Getting Started with AT Protocol

5 days ago (bnb.im)

Oh, it's some different AT protocol (some distributed mambojambo) than Hayes AT protocol.

You’ll get more traction, by stating way up top what AT is and who should care about it.

  • Do you know of something better than the first link in TFA?

    • You shouldn't have to click away from a blog post to understand what the blog post is about. It should start with a clear self-contained introduction.

      atproto.com contains a succinct discription:

      > Atproto is a big-world open social protocol. Users publish JSON records into repositories. The changestreams of those records then sync across the network to drive applications.

      Still a bit abstract, but OK. Personally I would include that AT protocol stands for Authenticated Transfer Protocol and that it is the protocol powering Bluesky.

Spaces really is gonna bring all the features that HN is critical about AT platforms like Tangled.

Private repos are now on the horizon. Huzzah!

One thing I'm wondering is how ATproto can be integrated with voice/video chat. Would you combine it with Matrix, XMPP, or some custom protocol?

  • One trick we've been playing with on the Matrix side is figuring out how to tunnel encrypted Matrix over other transports - so you could absolutely use it, layered on top of ATproto spaces, as a way to get E2EE DMLS metadata-protected realtime voice/video/chat but tied to ATproto DIDs and permissions. We're in the final stages of (at last) finalising MatrixRTC, the E2EE group voip stuff in Matrix, which would pair nicely with this.

    The "portable Matrix" idea is currently nicknamed Tachyon, and is earlier stage at this point, although I did a Matrix Live about it a few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc7yfec3iIQ

  • Bluesky has live video but it's a Twitch stream. ATProto itself is about databases and ways to replicate them. You can store pictures and videos there, but you wouldn't normally use a database replication protocol to actually transmit live video.

    • > you wouldn't normally use a database replication protocol to actually transmit live video

      Right, I'm more concerned about the areas where there's overlap between atproto and matrix, like with identity and authentication, for example.

    • > but you wouldn't normally use a database replication protocol to actually transmit live video.

      Unless you're Teams. Which... Is probably evidence for the above.

Funny how this rhymes with something I wrote in 2011[1][2]: a "universal spreadsheet" where people share not just data but the transformations over it. The pieces are more real now: you can actually free your data from closed services (e.g. Instagram), orchestrate it on something like ATProto, and LLMs make a great new kind of "function" for the system.

[1] https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration...

[2] https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/