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.
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.
Rashid Aziz: Extending ATproto for private data - ATProto Community
Trust Infrastructure on ATproto
I agree with Nick that you have noted a big hard problem, with Zooko’s triangle type trade-offs. (For a semi-related example that is “easier” but still crazy difficult, see our “PeerFlow: Secure Load Balancing in Tor” https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2017-0017 ) As noted or implied already in this thread: in the end, if someone can cheaply spin up indefinite unlinked identities and build good reputations for them, and if trust is based on such reputations, it is hard (impossible?) to avoid them s...
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
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
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.
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
