Small note beforehand: If you've followed me before, you likely know that I write a weekly ATmosphere Report with all the news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere every week, over at connectedplaces.online. These weeks I'm switching it up a little, by splitting the report up into smaller parts and publishing them separately. The entire ATmosphere Report will still be published (and emailed) regularly as well, and this posts will be made more accessible on my own website soon.
This edition contains the atproto tech news and links of the last two weeks. It focuses on the tech and protocol side of the network, and thus assumes some familiarity with what's going on in the network.
Bluesky PBC is setting the first step in having atproto potentially become an IETF standard. This November in Montreal they will hold a Birds of a Feather meeting at the IETF conference. "The purpose of a BOF is to make sure that a good charter with good milestones can be created, that there are enough people willing to do the work needed in order to create standards, and that any standards would get adoption." This is a first step for atproto towards becoming an official IETF standard:
yup it's a long road ahead with lots of ifs & maybes, but this is the first (formal) step!
Bluesky has enabled the 'show more/show less' buttons on their Discover feed to be used by custom feeds as well. The update came from independent developer Grace Kind, and I think her response shows the power of open networks:
You can just do things
If you're a custom feed creator, you can now enable "show more" and "show less" buttons in your feeds. This gives people using your feed a simple way to tell you what they love — and what they want less of.
Red Dwarf is a client for Bluesky, that takes a very different approach under the hood. It does not use an AppView, instead it relies solely on Constellation and PDSes to display all data. The code is now available on Tangled, and Red Dwarf demonstrates it is possible to build a Bluesky client with a significantly different architecture under the hood.
A guide to hosting the rsky-relay implementation. rsky-relay is an implementation of the atproto relay in Rust, made by the Blacksky Algorithms team.
Streamplace explains how their Indexer system works.
Some previews of an upcoming new project called Slices, which is an "appview for building appviews". Developer Chad Miller has used this to create a search interface for Tangled, as a demonstration of the capabilities of Slices.
A proposal on how to build encrypted messaging combining atproto with email's SMPT, with a demo of how it works here. Smoke Signal's Nick Gerakines wrote a response blog as well on the project.
The weekly update for microcosm, with a deep dive into the current ecosystem of relays in the ATmosphere.
Comparing the different (indie) relays that are active, now with some additional features.
A one-click deployment of a PDS on Coolify.
A new tool that displays all your 'bookmarks' (meaning posts you replied to with a 📌).
Graphtracks is a new custom API that aggregates atproto firehose data into accessible formats for other developers to build upon.
Tangled-pages allows you to host a website via a Tangled repo.
A tool that converts Whitewind posts into Leaflet posts.
A demonstration of email 2FA on a self-hosted PDS, which is now also available on Blacksky.
A prototype of a browser that can handle atproto handles, DIDs, as well as regular web pages.
An extensive article on the technical challenges when building a general-purpose recommendation feed.
A sneak peak at an If This Than AT system, which came out of the recent ATProto NYC Community Hack Day.