10 things you might not know about atproto

Atproto is an ambitious project to redefine the shape of the internet and up-end the chokehold that the dominent platforms have over the digital commons. It's also changing rapidly, and so it can be easy to miss the various innovations that have come out, especially more recently. Therefore, I thought it would be fun to do a recap of what's been going on in the atproto world recently.

1. You can run "a bluesky instance" now

Here is one: https://zeppelin.social

We did it! Or rather, Futur did it. Zepplin is a independently operated AppView, which is to say the part of the architecture which takes in all of the data from across the network, indexes it, and provides a "view" of this data in the shape of the bluesky microblogging app.

If you log in, you'll see all your posts and the exact same timeline, except none of it is coming from Bluesky servers. Since this isn't a federated architecture, it's not talking to Bluesky's AppView to do this. Instead, it's taking in the same source data from the PDSes, including those hosted by Bluesky and independently hosted ones, and deriving an identical view of the network to produce an identical looking app.

The beauty of this is that Zeppelin doesn't need to "ask permission" from Bluesky to do this - by just operating on the same data, which is all publically available, logging on to a different instance looks exactly the same as the previous one without needing to communicate between them. This is a huge step in proving out the promise of credible exit, and is really exciting to see.

Other projects to watch if you're interested is Blacksky, which is running the rest of the stack but hasn't got the AppView part yet.

2. You can create accounts without touching the Bluesky app

A lot of recent work on the protocol has been going into OAuth recently. Without OAuth, there's only one way to make an atproto account, even if you don't want to use it for Bluesky: throught the Bluesky app signup flow.

OAuth fixes this, and makes a

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