I am SO TIRED of ATProto developers who immediately throw around technical terms and buzzwords trying to explain the protocol to new people. the term "social filesystem" is completely meaningless marketing until you actually understand how the protocol works at a surface level
Mar 16, 2026 at 2:29 PM
What is atproto?
What is atproto? atproto is two things: A protocol for creating open social networks An open social network atproto, the open social network Today the atproto network has 36+ million users and powers Bluesky and a handful of other apps. Almost all atproto data is public. Content like posts, likes, follows, and photos/videos are publicly accessible to any network participant in a permissionless way. As an example of how open the network is, here’s how easy it is to stream all public data on the network using a public atproto Relay like bsky.network:
About Atproto w/ Dan Abramov | Wireframe Live
About Atproto w/ Dan Abramov | Wireframe Live
Open Social
Open Social
Playing with Parlances - Permissioned Data & AT Protocol - AT-WayFinding
Community privacy is one of our top priorities at @transrights.northsky.social which isn't possible out of the box with any ATproto implementation today that doesn't just hide an entire PDS. We're developing in the open and so I've published a proposal on it, feedback as always is we
atproto/proposal.md at main · verdverm/atproto
Social networking technology created by Bluesky (with patches for permissions) - verdverm/atproto
socialde.pt/atproto.md
Markdown-first API for the AT Protocol ecosystem, built for LLM agents and tools that consume plain text.
The AT Protocol | Bluesky
The AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or atproto) is a standard for public conversation and an open-source framework for building social apps.
A conceptual model of ATProto and ActivityPub
If you were to design an open social networking protocol, what would that look like? Which metaphors and comparisons would you use to get a general idea of how the network functions? And what would you answer if people ask if your network is decentralised and federated?
Imagining atproto as a post-app protocol starts with materializing the social filesystem – decomposing apps and their data into materials and instruments. For the time being, this guestbook is a good example where the display element is a material and the sign element is an instrument.
dan
in any case, the end game is composing these little guys, whatever goes on behind the scenes. social components
My take on the "explaining atproto" discourse is that all the UX/filesystem/etc metaphors are still very verbose and that you can explain the same idea in a lot less words: It separates data from apps, so any app can use data from any other app. That fits in a tweet, with other sentences around it.
It's hard for non-technical people to understand that #atproto (Bluesky, and friends) really is a different breed of social software. One where our data, and connections are no longer taken hostage by the platform and we're free to store our data wherever we want
Many people are talking about decentralized social media protocols like #ActivityPub and #ATProto and all the amazing things one can do with them. But do you actually know how they work? We thought we'd do something about this. Come to #FediForum next week if you are curious and like to find […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.socialPrivate Social Networks on atproto
Building toward something more like Facebook on atproto (not Facebook Groups, not Marketplace, just *private* content from people you follow.
Stratos
Permissioned Data Diary 3: Your Bucket, My Data - Daniel's Leaflets
Permissioned Data Diary 2: Buckets - Daniel's Leaflets
Spaces as Layers - Nick's Blog
