Lately I’ve had a fascination with atproto, which their site describes as “the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, a decentralized protocol for large-scale social web applications.”
I like the idea of decentralized apps. It feels like a way to get back to the internet I used to know — one where people had wider access to information without algorithms and ads shaping how we see it. Bluesky is obviously one of the first apps built on it, but there have since been others out there. Here’s a small list of a few I’ve tried recently:
- Pckt — a long-form blogging platform, sort of like Tumblr
- Scrapboard — mood boards built from media posted by the Bluesky accounts you follow, similar to Pinterest
- Comail — cooperative email
- Blento — a personal website builder
- Beacon Bits — a social mapping app, similar to Foursquare
What’s interesting is that all of these are essentially built on the same underlying identity and data layer — your Bluesky account (or really, your DID) becomes portable across completely different kinds of apps. That’s a pretty different model from the usual “create a new account everywhere” routine. I’ve been trying to think of ways I could use atproto on my own. There are some tutorials out there that use it to populate a website — basically scraping your Bluesky posts to display on a page. I already have this site, so I’m not sure how practical that would be for me specifically, but I might try it soon anyway, just to get a feel for how things work under the hood.
Another idea I had, mainly as a proof of concept, would be using atproto for tabletop RPGs — something like a character sheet tied to your DID, so your character info lives in a place you actually control instead of locked into one app or platform. From there it’s easy to imagine extending it to track things like battle history or campaign progress. I’m not sure there’s a way to build a full game on top of it, since decentralization means there’s no central authority to validate player actions — but it’s worth noodling on. We’ll see where it goes.