psionidesAug 20, 2025

Introduction to AT Protocol

https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/

Introduction to AT Protocol

Walkthrough of the various parts and concepts in Bluesky's AT Protocol (ATProto), the types of servers involved and how it all fits together

Show threadverdverm

If you are interested in building on ATProtocol, one of the best places to start is the Discord (until we have an atproto native alt @blebbit.app)

https://discord.atprotocol.dev/

Of course the spec is good too, very easy read

https://atproto.com

https://docs.bsky.app

Join the ATProto Touchers Discord Server!

Check out the ATProto Touchers community on Discord - hang out with 3803 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Discord
Aug 20, 2025 at 8:56pmWeb
Show threadtomrodAug 20, 2025
What sorts of things can be built on the protocol?
Show threadpsionidesAug 20, 2025
Anything "social" basically - the first ideas that come to people's minds are of course things like: GitHub but on ATProto, Instagram on ATProto, Tiktok on ATProto, Reddit on ATProto…
Show threadjazzyjacksonAug 20, 2025
Why isn't there a Discord built on ATProto ? [Serious Question, wondering if there are trade-offs that make this especially annoying]
Show threadpsionidesAug 20, 2025

So, one big problem is that there's basically no way to have shared-private data in the protocol - it's either private to you, or fully public. Hence no "locked accounts", "followers-only posts" and so on on Bluesky, and this also prevents more sensitive ideas like e.g. "Strava on ATProto" (where you probably don't want to share your run map with the whole world!).

They are working on this, but it's still gonna take a while as I understand.

Show threadjazzyjacksonAug 20, 2025
Ah thanks for the answer. What's the PKI story on bluesky, doesn't every identity have a corresponding public key? So if I had a list of people I wanted to a post to be visible to, couldn't I "just" encrypt it with a key that is decryptable by each of those individuals via their pubkey?
Show threadpsionidesAug 20, 2025
I'm not really familiar with that layer of things, but I think it's possible, though that "just" is doing a lot of work here of course, and I think it might not necessarily be a good idea to have encrypted messages available publicly for everyone all the time, so they can collect them and wait until someone slips up / a vulnerability is found / they have enough hardware to crunch it...
Show threadbeepbooptheoryAug 21, 2025
Thats such a bummer, I was on the matrix dev chat for a while and it was good and helpful. I wonder why they changed it from that?
Show threadpsionidesAug 21, 2025
I don't think that Matrix chat was used much after the initial months, I've only really heard about it in legends... That Discord (the ATProto Touchers) is community-run.