Building on ATProto
The author discusses their experience exploring the Atmosphere Protocol (ATProto) for building decentralized applications. While they express a desire for a community-driven, interoperable web, they argue that the current development trajectory of ATProto is falling short of these goals.
Why it matters
This reflects the ongoing debate in the tech community regarding the feasibility of decentralized social protocols versus centralized corporate platforms.
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Bluesky’s Atmosphere Protocol has the chance to become the base for a whole generation of applications. But it’s developing in surprising and disappointing ways.
I spent part of last week at the Local First Conference in Berlin. I was not surprised to find that AI coding was on everyone’s minds. Less expected was how pervasive ATProto was.
I’ve been considering trying to build on ATProto for a few months, so this was a great chance to ask a bunch of questions from both people building on it, and the people actually building it (multiple key Bluesky people were there).
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