<meta notes - WIP draft, feedback wanted!>
sharing this for comments before public launch — the idea is to put on a custom microsite, with a way to log in and sign via atproto (with its own lexicon!)
appreciate any thoughts on the text itself (you can highlight and comment on specific parts), or the overall framing, CTAs at the end, etc. thanks!
-brendan (@schlage.town)
</end meta section>
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We, the undersigned, are artisans, architects, and advocates of the ATmosphere — the diverse, growing ecosystem around AT Protocol.
We're building leading atproto apps. Hosting local meetups and events. Launching open source tools and libraries. Using them daily. Investing in the technology and the growing community around it.
We believe that AT Protocol is the future of open social.
We believe it uniquely solves the problems of social at scale.
We believe you should join us in contributing to its success.
We believe all of this for the following reasons:
• @ • @ • @ •
AT Protocol is a force multiplier that makes hard things easy.
It makes it surprisingly fast to get started building a social app, so you can do powerful things right away, by giving us:
A global identity layer
Working with a globally shared identity means that you don't have to figure out user accounts / logins yourself. People can use the same identity across apps, and the same handle anywhere — like "Sign in with Google" but we all own it collectively.
Shared data across the network
Similarly, developers have built-in primitives for user data. We can specify data schemas with lexicons and store it in the PDS, where user data repos live. Users can choose where their account is hosted, and it's portable if they ever want to migrate. This data is publicly accessible so we can aggregate it across the network and use data from other apps in cool ways.
Affordances to build powerful social features
We can then build powerful social features on top of solid foundations — comments, profiles, discovery, and more.
Lots of interesting things have been built already. A universal backlink index surfaces all links between entities in the network, across all apps, powerful dev infrastructure that anybody can use. Feed builders make it easy for people to build their own custom feeds based on many filters and criteria, on Bluesky and beyond to other types of data like photos and video and longform content. Other ideas beckon: a global notification service, for example!
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AT Protocol empowers both users and developers.
It holds a rare position of being both user first and developer first at the same time. And these are mutually reinforcing; the same design choices that enable flexibility for users also make things more powerful for developers.
Users control their own data
Each person's data lives in their own repo on their PDS, and can be migrated or even self-hosted. This brings theoretical benefits — more open and aligned with a user-owned internet — but there are also tangible practical benefits right now!
One-click OAuth login lets you use a universal identity to easily log into hundreds of apps. And you see your friends already there — you build a shared social graph you don't have to reconstruct on each new app you join.
It's also great for longevity of user content. You can get the benefits of polished hosted platforms and the optionality to self-host in the future, so you never get locked in.
Apps can work with data across the network
Apps can query across all this data; it's like one massive global shared database we can pull from, so we can aggregate the data we need for different apps and use cases.
We're starting t o see the power of apps talking to each other openly in this way — users can, say, read a blog post and seamlessly share it to Bluesky. yThings that make many apps feel like parts of a larger cohesive whole.
The protocol keeps us honest
As builders, we're structurally disincentivized from enshittifying, because users can always take their data elsewhere, including to other apps.
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AT Protocol helps us go faster and further together.
We don't have to each bootstrap a network for what we're building, because we all share a much bigger one.
We can share data and design patterns; we can interoperate in all sorts of ways. Users benefit, and we do too.
Sharing lets us specialize
Since we don't each have to reinvent the wheel, we can lean into our specific strengths, and calibrate where we share vs. specialize.
There are obvious things that we collectively benefit from, like the protocol-level affordances for identity and data storage. There are less obvious things too — like how the community can incrementally improve the messaging and UX around universal OAuth login, and a new flow or better branding can benefit all apps!
This makes deeper specialization possible. When we don't have to worry about the boring boilerplate, we can focus on making uniquely good experiences for the specific content, use cases, and social interactions we care about. And we can do it all that much faster.
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AT Protocol makes everything composable.
We store data in specific well-defined forms using lexicons. This supports both app-specific data and data that can be used interoperably across many apps, like photos or longform text.
This is positive sum in ways that are hard to predict! Luckily we don't have to plan it in advance — anyone can try creative experiments, and build on existing apps and data.
Build a new search experience. Extend an app with optional sidecar data and alternate frontend. From small scoped experiments to whole-network aggregation, and everything in between.
This is great for supporting a long tail of interfaces — even new bespoke apps for small communities — while still sharing common data formats as well as identities.
And it's not just lexicons — composability extends to PDS hosting (where user data lives), AppViews (application-specific views on the network), and relays (which aggregate data into a firehose that apps can consume).
• @ • @ • @ •
AT Protocol incentivizes us to cooperate.
There are built-in forces pulling us toward cooperation and mutualism in the atmosphere, which manifests in a community of people supporting each other and improving our products together.
It really feels possible to build collaboratively because we're not playing a zero sum game, each trying to capture users in our own ecosystem at the expense of others. More people joining the ecosystem and using lots of different apps benefits us all. If someone uses your app, that makes them incrementally more likely to use mine. Even more so if we both explore surfaces for interop, and others build new things on the data we both use.
There are real and powerful incentives to collaborate, which fosters a communal spirit — people are generous with their time, we enjoy being early users of each other's apps and sharing feedback, many of us open source our code to make it easier for others to build on. This is a strong motivator; it makes it fun and exciting to keep working and improving our products!
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AT Protocol is a vibrant ecosystem, and we actually build.
We have a great community here. We're all looking to the future and we're excited by what we see.
There's a strong cooperative spirit suffusing the atmosphere, and we're having a lot of fun. We're also building a lot of good stuff.
AT Protocol is so much more than Bluesky: we're making apps for music data, code collaboration, longform publishing, livestreaming, book and movie reviews, feed creation, research, and so much more.
So many things have emerged just in the past year: serious apps, promising experiments, meaningful infrastructure improvements.
We won't list them all here — we couldn't even if we wanted to, there are new things every week, too many to keep track! You can see a sampling by browsing our signatures below.
• @ • @ • @ •
AT Protocol is early — there's still so much to do.
The Atmosphere is at an inflection point.
It's notable how far we've come in the past year — from Bluesky plus a few early experimental apps, to a number of serious products used by hundreds or thousands of people — but we're still so early.
We haven't yet seen new Bluesky-scale breakouts; most niches have one or a small handful of apps. There's a ton of room to build something best in class in a space you're interested in, with potential to get millions of users and help grow the network by orders of magnitude over the coming years.
That means we have a lot to do, and it's a great time to get involved! There are so many ways to contribute. You can start a company and build something ambitious. You can make experimental open source projects and people will actually use them. You can build on what others have made already! You can nurture a local community — a few cities have strong scenes; many more could use them.
You can shape the ecosystem with us, and we can do much more together than we could individually.
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AT Protocol needs you to join in!
We're invested in the success of AT Protocol and the Atmosphere, not only because of everything above, but because it all keeps getting better.
We grow more excited by the potential each day. And we'd love to have you join us!
Here are some of the many ways to get involved:
Hop in the ATProto Touchers Discord
Join the AT Protocol Community forum (and on Bluesky)
Follow atproto feeds on Bluesky, like @proto and ATProto Ideas
Explore repos on Tangled; contribute to open source projects
Browse blogs from community projects on Leaflet
Host a local meetup; bring people together to talk about what we're making and how we can help each other
Most of all: start tinkering — play with things, post questions, share ideas you'd like to explore further!
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Add your signature below! [COMING SOON]
NB: this is a working draft; for public launch the plan is to put it on a custom page with a way to sign via lexicon!