Published on March 5, 2025

[Draft] Why the AT Protocol and Bluesky matter for actual users

Another day, another conversation in which I bring up The AT Protocol and Bluesky. Rather than continue to bug my friends about the whole thing, I figured I'd write down my thoughts on why Bluesky's technology and social media ecosystem is interesting from the perspective of an actual user.

Note: The AT Protocol is pronounced "at," like the word or the @ symbol, and will be shortened to "atproto" in this post.

How it works

TODO

The cool stuff

Separation of data and experience

First, a point of comparison. Started in 2008, TweetDeck was once an alternative experience for using Twitter. Users could log in using their existing Twitter account and access all the underlying content from Twitter, but from a different app/website. Over time, support for more social services were added so users could view and interact with content from multiple social platforms in one place. TweetDeck was largely adored, and often used by power users who appreciated the more extensive features than the first-party Twitter app.

Regardless of how good TweetDeck was (and, again, it was good), the important part is that it provided an alternative experience for accessing and using the same underlying data as Twitter, built independently from Twitter the company.

In 2011, Twitter, predictably, acquired TweetDeck. They subsequently rebranded the product to "TweetDeck by Twitter," removed support for all other social media outside of Twitter, and stripped out some of the features that user's loved most. Twitter wanted to control access to their content, for good reason—the majority of Twitter's revenue comes from advertising, and they don't make money if users don't see their ads (more on what users see in the next section). Since then, TweetDeck has gone through multiple iterations, been rebranded again, and is a much reduced version of what it once was. There were other third party apps for using Twitter, and they've generally been shut down or disconnected from being able to access Twitter's data.

Now, Bluesky. all Because Bluesky explicitly separates the data (stored on atproto) from viewing that data (on the Bluesky app), third party developers are encouraged to create alternative views of the data, with their own feature sets, branding, and more. In fact, there are many examples of this already,

Alternative clients

Feed and content curation

  • Bluesky Feed Creator - Design and customize your Bluesky feeds, no coding knowledge required
  • Graze - Effortlessly design, deploy, and optimize any algorithm on Bluesky, without a single line of code
  • goodfeeds - Custom feed directory / search engine and builder

Analytics, post management, and more

There are many, many more to check out in Fishttp's great curated list of projects in / on top of Bluesky.

Copies of other social media

Using the same underlying technology and data as Bluesky, people have already made alternatives to Instagram and Tiktok. When these services use the same identity and social network data as Bluesky, your follows / followers from Bluesky are already built-in from the start. No starting over on a new social media platform, just a new set of features and a new place for you and your community.

Feeds aka controlling "the algorithm"

TODO

Identity verification

Miscellaneous features

Labelling

Starter packs

Blocking and permissions

Blocking on Bluesky actually works. Ever tried to block someone on another social media platform, only for them to still pop up in your discover feed? Not the case on Bluesky.

Further reading

  1. Free Our Feeds
  2. Fishttp's curated list of projects in / on top of Bluesky