Off 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. Acorn is the next step, turning the infrastructure Blacksky built for itself into a service for other communities to use.

Links and references

The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/blacksky-as-a-service-a-first-look-at-acorn.

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.

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 board 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

The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/slowly-then-quickly-what-atmosphereconf-made-visible.

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.

In January Daniel Roe, 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 registry, 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

The archive for this episode, including a generated transcript, is available at https://atproto.com/off-protocol/a-thousand-prs-in-two-weeks-building-npmx.

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.