Daniel Holmgren, Head of Protocol at Bluesky, joins Jim and Alex for a live AMA on the permissioned data project. Their conversation starts with a core question: why does permissioned data need to be a separate protocol at all, rather than an extension of the existing public one?

Then Daniel answers your questions about how “spaces” compose into communities, governance issues around community-owned DIDs, writing to another person’s PDS (short version: don’t), a Giphy-style sharing use case, moderation in non-encrypted spaces, and why space declarations are lexicons rather than records.

Up top, the usual news from the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/ama-dholms-irons-still-hot

Head of product at ROOST, Juliet Shen, drops by for a conversation about Coop reaching version 1.0. Coop is ROOST's review and moderation platform used by organizations of all shapes and sizes, including Bluesky. It's also the first trust and safety tool that manages detection, review, and reporting in a free and open source tool.

Juliet and Alex get into why encoding moderation policy in the open matters—including The Christchurch Call Foundation—and where AI actually fits into a moderation workflow.

They also dig into what the 1.0 release means in practice: a more manageable memory footprint, Scylla now optional (with some tentpole summer movie cross-promo potential), and the ability to run a full production instance on a small team's budget.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/roost-v1-juliet-shen

Jim and Alex return to the livestream, now at a new time and day and even a scheduling widget on the Off Protocol homepage built on the event community lexicon. They take a look at the growing new crop of Standard.site-powered personal sites, while wondering what happened to their own sites, and the new class of reader apps showing up.

Alex covers Coop 1.0 from the team at ROOST and how even small teams now have access to moderation tools. Eurosky keeps launching new things at a pace possibly intended to confuse American audiences, we want your feedback about permissioned data, Streamplace VOD is now in closed beta, and more.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/cobblers-kids

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee and Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren step in for Jim and Alex on the livestream this week. They get into Standard.site's community-built publishing lexicon getting an integration into the Bluesky app, as well as a long-awaited overhaul to the TypeScript SDK. Daniel shares the latest from the permissioned data project, including a target of June for a formal proposal and PDS alpha. Plus news from PDS Moover, the launch of Latinsky and Medsky on Acorn, self-hostable small language models for moderation, and more news from around the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/in-our-timeline

Standard.site is, as best we can tell, the most successful community-driven Lexicon in the AT Protocol ecosystem to date. Even more amazing, this shared format for blog posts, articles, and newsletters was built and continues to be governed by three competing blogging platforms: Offprint, Leaflet, and pckt.blog.

Jim sat down with three of the core team members, Brook from pckt.blog, Miguel from Offprint, and Jared from Leaflet, to walk through how they found each other, why they decided a single shared format was better than three competing ones, and why they deliberately kept it small.

This conversation gets into the design decision to standardize on the metadata while keeping the content field open and customizable, the gnarly work of migrating thousands of existing posts to a new format across a decentralized network, and how this core team of competitors governs the standard. They also lay out where they see things going with the possiblity of new types of reader apps, new ways of monetization that support writers, and what permissioned data on the protocol might unlock.

This episode was released the same day Bluesky added Standard.site to the core app as a new avenue for discovery.

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/do-this-together-standard-site

Jim and Alex are live with the first live episode under the new Off Protocol name. Protocol meetups are happening everywhere, Alex and Jim were both in Portland, the Ozone moderation tool has some new features, and Bluesky is considering an edit button. Plus a few of your questions.

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/the-puppy-problem

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee and Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren join for a wide-ranging conversation about what atproto is, why it exists, how it got built, and where it's going next. From a Twitter consultancy to an IETF working group, this is where to get started.

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/why-a-new-protocol-the-history-and-future-of-at-protocol

Rishi Balakrishnan is the lead engineer on Acorn, Blacksky's soon-to-be-released platform for letting communities run their own moderated spaces on atproto. Jim and Alex talk with him about how Acorn came together and the design choices that went into building a landing page that doesn't mention a PDS, relay, labeler, or Lexicon. Acorn is built for communities that don't necessarily know what atproto is but want a space that isn't owned by a tech giant.

Rishi walks through a bit of the history of Blacksky, starting as a custom feed, then a moderation service, and now a full alternative implementation of the protocol with rsky. Acorns is the next step, turning the infrastructure Blacksy built for itself into a service for other communities to use.

Links and references

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/blacksky-as-a-service-a-first-look-at-acorn

Jim sits down with two of the organizers of this year's AtmosphereConf, Boris Mann and Ted Han—joined later by Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee—to talk about what the gathering surfaced. One of the big announcements from the conference is the Authenticated Transfer Protocol working group has been officially chartered at the IETF, giving the protocol a home outside of Bluesky the company.

The conversation delves into what this looks like in practice: the PLC governance boardin in Switzerland, a proposed Atmosphere community co-op from the post-conference hallway track, Hypha and Limeleaf as worker-owned co-op consultancies, and the many regional community-run local events that have blossomed.

Links and references

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/slowly-then-quickly-what-atmosphereconf-made-visible

In January, JavaScript engineer and lead dev of the Nuxt project, posed a provocation to Bluesky, asking: what are your frustrations with JavaScript packaging? The response was swift and overwhelming; two days later he had a working prototype of something new. Two weeks later, over 1,000 issues and PRs had landed from over 100 contributors. NPMX, a fast and fully featured client for the npm registery, had landed with social features powered by atproto.

Jim and Alex livestreamed with Daniel and other core contributors Matias Capeletto and Zeu about how a project moves fast without falling apart. How did they make design decisions with so many contributions coming from seemingly every direction? Why did they shut down the Discord for a full week — just before launch! — and take a vacation? And why did they decide to also host their own PDS, which gives developers a way to register an atproto identity separate from Bluesky?

Plus news from around the Atmosphere: the new atproto.com docs, Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee's post on practical decentralization, protocol head Daniel Holmgren's permissioned data series, some new Standard Site reader apps, and what Streamplace is doing about content-addressable media.

Links and references

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/a-thousand-prs-in-two-weeks-building-npmx