AT Protocol

So Scott, you are the creator of Comail.

Uh, it's a mail service related to App Proto and Atmosphere Mail.

I'm really interested to hear more about what that is and what it provides.

But before we dive into that, would you like to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself?

Um, which honestly is where I spend a lot of my time in implementing right now, is those safety mechanisms.

It's, it's very easy to ensure that, like, myself as a PDS operator, you know, I send maybe five emails a week maximum.

But my PDS is very small, right, compared to something like the Atmosphere community discourse, which I recently helped migrate over to Comail.

Um, which has been awesome.

We got a patented Gruber mispronunciation.

At protocol.

Jesus.

That's great.

And it can't just build.

Sometimes you can't just build on the old thing.

And there are aspects of what, that's going to be a tough one, at protocol, aka AT protocol, and Blue Sky are doing.

that simply are not compatible with the fundamental nature of ActivityPub, right? Yeah.

Impressive.

I mean, the AT protocol has some diehard fans and folks who are really investing in the ecosystem.

More so than, well, I don't know, maybe I'm not a part of the Mastodon community or the other ones that have also came and went.

The AT protocol is definitely not the level of Twitter or that sort of adoption.

There are folks who are really doing some really clever things with it.

Yeah.

So, you know, that not being isolationist part is, is really important.

But what comes with that is Blue Sky is a microblogging platform.

It is, you know, that protocol was created by people from Twitter, and so th- that's, they're very focused on that.

We sort of ha- have thought of Gander more as, like, a hybrid of things, Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky, in terms of functionality, but that technology, that underlying interoperability piece is what kind of sat there.

Uh, and so it ha- it's, it's imp- it impedes, um, you know, thought pieces 'cause you've gotta get it down into three hundred characters or put it into a thread, which we haven't built yet, or, you know, put it in the comments kinda thing.

So just like HTML, yeah, it's just links to JSON in that repo.

And so this is what, why you see, you know, at, why at protocol is like at, you know, colon slash slash that is, that is the URL for the link to somebody else's JSON.

So that's why like at Prado is kind of like a web of JSON.

It's like JSON that links to other JSON that could potentially be in different repositories.

Yeah, a lot of what I've been building is kind of more, I guess, the infrastructure side, like you said, with the rotation key.

So it's the tools you use on the protocol, so you can move your account from one PDS to another.

Along with that, I also kind of like building applications, like I recently built LexiDraw, which is a Forka ExcaliDraw, and it just lets you share those diagrams or your drawings on that protocol.

And I think one of the biggest things that really keeps me here is just the community.

It's all open source.

That was something everyone was really excited about.

The other one is Spaces.

That's private data on that protocol.

Uh, it's available at mode.place.

But, um, what I'm showing you here on the screen is standard.mode.place. And what this is, is a, um, result of the conversation that I had with Dan Abramov, who was here on the show a few months ago because he was really, really excited about the, um, AT protocol, right? And this AT protocol is the thing that's basically built, you know, um, um, behind Blue Sky as well as other different apps across this, this ecosystem that they call the Atmosphere.

And when he was talking about it, it reminded me of...

Or actually, he, he mentioned that it was similar to RSS, which I love, because RSS provides you the ability to just put the data out there that anybody can go syndicate and use to their own, uh, benefit, right? So like for RSS, for example, it allows me to read all the news without all of the, you know, um, [lips smack] ads and, and pop-ups and all of sort of this junk that's in the way.

So Tangled is a place where you can collaborate on Git repositories.

It is based on the at protocol, at proto.

There's some nuance around how you say it or spell it or capitalize it.

I don't remember.

So probably another aside, but you keep saying atmosphere, which is more like the entire ecosystem.

Yes.

You know how lots of the activity pub implementing apps are collectively referred to as the Fediverse? This is the same thing for the at protocol.

I was wondering that.

And what Graze did was work in the at proto environment.

So what most people know as blue sky, but is the atmosphere protocol running underneath it.

So Graze was working in that protocol to help people basically build their own algorithms.

Like we all complain about the algorithms.

We're like, oh, this is not showing me the stuff I want.

It's very hard to say like how things could have turned out.

I think at protocol has the same issue as SREs do.

Like when it's doing its job, you don't know what's doing it.

Great.

But I wonder also if like, you know, like there's a lot of discussion and how people are, you know, data is being harvested.

It's a lot of discussion into like flock cameras and like, just all of these kind of like data and like living in a like security state and how people are using your data.

And I think the more that mistrust grows, the more people are looking for other alternatives and whether that be at protocol or anything.

But I do think we're in a point where it even just look at the laws that people are making and data sovereignty or just the way that like the government got involved with TikTok.