If you’re an ATProto developer (feel free to read this if you’re a normie too - I hope I’d be able to impart at least some of the magic to you too, though there’s a high chance most of this ends up flying over your head) you’ve probably heard the term “repo” come up at least once in discussions of the ATProto architecture. While most of the time you can ignore the details of how these data repositories work, since they are the beating heart of ATProto, you may want to learn more about them, and if you know with some detail their inner workings you may also find yourself able to use the protocol more effectively.
If you’ve touched even a bit of ATProto, you probably know that data is organized into typed ‘collections’ of ‘records’. These are actually conceptually not that different from what in an SQL or similar database you might refer to as ‘columns’ of ‘rows’ or ‘records’ - and that’s intentional. ATProto repos are, essentially, a database containing your personal