Building on ATProto

Summary

Building on ATProtoPosted 7/20/26Bluesky’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. But unfortunately I think it’s not on track to be that right now.In this post I’m going to describe what I have been wanting to build, and how ATProto’s current and proposed designs do and don’t work with that. And I’ll also throw in some comments about what’s been surprising to me.I’m probably trying to do too much here. But my main goal is to provide feedback on the proposed design, and it’s hard to do so without being clear about what I want to build and why.Start With ReviewsThe smallest version of what I want to build is a suite of applications for recording reviews. In an ideal world, these applications would supplant Yelp, GoodReads, Letterboxd, and a bunch of similar applications for just about anything you might consider reviewing. (Yes, I know there are already people building versions of these on ATProto; I’d want to collaborate with them.)I want to replace these applications not because of their function, but because of their business models. Neither my wife nor I will use them the way they’re intended, and I think most people are like one or the other of us.Local First DataFor me, I don’t want these companies to own my data. We have more th...