Off Protocol

Off Protocol

By BlueskyTechnology
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Off Protocol episodes

  • Somewhere We Have Some Agency

    Edward Niedermeyer is, by his own admission, an autodidact with an obsession over cars and technology going back a few decades. This, along with an outsider's perspective on the auto industry, led him to a suspicious-sounding feature being promised by a still-fledgling Tesla Motors.

    From there, Niedermeyer has turned his early skepticism of the promises of Elon Musk into a passionate, full-throated critique. This led him to become an early adopter of not just Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter but to the atproto ecosystem as a way to build agency against the demands of the big tech platforms.

    Links & Resources

    • Edward Niedermeyer on Bluesky
    • Ed's personal website at niedermeyer.online
    • Elon Take The Wheel
    • The Elon Take the Wheel livestream on Streamplace, of course
    • Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019)
    • Autonocast
    • Musk, directed by Alex Gibney

      • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-11-02-somewhere-we-have-some-agency-edward-niedermeyer.

      Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

      Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

      Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

      42 min
    • The Path of Honor

      Jim and Alex take a break from running yet another software update to run through the news from the Atmosphere. The livestream gets its first spammer, which means we've made it.

      Links & Resources

      • Developer experience goals for Spaces
      • An intro to Atmospheric Groups
      • Call for Participation for the AT Protocol devroom at FOSDEM 2027
      • AtmosphereConf 2027 Call for Presentations
      • HappyProto
      • Toni Schneider and Rose Wang introduce Attie Site Builder at TechCrunch Disrupt
      • An Atmospheric For You Feed from spacecowboy
      • did.bot

        • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-10-28-the-path-of-honor.

        Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

        Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

        Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

        31 min
      • The Code is the Easy Part

        At the beginning of this year, Matt Kane, a principal engineer at Cloudflare, found himself facing a question he'd been wondering about for some time: would it be possible to build a new WordPress? This time, though, he had a new tool that made taking on this rather herculean task less daunting, in the shape of newly capable AI coding agents.

        A few months later (thanks to an "unlimited token budget"), Matt had produced a working beta of the EmDash CMS. He also found that atproto was an ideal fit for the EmDash plugin registry.

        Links & Resources

        • Matt Kane on Bluesky
        • mk.gg
        • Matt's Cirrus single-user PDS that runs in a Cloudflare Durable Object
        • The Cirrus conformance checker
        • Cumulus, an atproto blob proxy
        • The EmDash CMS project
        • Introducing EmDash blog post
        • The EmDash plugin registry
        • Everything Cloudflare launched during their birthday week, including EmDash

          • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-10-14-the-code-is-the-easy-part-matt-kane.

          Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

          Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

          Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

          1 hr 7 min
        • Crab Bisque-y

          After a month of travel and special episode livestreams, Jim and Alex are settling in for a bit of a return to normalcy. Highlights include a new top-level domain proposal, an community-driven surey of the ecosystem, a preview of what spaces could look like in the Bluesky app, and more.

          Links & Resources

          • Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider on Bluesky’s .bsky TLD application
          • TechCrunch: Bluesky wants to give you your own domain on the open web
          • Bryan Newbold's at:// URI scheme draft
          • Where We’re AT 2026
          • Post-alpha plans for permissioned data
          • EmDash 1.0
          • Cloudflare: EmDash’s plugin registry
          • Bluesky Head of Product Alex Benzer shared a thread with some thoughts on spaces in the Bluesky app
          • The Tolerance Group
          • Blacksky polls
          • Brookie’s polls
          • Graze's midterms election feed app
          • MySky feed infrastructure
          • Mapping web pages to canonical AT records
          • FOSDEM 2027 atproto devroom proposal
          • Atmosphere community events

            • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-10-09-crab-bisque-y.

            Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

            Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

            Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

            40 min
          • The Only Moat is Taste

            If the AT Protocol is going to succeed, it's going to upend decades of assumptions about building on the web, including how businesses find customers and make money. Ricardo Méndez is a technologist, privacy advocate, and investor in early stage startups who has been working with decentralized technology for years. Ricardo is a very clear thinker about the hard problems of building a tech business, and his blog at numergent.com is a must read.

            Links & Resources

            • Ricardo J. Méndez on Bluesky
            • Ricardo's blog, Numergent
            • Project vs. Product, Startup vs. Business
            • A taxonomy of Atmosphere applications
            • Winesky

              • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-10-02-the-only-moat-is-taste-ricardo-m-ndez.

              Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

              Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

              Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

              53 min
            • Stroopwafels for Everyone!

              Planning is underway for the next Atmosphere Conf and the organizers — Boris Mann, Guido Jansen, and Ms. Boba — joined the livestream to announce the location (beautiful Amsterdam), dates (April 29–May 2), and the new website at atmosphereconf.org. They also had news to share about a new organization that's going to be overseeing the conference and other community governance.

              Links & Resources

              • ATmosphereConf 2027
              • RSVP for ATmosphereConf 2027
              • Subscribe to ATmosphereConf News
              • Erin Kissane's "People In Protocols"
              • atmosphere.community
              • Off Protocol, "Slowly, Then Quickly: What AtmosphereConf Made Visible"

                • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-09-28-stroopwafels-for-everyone-boris-mann.

                Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

                Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

                Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

                37 min
              • Make Your Own Thing

                In the age of aspirational influencers, million-dollar podcast hosts, and so, so many newsletters, it's sometimes hard to imagine the very idea of making a career out of writing on the internet was once considered controversial. John Gruber has been writing at Daring Fireball for nearly a quarter of a century and managed to turn his unique and incisive takes on technology, the internet, and Apple Computer into not just a career but a framework for countless writers, podcasters, producers — an entire economy.

                He joins Jim to talk about those early days and what they might have in common with a post-platform internet, the slow boil of Markdown, and, of course, Apple.

                Links & Resources

                • Daring Fireball
                • John on Bluesky at gruber.foo
                • Independent Days
                • Dive Into Markdown
                • Aaron Swartz's atx
                • Dean Allen's Textile (archived)
                • Github Flavored Markdown
                • "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste"
                • The Standard Site community lexicon project for long form writing on atproto
                • At.pm, a toolkit for building atproto apps in Perl

                  • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-09-11-make-your-own-thing-john-gruber.

                  Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

                  Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

                  Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

                  1 hr 34 min
                • A Bad Idea Until You Think About It

                  Paul Frazee, Bluesky's CTO, and Daniel Holmgren, the Head of Protocol at Bluesky, each published a blog post within minutes of each other last week exploring some of the big ideas of the protocol. It was a classic blog-off, so we decided to settle it on the livestream this week, after the regular news roundup.

                  Links & Resources

                  News roundup

                  • Off Protocol on VoxPort
                  • "The atproto Spaces Alpha is Live"
                  • Sign up for the atproto-spaces enabled PDS
                  • The atproto NYC Community Day recap
                  • Talks from atproto NYC available on Streamplace
                  • Troposphere
                  • Sri's IRL atproto apps from atproto NYC
                  • Sam Goto's FedCM demo
                  • "Working to Decentralize FedCM"
                  • Bluesky's proposed notifications redesign
                  • Ten-minute videos on Bluesky
                  • A new Bluesky setting to hide your posts from Discover
                  • Leaflet's paid memberships pilot
                  • Graze joins Flipboard
                  • Roomy teams up with Modal
                  • Germ launches voice notes
                  • Tim Disney's vision for Skyreader
                  • Keith Kurson's atmoBB
                  • Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider's AMA on Off Protocol
                  • Chicago Public Media building on atproto with Roundabout
                  • All the latest meetups on Atmosphere Community

                    • The blog-off

                    • Paul Frazee, "SELECT * FROM internet.blogposts"
                    • Daniel Holmgren, "Reintroducing Spaces"
                    • An early thread from Paul explaining some of the atproto fundamentals
                    • "Solving for scale in open networks" Paul's talk at this year's Local-First Conf

                      • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-09-04-a-bad-idea.

                      Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

                      Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

                      Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

                      48 min
                    • Not Just Us: An AMA with Toni Schneider

                      About six weeks ago, Toni Schneider dropped the "interim" from his job title to take on the role of Bluesky CEO full time. He's now ready to answer questions from the atproto ecosystem, starting with a crowd favorite: when are we getting an edit button?! (Turns out, it's complicated.)

                      From there, Toni dove into strategy on everything from moderation to AI. The biggest set of questions was centered on how to build sustainability around an open protocol and how to make that easier for everyone from creators to builders.

                      Links & Resources

                      • Toni's profile on Bluesky
                      • Toni's blog at toni.org
                      • The AMA question thread
                      • Introducing Bluesky Protocol Services
                      • The Atproto Spaces alpha launch post
                      • Bulletin, Bluesky's spaces demo app
                      • Secret Sky
                      • Alex Benzer's thread on adding an edit button

                        • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-08-26-toni-schneider-ama.

                        Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

                        Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

                        Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

                        48 min
                      • Own Your Own Destiny: An AMA with Jim Calabro

                        Jim Calabro is the head of Bluesky's platform team and is therefore ultimately responsible for managing the infrastructure of the largest node on the atprotocol network. He also led the engineering effort to rebuild the Jetstream developer service to make it easier to get started with new atproto apps.

                        Jim joined the livestream to answer your questions about these topics and more.

                        Links & Resources

                        • Northsky's social app is live
                        • The HOPE conference
                        • Jim's profile on Bluesky
                        • AMA question thread
                        • The new BPS website, including Jetstream

                          • The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-08-24-jim-calabro-ama.

                          Off Protocol is a production of the Bluesky developer relations team. For more about AT Protocol and an archive of this show, head to atproto.com.

                          Our theme music was composed and produced by Saleem Reshamwala.

                          Catch our livestream every other Wednesday at stream.place/atproto.com.

                          48 min

                        About Off Protocol

                        From the publisher's feed

                        Conversations about AT Protocol and the open social web with the people working to build a better internet. Brought to you by the Bluesky DevRel team.