Oh hey @kumail.bsky.social , Welcome welcome! Both Jay and I were (minor) technical advisors to Silicon Valley. Crazy cool to have you here

“Testnet” is targeted for end of next week, maybe the week after.
From there its hard to say exactly how long it will take for fully switching prod into that mode, but hoping to move pretty fast

It's backwards compatible in the sense that Handshake users can still resolve domains on the ICANN root (the regular domains we all use now).

The server was meant for people to try out Handshake in bsky, not get access to bsky via another server. Until/after federation is ready, we'll keep remdinding everyone on that server not to expect full federation (yet).

Btw the past few days learning about atproto and seeing code merged every day - I can't imagine the amount of work you've all been doing to manage this at scale, awesome work! We've never intended to make bsky look bad, even the recent surge in traffic was unexpected.

As for the blockchain software, we are running a light client which takes only a few MB memory. And even that doesn't have to be self-hosted; it can be as simple as pointing the server to a public resolver like https://hdns.io

I could be wrong here (still new to all of this), but with the way verification works right now, clients - frontends, phones, etc. - do not need to resolve anything. Their PDS does it for them. Is this going to change?

Right. Really excited to see how federation works out, for both stems and other servers!

working on stems.social with @rithvik.bsky.social -- it's a bsky server that supports handshake domains!

hey 👋 in case it hasn't been reported already, looks like the getPopular api call from What's Hot page always goes to bsky.social even when using a custom server