at protocol

Bilingual

Open Social — overreacted
2 months ago
- Open source has become dominant in shared infrastructure, similar to the current potential of open social.
- The AT Protocol (atproto) from Bluesky aims to give users ownership of their data, like personal websites did, but with social aggregation features.
- In closed social apps, user data is trapped in a company's database, making it difficult to leave without losing social connections and content.
- Open social allows users to own their handle via domain names and store data in personal repositories on the web, enabling portability.
- User data from different apps can coexist in the same repository, allowing apps to piggyback on each other's data without APIs.
- Aggregation works via relays that stream events from all repositories, allowing apps to build local caches for fast queries.
- Cryptographic signing ensures data integrity and trust in the network.
- The open social model blurs app boundaries, enabling remixing, forking, and reuse of data, reducing lock-in and cold-start problems.
Starting from Scale in the Design of the AT Protocol
2 months ago
- The author, a local-first advocate, worked on SSB and Beaker Browser before joining Bluesky to build AT Protocol, a federated network for high-scale open computing.
- AT Protocol departs from local-first designs due to scale requirements, aiming to handle Twitter-level traffic (e.g., 6,000+ tweets per second) while preserving openness and user autonomy.
- High-scale systems decouple read workloads, replicate data from a canonical store to purpose-built secondary databases (e.g., graph, OLAP), and use logs (like Kafka) for durable, low-coordination sync.
- Bluesky applied the same data replication pattern to the public WAN by treating network challenges as similar to internal datacenter faults, adding trust through signed merkle trees and defensive APIs.
- The Personal Data Server (PDS) network replaces userdata clusters; writes are signed and replicated via pull-based sync streams, allowing apps to recover by replaying from PDS hosts.
- AT Protocol currently handles 500-600 events per second (peaks of 2,000), with over 3,000 PDS operators, and aims to keep the internet as an open information commons.
Where It's at:// — overreacted
2 months ago
- at:// URIs place the user as the authority, not the hosting server, using handles that resolve to immutable DIDs.
- Resolving an at:// URI involves three steps: handle to identity (DID via DNS or HTTPS), identity to hosting (DID Document), and hosting to JSON (via getRecord endpoint).
- Handles can be changed without breaking links by using DIDs as canonical identifiers, forming permalinks.
- Two DID methods exist: did:web (tied to a domain) and did:plc (from a public ledger, more portable and resistant to domain loss).
- The DID Document contains the handle, public key, and service endpoint, enabling verification and data location.
- Practical resolution tools include SDKs, caches like QuickDID, and services like pdsls or Taproot.
- The AT protocol abstracts over HTTP, DNS, and JSON to give users ownership of their data independent of apps.
A Social Filesystem — overreacted
2 months ago
- Files in personal computing are owned by users, not apps, and outlive the software that created them.
- The social filesystem extends this concept to social apps, where user data (posts, likes, follows) are stored as files in a personal repository.
- Records are JSON files organized into collections, with lexicons defining the schema for each type of record.
- Identity is handled via DIDs (decentralized identifiers), which allow permanent links that survive changes in hosting or handles.
- Apps are reactive to file changes; derived data like like counts are computed from records across users' repositories.
- Repositories are self-certifying via hash trees, and relays enable streaming of changes for app-specific caches.
- Real-world examples include Bluesky, pdsls, Sidetrail, and teal.fm, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.

at protocol

Open Social — overreacted

Starting from Scale in the Design of the AT Protocol

Where It's at:// — overreacted

A Social Filesystem — overreacted