I want people to be comfortable paying for an atproto account (ie. space on a PDS) It’s the bedrock of everything we’re building; if it’s not funded it’ll get squeezed in ways that are bad for users (hi Gmail) We should normalise having (very cheap) paid-tier PDS accounts on the services we build
Feb 23, 2026 at 8:51 AM
Adversarial ATProto PDS Migration | Blog
An ATProto account lives on a Personal Data Server (PDS), and that service needs to be hosted somewhere by someone. There are a lot of options here, like a Raspberry Pi in your closet, a rented VPS in a datacentre, or a batteries-included service like bsky.social.
This is a spec for ATProto accounts to request and advertise (compute) resources.
This is a spec for ATProto accounts to request and advertise (compute) resources.
Ideas on a Financially Sustainable Atproto | Alex | Offprint
Explore a new funding model for Atproto that moves beyond grants and VC. Discover how StratosFund enables sustainable, community-driven open-source development.
Embracing ATProto, part 1: Setting up a PDS
In this series of posts, I'll explore my journey into setting up my workflows and services for atproto. The first step is setting up my PDS. Let's start with a bit of explanation for all this lingo.
Shower thought idea: What about expanding the role of the PDS for account management? E.g. when signing up on atproto with any app/service for the first time, redirect to the already existing account interface (`/account/`) already present on reference PDS, making this flow mandatory to support.
the single most important part of atproto is the PDS as a user-controlled auth and storage layer to which clients can connect directly. death to appviews
Authenticated Transfer Enables Orchestration - nekomimi
blog.nekomimi.petSelf-hosting your own atproto infrastructure is very much attainable and after going through the process, I wanted to do a little series of write ups on how to go about it. Starting with the PDS! jola.dev/posts/self-hosting-your-pds
Self-hosting your PDS
jola.devThis is a very straight forward atproto-business play btw 1. bring (the feature-complete) UnInbox into the atmosphere: put a PDS on it & accept open-social login 2. promptly charge indie teams like mine flat rates (no seats) of $100/yr and up for managed service. Outcompete missiveapp.com/pricing
Erlend Sogge Heggen
Note to @mk.gg and @cloudflare-dev.bsky.social DevRel folks: There’s a feature-complete team-mail client called UnInbox that’s no longer in business, but the dev is trying to bring the (self-)hosting costs close to zero, which is the sort of thing Cloudflare excels at 👀 github.com/un/inbox
Playing with the idea of ATProto as a marketplace for compute github.com/publicdomainrelay/compute-con…
Compute Contracts - Blog
john.leaflet.pub
John
Got a little reverse proxy over ssh auth'd via ATmosphere account going: fedproxy.com
I still think the biggest perk of atproto for everyday devs is not the decentralization, but things like - Handles auth, with good standards to check that auth and build permission layers. - A free public key/value database. - Can build api clients and some of the backend with lexicon schemas
