lesser daemon (Page 2)

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

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

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

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

6 min read

11

Oct

Cat Lexicon Server Prototype

I'm short on time again - had a wedding ceremony to attend last night and a reception to attend today - so today's another 5-minute throwaway. I set up a quick server prototype that I can run some basic curl commands to and from and that validates my lexicon schema. This is all local for now and not attached to a PDS, so URIs are fake.

lexicons.js:

import express from 'express'
import { TID } from '@atproto/common-web'
import { lex } from './lexicons.js'

const app = express()
const PORT = 3000

// In-memory storage for records
const records = new Map()

app.use(

4 min read