I want to hone in on one specific detail from today's Apple Event. Instead of spending all their time at their own Apple Park corporate campus in Cupertino, as they usually do, Apple decided to take to the streets and the Apple Retail Stores of various cities around the US for their latest pre-recorded presentation. First to Apple Union Square in San Francisco to unveil the new AirPods, then to Apple Aventura in Aventura, Florida, to showcase the new base iPhone, and up to Apple Michigan Avenue here in Chicago to reveal the Air before making their way out to the East Coast to Apple Downtown Brooklyn in NYC to talk about the new Pro model. It was really cool to get a peek at these various Apple Stores across the country rather than the same recycled locations over and over again at Apple Park, and as you can probably imagine, my favorite of the four was the Chicago segment. Seeing the camera pull up to the shores of Chicago was the best surprise for me, and I'm so glad they left California to film a keynote for once. Coincidentally, if I had to assume, the Chicago section will probably become the most remembered of the four because it was where the new iPhone Air was announced. I hope Apple continues on their miniature tour around the country in future events because I had a blast hunting down each store and sharing my findings online in the hours after the stream concluded. And I'll certainly be swinging by that pedestrian bridge next time I'm downtown.

Just wanted to share this since I'm really excited they visited Chicago. Be sure to check out the event if you haven't already.

Today is August 13, and I'm back home after a morning excursion downtown for my cast removal. It went smoothly, and we quickly cracked open the cast like a lobster, but I wanted to share how I've been since then. Unfortunately, I have taken many steps backward in my recovery. I can no longer walk and suffer greatly with standing. I am once again almost entirely reliant on my walker to get around by hopping, something I was previously starting to move on from in my cast, and my adventures have once again not gone farther than the living room. It is awfully disappointing. I hoped I would be better by now, but perhaps as always with what I like to call the Brewer luck, I will be stuck in an inferior state for a while longer. To make matters worse, in a disgraceful combination of my sensitive skin and my desperate attempt for itch relief in the final weeks and days of the cast, my leg and foot have become quite the eyesores. Redness and irritation, swelling, sores, bumps, and serum oozing, it's not been much of a joy to have my leg back. We expect that it may take weeks for it all to heal back to health in an excruciating process.

Regardless, after my cast was sawed off and I was properly cleaned up, I was presented with my shiny new, finished and fitted orthopedic brace picked out inexplicably by my parents while I was undergoing the surgery. Why it was done that way I have no idea, especially at my age, but I am quite pleased with their selection based on the options they described to me. Since the last brace I had years ago as a child, I've also received an excellent upgrade to higher-quality, more visually appealing, reinforced straps that are delightful. Right now, I've been instructed by my orthopedic specialist to wear my new brace night and day to maintain the stretch of my Achilles tendon. After this first month or so, he believes it will be fine to skip it at night if I wish to, something I cannot express how much I am looking forward to after great restlessness and discomfort from an extra thing on my leg all this time.

Note: This post is the follow-up to Surgery.



We received my pre-op instructions the Friday before surgery day to shower twice before the day of with Hibicleanse, stop eating food and drinking non-clear liquids at midnight the night before, and only sip clear liquids until seven-thirty AM the morning of. We were also given our final arrival time: eight AM, updated from our original six AM timeslot that would have had us wake up as early as three-thirty in the morning. Having to be there by eight versus six meant we could sleep in much later than before, and overall made our trip to Chicago and back much more pleasant. Once we arrived, all the staff at the hospital were wonderful, I had a great time with them and my orthopedic specialist before surgery, and I was wheeled out of the pre-op room around ten forty-five en route to the operating room. I woke up in the post-op room after my surgery around twelve forty in the afternoon, and was happily eating a giant sausage pizza roll from the hospital cafeteria less than an hour later downstairs in the recovery room. Hours later, after plenty of room visits, episodes of Castle, and a brief visit from one of their physical therapists who helped me take my first few hops out of bed and showed us a few ways to get me upstairs, we left the hospital around dinner time, and picked up fast food on the way back.

Once we got home and inside, I had a lovely, extended FaceTime call with my grandmother, and in my recovery, I've been filling my newfound spare time conversing on X, playing Crossy Road on my phone and Crossy Road Castle on my old Xbox, and binging a mix of movies and television shows, from The Rookie: Feds to Destination X and America's Got Talent, A Minecraft Movie, Five Nights at Freddy's, and old The Big Bang Theory reruns. More recently into my recovery, I've also been able to make it over to my desk for short periods to play my collection of PC titles, and I've been busy drafting dozens of new blog posts in my head. My pain has actually been surprisingly tolerable from the moment I woke up in Chicago, and my idle pain when I'm just sitting there has been minimal. The only meaningful pain I've experienced has been while shifting positions or trying to put weight on my leg, which has both become almost non-existent as time has gone on. That isn't to say I don't still have pain, but it's much less common and more so when I'm putting too much strain on my leg, especially in weird positions. While awake, getting into a comfortable sitting position is relatively rudimentary for me, but sleeping has been a completely different story. For the first couple of weeks, I could only lie comfortably in a couple of hyper-specific positions, but even now, there's still a delicate art to getting and staying comfortable in my cast while horizontal. I've primarily been getting around the house by hopping with my walker, though in the past week or so, I have been able to start taking some small steps here and there. Also in the past week, I've been dealing with increasingly powerful and relentless itches inside my cast that have been incredibly difficult to alleviate. One of the recommendations we were given to deal with itching was to use a cold hair dryer to blow air into the cast, but we haven't had much success with that.

I would say the worst part of my forced staycation, aside from the occasional random outbursts of pain, is the significant hampering of what I can do, when I can do it, and where I can go, as well as my inability to be out, interacting in the world. I haven't been outside since surgery day, and inside, my travels haven't gone much farther than the living room. With that in mind, in the weekends leading up to surgery day, we kept busy attending a Dierks Bentley concert with my aunt, spending quality family time in downstate Illinois with my grandmother, and watching the sunsets with our family friends up at their Wisconsin lakehouse. With the exception of the concert, it's a pretty standard summer calendar for us, although I will admit this is the first time we've packed the festivities in so tightly. Regardless, the hospital staff weren't impressed when I said we hadn't been up to much.

The first time I stepped outside the house post-surgery was on the sixteenth to tag along while my parents coordinated bringing one of my father's dump trucks to the repair shop. It wasn't by my choice, but we did go out to dinner at Chili's afterwards for the first time in a long while. Not that I would've stayed home for much longer after that, as the following day, I had to go to a follow-up doctor's appointment with my neurologist. As for physical therapy, I had my first appointment on the twenty-third, where I was given some simple exercises to do with my leg until I can properly begin therapy once my cast gets cut off on August 13.

On April 2, my mother received a phone call from my orthopedic specialist. He was calling with the results of a gait analysis I did back in January, where I was camera recorded and motion captured walking back and forth to create a three-dimensional, stick-like figure of how I walk. I almost wish it were a late April Fool's Day prank, but as I mentioned in To Date as a possibility for the future, I need surgery. Dubbed "heel lengthening" by my orthopedic specialist, the surgery involves making small incisions in the lower back of my leg to make cuts in my Achilles tendon in the hope that it will elongate as it heals so I can begin to walk with my right foot flat to the ground and have a much wider, more normal range of motion in it and my ankle. While under, he informed my mother that I may also need arch flattening surgery, which is when the arch of the foot requires restoration by repairing the supportive bones, ligaments, and tendons in the foot, though he advised her that he would determine that and follow through on it if necessary during my heel lengthening. He also mentioned that I'll be cast for a new orthopedic brace like the ones I used to wear when I was younger while asleep and that the surgery is outpatient, meaning I can go home the same day.

For the first six weeks post-surgery, I will be in a walking cast, and for the first week, will undoubtedly be in a lot of pain and require great assistance getting around and doing things from my parents and a pair of crutches or a walker. After the first seven days, I should mostly be able to get around on my own, albeit weighed down by the extra weight of the walking cast. Past the first six weeks, assuming the well recovery of my Achilles tendon, I'll get my cast cut off and likely go into wearing my new orthopedic brace for the foreseeable future—a wonderful additional complicating factor in shoe shopping and source of embarrassment.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. Worried about everything that could go wrong, worried about what complications the symptoms of my diagnosis could cause, and worried about the road ahead after recovery. The reason I didn't do the surgery when I was younger was because I was scared of it, and I know I'll be better off once all this is behind me, but that doesn't make the now any easier.

The surgery is scheduled for July 1, and I'm publishing this as soon as possible so that I can get all the details out in one place. I've started a countdown to the big day on my website, and if all goes to plan, I'll be rolling into the operating room as it finishes. After the surgery, I'll be sure to post a status update on how I am and how everything went on X, and I hope to share the events of the day of and afterward in my recovery in a follow-up blog post.

Update (August 3, 2025): The follow-up blog post, Recovery, is available now.

I was born three weeks prematurely by c-section due to placental abruption, when the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the baby, disconnects before it is supposed to, caused by preeclampsia, a complication in pregnancy brought on by high blood pressure that can lead to premature birth, a low birth weight, long-term health issues, and even stillbirth. I spent my first forty-eight hours of life in the NICU, the newborn version of an intensive care unit (ICU). I was ultimately diagnosed with left cerebral palsy, a condition that leaves great weakness or paralysis in the right side of the body, tight muscles, walking on tiptoes, poor reflexes, and over-exaggerated body movements, among other symptoms, from damage to the left side of the brain, which, in my case, was caused by a stroke I suffered in utero. Thanks to my cerebral palsy, I walk not only on tiptoes on my right side but also with a great, leaning limp cripple. All my life, I've had to regularly see an orthopedic specialist, get physical therapy, and was supposed to wear an ankle foot orthosis brace that went up to my knee. Before all that, my mother struggled greatly to conceive and spent three and a half years in constant fertility treatments. She and my father tried everything, having escalated all the way up the chain from basic insemination to the last resort of in vitro fertilization, taking every opportunity along the way that their insurance would cover. I began from their very last attempt at IVF, after they had exhausted their insurance, paid for out of pocket by them. As my mother put it, "I fought through hell and endeared hell to have you."

At age twelve, I was diagnosed with cyclic vomiting syndrome after missing outstanding amounts of middle school due to severe nausea and vomiting. For it, I was prescribed Ondansetron, a medication often prescribed to cancer patients that blocks the nausea and vomiting signals your stomach will send to your brain as needed. It helped me subside my vomiting greatly, and the rest of my middle school career and my freshman year of high school flew by without outstanding troubles. My following sophomore year, however, would quickly dissolve into issue. On the weekend of Labor Day 2023, while visiting my grandmother's in downstate Illinois, what started as a slightly less standard bout of nausea one night after dinner and increasingly painful cramps and other bodily pains, as well as great disorientation, became a complete collapse and blackout on the hallway floor just outside of the bathroom. My parents and grandmother were understandably freaked out, and following the weekend, I did not return to school. In November, my diagnosis was officially corrected to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a condition where blood volume is reduced when going from lying down to sitting up to standing up, causing lightheadedness and dizziness, fainting, migraines, disorientation, and rapid heartbeat, among other symptoms. I was eventually able to do my school from home in a program they call homebound tutoring. This program is often used by students who were kicked out of school for bad behavior or who have an exceptional medical need, like pregnancy. In it, you are assigned a tutor who coordinates with your teachers, classes, and school to bridge the content from them to you. I was thankfully in reasonable enough health to mostly sustain that for the rest of the school year, closing with slightly underperforming grades to my usual, but well above passing nonetheless. This year, for my junior year, my parents and I attempted to resecure a spot in homebound tutoring, though, to the notice of my English co-teacher-turned-tutor at the end of last year, the school would undergo significant budget cuts this year after the conclusion of their COVID-19 pandemic relief surplus money, which included cuts to staff, curriculum, among other aspects, that we presume was the cause to my application ultimately being denied. I had to leave my high school in favor of a fully remote, homeschooling-esque option. It wasn't easy on me by any means; being with my local school through all this gave me the reassurance that everything would eventually pan out and be okay with time, but leaving left my entire world shattered in millions of pieces. It was heartbreaking.

All this to say—I've been through a lot, the past few years have been complete mayhem, and I've only just turned 17. It's absolutely unbelievable to say that out loud, given everything I've experienced, yet instead of being out having fun and partying with friends, acting like I'm invincible, as everyone always says, I'm stuck either in bed or on the couch, isolated from the world, with the closest thing to a conversation outside of my immediate family occurring over X, Snapchat or other social platforms. My parents and I have tried time and time again to make the best of it, and on the rare occasion I'm up to it, we do try to get out, whether it be to do a couple of errands around town or going out to eat for dinner, or something more eventful like a few nights out of town at my grandmother's or downtown Chicago for a change of scenery, but regardless of what it is we do or where we go, it's purely a temporary distraction, and these opportunities are increasingly sparse and limited. All the while, I've been barred from much of what I love—my writing, my ever-growing Steam video game library, all my other interests, the great outdoors, and perhaps most importantly, any meaningful communication with the outside world. I used to be so active, outgoing, and social; I used to hold myself to such a high standard, yet, these past couple of years, I've had to completely abandon everything.

I am now in a state where I cannot even sit up at my desk for any extended period, and I struggle with indecisiveness for even the simplest of things. Not much of anything we've tried or done has particularly helped; some have made things worse, and in the face of three MRIs, nothing viewable is wrong with my brain aside from the damage left by my stroke. My body is increasingly rapidly deteriorating because of my crippled walk, and it's becoming increasingly apparent that our only route out now, if there is one left, is a major orthopedic surgery involving the cutting of my Achilles tendon that I'd been brushing off all my childhood. Instead, I underwent a temporary round of botox and casting and refused to wear my leg braces out of discomfort as soon as my mother could no longer force me to wear them. We'd been forced to stop my professional physical therapy in elementary school, and I didn't continue it at home. Every day, I am confronted by dizziness and lightheadedness, disorientation, severe brain fog, rapid heart rate, severe pains in different parts of my body, headaches and migraines, sometimes nausea, and more. I go in and out at complete random of being able to sleep well, and the isolation brought upon me leaves me deeply lonely and sad. What I am going through is miserable; I am miserable, and all the while, my aspirational dreams of what I hope to accomplish in life are further crushed by an industrial press.

When I was little, my parents set up a child AOL account purely for me to play with. But as I grew up and got a real need for email, I, like many others, opted for Gmail as my provider of choice. Although I've since changed addresses a couple of times, my primary personal email account has always been with Google. I've never had any problems with Gmail, and it's been highly flexible as my setup has evolved. As of late, though, something has felt... off, and I found myself wanting to look elsewhere for something different. There have never been more options available, but I found myself circling back to the same two choices I'd been eyeing for the past couple of years. For the first time since I switched off my child AOL account to Gmail, I've switched email providers for the third time in my life to kickstart the year on the right foot. I'm no longer with Gmail — I've moved to HEY.

What's HEY?

HEY is the email platform that aims to give you back control of your inbox and fix the modern-day headaches of email, launched in 2020 by the people at 37signals, best known as the makers of product-management software Basecamp. The headline feature is what they call The Screener, which is a dedicated landing zone for all the mail from senders who haven't emailed you before so you can review what's coming in and decide whether or not to let them "in" or keep them out, separate from your primary inbox. Inside, HEY divides everything into what 37signals considers the three key categories of email—important and everyday stuff, newsletters and other marketing-type messages, and receipts and confirmations with the Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail, respectively. The philosophy is to "just let it flow" and not worry about archiving old messages, simply allowing the new to push down the old over time and using Recycling to move old threads to the trash after thirty or ninety days, or two years. In the Imbox, new messages are displayed in a separate section above things you've already seen. In the Feed, everything is laid out in the email equivalent of a Following feed on social media for you to scroll through when you've got the time. It's easy to move individual messages between the three, and it's only a few clicks once to have HEY move all past and auto-deliver all future correspondences by address or entire domain. You can also configure automatic labeling, recycling, screening status, and notifications at this level. By default, there are no push notifications in HEY, and you should only turn them on for senders you specifically want to be notified of new emails from as soon as they arrive. HEY also blocks a grand majority of spy pixel trackers that some companies will put into their mail to see if and how you interact with it.

As part of HEY, there's also Reply Later and Set Aside to mark emails as to circle back to, where they'll be pinned to the bottom of the screen and brought together in one unified view separate from the rest. Workflows let you track the progress of something happening across threads, like a home improvement project where each component is a separate conversation. Collections allow you to see multiple threads together in one timeline view. There is also a collective spot for all attachments you've ever received or sent, and this can be further broken down by thread, address, or domain in one place. It's easy to resubject your mail in case the sender didn't set a good one, and you can also merge separate threads without affecting anyone else in the conversation. Ignore effectively mutes a thread by not sending it back up to the top of the Imbox as new each time someone adds on to the chat, and HEY makes it easier than ever to share a thread with somebody else by link, similar to sharing a document in Google Docs, meant to replace forwarding a potential indented disaster. Snooze has also been given some fresh love with what they call Bubble Up, which pins emails to a section above all the new mail in the Imbox until you "pop" them. In February 2021, 37signals expanded into internet publishing with their HEY World, where @hey.com users can send an email and have their subject and content transformed into a simple webpage. Others can also subscribe by email or RSS. And back in January, they launched a calendar that's supposed to reflect "how you think," week-to-week rather than how other calendars emulate their paper counterparts. It includes cool things like a "Sometime this week" section for what you don't necessarily know when you'll do when, a Maybe functionality for stuff that isn't set in stone, and many other time-related things built-in, like countdowns, habit tracking, time tracking, and journaling.

Speaking of those @hey.com addresses, while they can certainly be desirable, you don't have to have one to use HEY. HEY for Domains is the whole consumer HEY, plus additional features for groups, teams, and organizations working together on the same custom domain. While undeniably tailored to these groups, nothing stops you from using it solo if you'd prefer to bring your own address. The one downside to HEY for Domains is that it doesn't include access to HEY World. With that said, there are a few potential downsides to HEY overall. Most notably, HEY doesn't support importing old mail from other platforms. The idea is that HEY is a fresh start, but you can set up forwarding for new mail from old addresses and even send from them if you'd like with SMTP. HEY also doesn't support checking external inboxes, like over IMAP or POP, and because of all the changes they've made, you can't access your HEY account outside of their official apps. On the flip side, should you later decide to move on from HEY, it's easy to export all of your data, including mail, contacts, attachments, and calendars. If it's after your first year, they'll even hold your @hey.com address for you in the event you'd like to come back in the future and let you forward all the mail your HEY address receives to another address. If none of those downsides turned you off, though, HEY for You (with the @hey.com addresses) is only billed annually and is ninety-nine dollars per year for addresses four characters and up. For shorter addresses, however, there is an upcharge: three characters are three hundred and forty-nine dollars per year, while two characters will set you back nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars per year. On the other hand, HEY for Domains is only billed monthly and is ten dollars per month for the first user, then twelve dollars per month per subsequent user.

With all that said, my experience and thoughts so far

I signed up for HEY on December 14 and began actively using it full-time two days later. The first thing I did when I decided to go all in was to move all the accounts I could to my new address and do the same for the regular newsletters I subscribe to. I also set up forwarding from my old Gmail address and added my public address to HEY so I could send as it through my account. Both were straightforward to set up with the guidance of HEY, minus a lot of "Are you sure you're you?"'s from Google during the forwarding setup process. While I figured the forwarding would be temporary, I quickly realized when going through my accounts that many of them made it nearly impossible to switch my associated email address or flat-out refused to let me. I don't know why it's such a big deal for them, but HEY doesn't treat forwarded emails any differently than direct ones, so it doesn't matter too much. The Screener has become quite handy for me in regard to the unsolicited emails I get about my website, and I've been redirecting everyone I do let in to their respective mailboxes. The only issue I've encountered with the categorization is due to how some companies will send their mail. While some will send different types of messages from separate addresses, others, like the digital software and games store platform Steam, only send from the same address, regardless of what it is they're actually sending. In these cases, I've had to resort to sending their mail to the Imbox and manually sorting things where they need to go. This isn't HEY's fault, of course, and I understand that Steam likely has it this way for convenience in other email platforms, but it is something to mention. I've also spent a little time doing things I'd been meaning to get to in Gmail, like setting everyone's respective profile pictures, which is a lot easier to do in HEY I think, at least for companies, because you can assign it at the domain level and not worry about it again, regardless of where they send from. HEY has done a few of these by default, like for Apple, but it's up to you for the most part. I've also gotten recycling going for the mail I receive frequently or otherwise don't care to keep after initially seeing it, which is so nice not to have to worry about managing myself while making sure my storage footprint remains low. I know it can sound like HEY is entirely manual, but a lot of these things are set-up-once-and-forget. Speaking of storage, however, there is a reason HEY pushes recycling so much (besides that it's better not to keep things you won't read again), and that is because HEY only offers 100GB of it, and you can't upgrade to get more. I do find it funny that this fact is only mentioned once on the website (on the pricing page no less), with no way to check how much you're using in any of the apps, either.

With push notifications off by default, I initially found myself anxiously checking my account regularly, knowing that I wouldn't get pinged just in case I missed something, but as I've used HEY more, I've found that the behavior dissipates over time to the point where I'm not really worried about it anymore. Something worth noting is that if you can't get the hang of it, HEY does allow you to enable notifications for everything in the Imbox. One thing I've thoroughly appreciated in HEY is that there are no obnoxious numbers anywhere in the app, such as an unread count. This is part of their HEY Way philosophy, and while it may sound dumb, it has made me feel better about going extended periods without checking in on things and less stressed about everything when I return. As for the calendar, I haven't given it much of a try yet, primarily because I can't actively sync my Google family calendar to HEY rather than just importing old events. This appears to be a limitation on Google's part because every other calendar in GCal lets you generate a secret access link to give to other apps, but that isn't available for the calendar automatically generated by Google's family system for some reason. Of course, HEY has its own family system where you can connect up to four additional HEY accounts for a bundled price of one hundred and seventy-nine dollars per year that comes with its own shared calendar, but realistically, none of the members of my immediate family care about or want to switch to HEY, so I'm stuck in this regard unless I want to juggle both and manually copy events over. But using HEY has also enlightened me to how much companies are trying to spy on me from inside my inbox; almost all of the mail in my Feed has been identified by HEY as having spy pixel trackers, and my Imbox gets the occasional unwanted visitor, too.

On the flip side, HEY World is an interesting one for me. I've already got this publication, The Writings of Matthew Brewer, which I have very particular requirements for that not even Substack, my platform of choice, fully meets from head-to-toe, and while I have looked into creating a separate blog off Substack, I still don't think HEY World is the best place for it. Sure, it's easy, low-pressure, and really simplistic, but regardless of what I'm writing, the forced link structure will always leave me with a sour taste in the mouth. Here in Substack, I can mostly customize the subpage link for each of my posts and use a custom domain, but with HEY World, I'm stuck on their subdomain and can't customize the post links. Substack does have limits, but it is far better than nothing. This may only irritate me, but I prefer customizing the links so that I can remember them and generally make it easier to share, especially if I have an extended title. One of the critiques I saw about HEY World in the community is that it uses your full name and the front half of your address without the ability to change or hide that, and in general, it doesn't seem to be used much outside of the 37signals team. Also, according to Reddit, the HEY World emails are left in your Imbox, and you can't move or delete them without causing them to become unpublished from the internet. In researching, I discovered a shuffle parameter that takes you to a random post, and besides the wide variety of content I discovered, a trend I observed was that a lot of the posts I was served were published back in 2021, around the time HEY World initially released. Regardless, I do believe it's an excellent product for specific people and use cases — just not me. I do have one complaint about HEY overall, though, and that has to do with the Screener. As it turns out, when you make a screening decision (yea or nae), you can't reset that screening status to have them land back in the Screener. You can swap back and forth between in and out to your heart's content, but there is no reset. You could argue that this is just another insignificant problem of mine, but I'd love to see that added, either in the screening history or on the address and domain contact pages.

While I primarily switched to HEY out of wanting to try something new and change things up, I have genuinely come to love my decision to do so, and by the time you're reading this, I'll have already paid for my first year. So, if you're considering switching to HEY, I want you to know I've had a blast. But if you're concerned about the software as a service model and whether or not HEY will still be around in a couple of years' time, don't be; I may just die before HEY does. In the meantime, I hope you have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you around. Here's to 2025! 🥂

Bluesky was initially created in 2019 as a research project tasked by Jack Dorsey and the then-Twitter, Inc. to develop an open, decentralized social protocol and social app atop that protocol. Twitter wholly funded this group of engineers, and the original intention by Jack Dorsey was to eventually move Twitter onto this new protocol to strip the platform of its centralization.

What is centralization? On a centralized social platform, one party controls the platform entirely, and one central server owns and controls the data. On a centralized social platform, you do not own anything you post or upload—they do. All of today's major social giants are centralized. However, decentralized networks are gaining steam and have no central authority or central server. Instead, user data is distributed across the network, giving users more power over their data.

So, how does Bluesky work?

Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol works off what they call Personal Data Servers, or PDSs. A Personal Data Server is a decentralized server that hosts all your data. When you sign up to Bluesky, by default, you're randomly placed on one of Bluesky's own Personal Data Servers, and whichever you're selected for, that's where all your Bluesky data lives—posts, reposts, replies, likes, follows, and blocks, among other things. All of this data is entirely public and can be read by anyone. To help visualize this, there's a fantastic website known as the AT Browser that lets you see what is on anyone's Personal Data Server. For example, here's a screenshot from the AT Browser of what's on my Personal Data Server:

Data on a PDS is stored separately by type, which the app developers define themselves. They can be thought of as separate folders on your desktop. Source: atproto-browser.vercel.app

The only AT Protocol app I use is Bluesky (and I only use the core features), so only Bluesky content is stored on my PDS. But there are several other AT apps, and they each write their own data to your PDS when you use them. For example, here's what my friend Jack’s PDS looks like in the AT Browser. He uses quite a few other AT Protocol apps, so his has a bunch of additional data on it compared to mine:

Because Jack has used additional Bluesky features and other AT Protocol apps, his PDS has additional data types from these other apps. Source: atproto-browser.vercel.app

You could also write your own data to your PDS if you know how to. Hosting your own PDS and transferring it between different hosting locations is also possible, but this isn't recommended for most users because it can require a lot of technical know-how to ensure you don't lose all your data and get wiped from the AT Protocol. Apps also don't necessarily have to store content on your PDS; Bluesky, for example, doesn't store what accounts you've muted or the Chats, Bluesky's equivalent of DMs, you have with other users on the platform, but the majority of all content is.

Other apps can also read and use each other's data on your PDS. Here's an example from Jack of this in action:

let's say Instagram was built on ATProto [AT Protocol], you could keep your insta posts in your PDS, it might look for https://com.instagram.post.photo or something, then other apps can integrate and look for that data, so for example Bluesky could have a section called "Photos" which reads for that instagram data

What he's explaining here is that a photo-based app on the AT Protocol (in his example, Instagram) could store your uploads in a dedicated spot on your PDS that another AT app could recognize, read, and pull into a section of their app. And this ability is fantastic on multiple fronts. Most notably, what if you no longer like Bluesky? Say they made a decision you didn't like. Because other AT apps can read your Bluesky data, someone else could create a competitor on AT that ensures you aren't starting over again while distancing yourself from Bluesky. And they’d be able to associate it with your same identity on Bluesky because…

On AT, you have one all-encompassing identity.

When you sign up to Bluesky with one of their Personal Data Servers, they give you a bsky.social subdomain as a handle. This is because, on the AT Protocol, handles are domain names. Y'know, the things you type into a web browser to go to a website? For example, imagine my handle is thebrewergame.bsky.social. This handle is my AT identity, and I can use it to log in to Bluesky and any other app on the AT Protocol. Theoretically, other AT apps could issue their own handles, but that would require them to host their own Personal Data Servers. These handles are considered “server-side.”

But there is another option. Because handles are just domains, nothing stops you from bringing your own. My handle isn't actually thebrewergame.bsky.social, but rather, just thebrewergame.com because I own that domain. I could also use a subdomain if I wanted to, like matthew.thebrewergame.com. I don't even need a website set up on my domain (or subdomain) of choice to use it as my AT identity.

A custom handle like mine can actually serve as a decentralized form of a blue checkmark, too. One famous example the Bluesky team usually uses in this conversation is the British news organization NPR, which is on Bluesky with the handle npr.org. Because that is NPR’s official domain, and they’ve gone through the verification process, we know it's officially them. They can also verify additional accounts as being associated with them for no cost with subdomains. For example, if they wanted to confirm a journalist named Jane Doe, they could give Jane the handle jdoe.npr.org.

And finally… a quick tip before I go. If you have a .bsky.social handle, you can actually type it anywhere, and it becomes a link straight back to your profile!

Thanks to Jack for helping review this! Be sure to follow him and me on Bluesky and across the ATmosphere at jglypt.net and thebrewergame.com, respectively, and until next time, I’ll see you around.