Building on ATProto

Posted 7/20/26

Bluesky’s Atmosphere Protocol has the chance to become the base for a whole generation of applications. But it’s developing in surprising and disappointing ways.

I spent part of last week at the Local First Conference in Berlin. I was not surprised to find that AI coding was on everyone’s minds. Less expected was how pervasive ATProto was.

I’ve been considering trying to build on ATProto for a few months, so this was a great chance to ask a bunch of questions from both people building on it, and the people actually building it (multiple key Bluesky people were there).

I want ATProto to be the answer for me. I want to again live in a world where application developers use public, community driven standards to create interoperable applications with common data standards. I think it can be.…