MacKuba

I’m starting a new blog post series that I’ve named “ATProto in Practice”. I want to go through some practical tasks that you’re likely to need when working with the protocol, using Ruby and my Ruby gems for the examples. These will (hopefully) be a bit shorter than my standard book-length blog posts here 🫠

If you’re new to the AT Protocol and you haven’t read my long Introduction to AT Protocol post that goes through the whole architecture and defines the various pieces of it, I recommend you read that one first, because I won’t be explaining everything from scratch again here.

I had a comments section on this blog since the beginning. I always felt like a comments section was kind of a requirement for a blog: it’s not just a website where you publish posts, it’s a website where you publish posts and other people can comment on them. I strongly disagreed with bloggers who openly declared that they’re removing comments from their blog because their blog is not a place for others to add their remarks, and that they can always write to the author on Twitter if they want to contact them.

A bit over a year ago, in the first week of January 2025, I migrated my main Bluesky account to my own PDS on a Netcup VPS. It’s been quite easy to set up using the official installer, and it’s been running pretty much without any problems or maintenance the whole year.

Despite that, I haven’t been 100% happy with this setup for one reason: Docker. So I decided to try to take it out of the box, and I made it run first on the same VPS installed separately, and then moved it to another machine this month with a clean install. This blog post is a guide to how I did this, if you’re interested. There are a few existing posts about this already:

I come across a lot of blog posts about the AT Protocol and Bluesky technicals – both on Bluesky official blogs and those of the team members, and by independent developers from the community. So many people are blogging now (especially now that Leaflet got popular in these circles) that I started using an RSS reader again just to keep up with everything.

These posts are usually shared widely for a day or two, and then kind of forgotten – but a lot of them contain some valuable knowledge that is still relevant much later. Even if someone remembers that something like this has been written, it’s not always easy to dig it out from the archive.

I thought it would be nice to have one place collecting those old and newer blog posts to make them easier to find. So I went through those RSS feeds, my like archives and other places, and collected everything I could find here in an organized list. I also included the documents from the “Proposals” GitHub repo, and various posts from the “Discussions” section in the ATProto repo.

This is a subjective selection – from many blogs I skipped some less relevant posts or only included a couple out of many – so if you’re interested, click through to the home page from any post and look for the other posts there.

Since June 2023, I’ve been running a service written in Ruby (Sinatra) that provides several Bluesky custom feeds (initially built with a feed for the iOS/Mac developers community in mind, later expanded to many other feeds). If you don’t know much about Bluesky feeds, you make them by basically running a server which somehow collects and picks existing posts from Bluesky using some kind of algorithm (chronological or by popularity, based on keyword matching, personal likes, whatever you want), and then exposes a specific API endpoint. The Bluesky AppView (API server) then calls your service passing some request parameters, and your service responds with a list of URIs of posts (which the API server then turns into full post JSON and returns to the client app). This lets you share such feed with anyone on the platform, so they can add it to their app and use it like any built-in feed. (If you’re interested, check out my example feed service project.)

In order to provide such service, in practice you need to connect to the Bluesky “firehose” streaming API which sends you all posts made by anyone on the network, and then save either those which are needed for your algorithm, or save all of them and filter later. I chose the latter, since that lets me retry the matching at any time after I modify the keyword lists and see what would be added after that change (and also some of the feeds I now run require having all posts). I also use the same database/service to generate e.g. the total daily/weekly stats here.

Some time ago I wrote a long blog post I called “Complete guide to Bluesky”, which explains how all the user-facing features of Bluesky work and various tips and tricks. This one is meant to be a bit like a developer version of that – I want to explain in hopefully understandable language what all the pieces of the network architecture are and how they all fit together. I hope this will let you understand better how Bluesky and the underlying protocol works, and how it differs from e.g. the Fediverse. This should also be a good starting point if you want to start building some apps or tools on ATProto.

This post is a first part of a series – next I want to look at some comparisons with the Fediverse and some common misconceptions that people have, and look at the state of decentralization of this network, but that was way too much for one post; so this one focuses on the “ATProto intro tutorial” part.

So here we are, halfway through 2025, a bit over 2.5 years after the Eloncalypse… For better or worse, the Twitter as we knew it in the 2010s and the communities we had there are mostly gone. But it doesn’t feel like we’ve all settled on anything comparable.

If you’re a software developer who was active on Twitter before, by now you’ve almost certainly tried at least one of the alternatives – Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, and you’re probably posting actively on at least one of these, but probably not on all of them. The problem is that nobody has enough mental space to be active on 3-4 similar social networks, so we’ve split into different camps which only partially overlap. You’re probably still missing some friends from Twitter and some interesting content. It’s all a bit in flux and a bit of a mess.

Myself, I’ve basically left Twitter; I haven’t spent much time on Threads (among other reasons, it was unavailable in Europe for a long time); and I’m mostly hanging out on Bluesky and somewhat on Mastodon.

So where do we go from here?

Update 17.11.2025: I’ve migrated this journal blog now from Micro.blog to Leaflet, a new blogging service built on top of Bluesky’s ATProto. I wrote about this here, the new URL is https://lab.mackuba.eu (I’ll add a redirect from ‘journal’ later).

Just a quick update, if you’re following this blog via RSS: I’ve started a separate “journal” blog on micro.blog: journal.mackuba.eu.

Micro.blog is an interesting service: it’s a one-man indie business that’s sort of a hybrid between a blogging platform and a microblogging social network. You can write anything between full-size blog posts and tweet-sized single messages, and you can cross-post them to Bluesky, Mastodon etc. You can also follow people from the community that’s formed there and reply to them, all in the form of those mini-blogposts (there are no likes or retweets though). The idea, as I understand, is to use a network of blogs to build a social network that uses the web itself as the foundation.