05
Nov

30 days of atproto: hope for an open future

It's a beautiful day here in New York. Zohran Mamdani was elected on a message of hope and change (and significantly more concrete change than the last time something similar happened). This is also the final day of my 30 days of atproto project, which works out thematically quite well. I have a lot of hope for atproto, and while there's a lot of work in front of us (just as there is for the mayor-elect), I am thrilled at the prospect of building something that felt impossible a few years ago, a sea change for how we think about

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4 min read
04
Nov

The (Absolute) State of the ATmosphere: 3. Stuff I'm Not Sure About

A shorter post today - it's election day in New York, so I've got other stuff on my mind. This is the stuff in the ATmosphere I'm either mixed on or haven't dived deep enough into to have a strong opinion about.

Feeds
One big selling point of Bluesky is being able to "choose your own algorithm". This is pretty well-trod ground for others, and apps like graze.social purport to make it easier. Clearly people are using this feature and finding workflows that work for them. But my own dive into it was pretty frustrating.

The documentation needs

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3 min read
03
Nov

The (Absolute) State of The ATmosphere: 2. The Bad

Though I'm overall optimistic about the direction of atproto, it's a young ecosystem and there are still jagged edges. As I mentioned yesterday, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about some of the stuff here, and am generally optimistic that it's being addressed, but I think these are worth noting as the big sticking points I ran into during my explorations.

DIDs

I was really excited to try hosting a did:web. Self-signing my own identity from a domain I control felt like the final step in decentralized social. Unfortunately in reality it just breaks stuff

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4 min read
02
Nov

The (Absolute) State of The ATmosphere: 1. The Good

I finally wrote up what I did over the last few weeks, so I figured I'd zoom out a bit and try and cover what I learned in the process and the ups and downs of working with atproto at the tail end of the year of our lord 2025. Where possible, I'll do my best to link to all the bookmarks I've made of tools or explainers by smarter people than me.

I'm going to make this a three-parter focusing on what's good, what's bad, and what needs work. The importance of giving a compliment sandwich during feedback is

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5 min read
31
Oct

~3 Weeks Of The ATmosphere

It's been a while!

I went to the Brooklyn atproto meetup on Wednesday and met a lot of cool and interesting folks doing cool and interesting work - shoutout to the leaflet team, who inspired me to start crossposting my atproto work over there. This also reminded me that I should probably do a writeup of what I"ve been up to.

After initially blogging every day's worth of work on my 30 days of protocol (which really has just turned out to be 30 days of atproto) I realized that the rules I set out for myself did not

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6 min read