Just want to add that the AT Protocol IETF working group has been formed, and the PLC directory independent organization and board has officially been established. I’m at the closing talk for this years Atmosphere Conference as I write this and it’s really an incredible community of devs.
I'm excited to see communities of developers working to build things that are meaningful and matter to regular people, which ATProto seems to have more of than some other ecosystems in decent tech land. And where else could you attend an awesome workshop on "Hospicing Social Media?"
Since this re-surfaced from the second chance queue, this is a good place to say they just announced the first and very important steps to an independent PLC directory: https://martianbase.net/@mackuba/116314877708269740
I can really get behind this positive take on ATProto and the ecosystem. I know there was early criticism, but much of that stems from the project taking a fairly long-term viewpoint early on, and then having to work their way towards fulfilling that. We're now at that point, and the model looks great.
I still don’t think the model is quite great until the bandwidth problem is solved in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive for alternative appview hosting.
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
> It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness
I completely disagree with this guy. No amount of process or protocol can be a substitute for an actually decent organization culture; without the latter, everything falls apart no matter how good the former is.
I agree; and whatever you think that is good can possibly be used against you. This is why I think ATProto is possibly dangerous, it makes Big Brother's job easier, as opposed to how ActivityPub does it.
What's the trade-off between this and ActivityPub?
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?
I don’t get this post at all. Just because the Bluesky people opted to call things “open” doesn’t make it so. ATproto helps the open web as much as NFTs and DAPs did before it.
21 comments
From the alt text:
Initial board
- Bryan Newbold - Bluesky, protocol engineer
- Richard Barnes - Co-founder Let's Encrypt, Co-author MLS, ACME, HPKE, etc
- Wendy Seltzer - Internet Lawyer & open standards advocate
- Filippo Valsorda - Cryptographer, Go cryptography maintainer, transparency log aficionado
- Thyla van der Merwe - Cryptographer, security & privacy engineer at Google
This is on top of the IETF working group news: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/atp/about/
It’s the one part of the whole system I think needs a lot of work.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/05/executive-dysfunction/
> It's not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness
I completely disagree with this guy. No amount of process or protocol can be a substitute for an actually decent organization culture; without the latter, everything falls apart no matter how good the former is.
I might be being cynical but I think I've seen this story play out before. Did Bluesky genuinely believe that AP wouldn't work for their use-case, or did they want to own the protocol?