AT Protocol

From IndieWeb
(Redirected from ATProto)

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it with relevant information.

AT Protocol or Authenticated Transfer Protocol, previously known as Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), is a federated social network protocol, designed and first implemented by the Bluesky project, subsequently supported by IndieWeb-friendly service micro.blog and libraries. The term "Atmosphere" can be used to describe the ecosystem around the AT Protocol.

IndieWeb Examples

Currently the only IndieWeb Examples are hardcoded to post directly to Bluesky rather than arbitrary AT Protocol supporting services.

Service Support

This section is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

In progress support

Criticism

Blocks Publicly Accessible via API

Your list of blocked users is public. Anyone can see it through the API. Someone harassing you? They, and all of their buddies, will know as soon as you block them. People can build profiles of who's ripe for harassment just by searching for large blocklists.

Heavy Architecture & (De)centralization

Follow up, 2025-12-27: Rudy here confirms the Blacksky appview is still being worked on (eg: blacksky uses bluesky's appview still) The sticking point, as he describes it, is "backfill". This alludes to the issue that makes me compare ATProto to blockchain: to get the features users expect, every node on the network must mirror the network's entire history. This is impractical, which is why bluesky is as of this moment a federated network with effectively only one node.

ATProto's complicated architecture more or less puts running an alternative app into the realm of well-funded nonprofits and startups.

The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky's purposes, but on the economics alone it's going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.

How To

But i'm still really psyched at how much simpler things have become, so I set up my own $34/month VPS demo instance, and this is the write-up.

The relay describe here is running at: https://relay-vps.demo.bsky.dev

History

"ADX" iteration of the protocol renamed to “Authenticated Transfer Protocol” — or the “AT Protocol.” https://atproto.com/

Blogposts

See Also

Retrieved from "https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=AT_Protocol&oldid=110049"