I'm one of three speakers, along with Bryan Newbold and Mallory Knodel. Video was recorded and will be shared.
PDF of my slides: DWeb Bluesky and Beyond - Growing the ATmosphere
Text from the slides included below. Notes callouts are speaker notes.
Growing the ATmosphere
The AT Protocol ecosystem beyond Bluesky and microblogging
ATprotocol.Dev
Decided to start doing Tech Talks - presentations by and for AT Protocol developers, Aug 2024 https://atprotocol.dev/ ATProtocol Dev
By December, decided to put on the first in-person community AT Protocol conference aka ATmosphereConf https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf
- tech talks with live video have been great
- in-person connections help to build strong ties that carry us through online discussions
[!NOTE] User 22 on the network, November 2022 https://atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/bmann.ca
ATmosphere
The ATmosphere is what the collection of all the apps and data on the AT Protocol is called.
For example, Recipes! https://recipe.exchange
With a full featured Schema.org data model, attribution, images, etc
[!NOTE] Chick Peas with Garlic Mousseline on Recipes.Exchange. You can also browse it in my user repo to get a sense of what custom Lexicon records look like.
Many data types and app front ends
Here’s a small selection of other apps
- WhtWnd: long form blogging
- Smoke Signal: events & rsvps
- Frontpage: hacker news clone that might grow up to be Reddit
- And cool experimental stuff like Roomy Chat - atproto + localfirst + p2p
All of this data is stored in your own user account, and can have multiple client front ends.
[!NOTE] Blog posts and video interviews all available at https://atprotocol.dev
What about the clones?
Most of them are client apps that sit on top of the Bluesky microblog Lexicon.
Some of them are starting to add custom Lexicons
I love them all equally but for simplicity will link you to Pinksky, an “Instagram clone”
[!NOTE] There are tons of Instagram and TikTok “clones” popping up.
Most of them are client apps that sit on top of the Bluesky microblog Lexicon, but with a novel UI customized for images or videos. Which is cool by itself!
Some of them are starting to add custom Lexicons for layout preferences and other features. At least one plans to not use the microblog Lexicon.
These are 1 - 2 person teams mostly without funding. Many are native mobile only.
Small AT Protocol
People are generally talking about “small Bluesky” or “alternative Bluesky”.
Can ATproto scale down? 1B links on a homelab RPi
Also many other app architectures: e.g. Smoke Signal talks to PDS directly
[!NOTE] Alternative to Bluesky is an extremely boring take. Bluesky means a lot of things, one of them is the bluesky Lexicon which defines 300 character microblogging.
A German only – or even better, a Canadian only - microblogging site would both be relatively cheap to run.
The architecture for different shapes of things isn’t fully figured out yet. People need to try things!
PDS are small, simple and cheap to run per account.
AT Protocol data is public
It’s a protocol, anyone can run a firehose (these are cheap to run, more expensive if you keep the data, index it, run search queries, and serve it up as a full AppView) You delegate your hosting to a Personal Data Server (PDS) which has a repo with all of your data, of all Lexicon types and all apps.
Example: A follow record is stored in your user account, as a record that points to the account (DID) of the user you’re following.
Same for likes and blocks.
Kind of like HTML – you host a website that has links to point to others.
[!NOTE] This has kind of covered a lot – private data on AT Protocol is a work in progress. I’m personally very interested in this, not just for social media use cases, but for app use cases of all kinds.
ActivityPub for nuanced group privacy
I’ve run/test/administered various ActivityPub servers, mostly microblog (aka “Note”) shaped ones.
Am a member of CoSocial https://blog.cosocial.ca
Next on my personal list: a Hometown server for my hometown of Bowen Island, to displace Facebook from the core of the community.
Join us in Seattle for talks & working groups
ATmosphereConf March 22nd & 23rd, Seattle Washington https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf
Volunteer community organized. Hosted by AT Protocol Community Fund, with fiscal sponsorship by Raft Foundation https://raft.foundation
For this crowd, some of the in progress working group topics in a collaborative notes page - including Private Data, incentives for running commons infrastructure, and more.
Try things! Pool funds, pool collaboration, gather and serve what community means to you!