(//_-) ← emo bang

If you're on Bluesky or have friends who are, you may have heard about the CEO of Bluesky being wildly unprofessional considering who she is and what she represents. Very strange behavior! However, ATProto, the protocol Bluesky is built on, is really cool. Jay (the aforementioned CEO) does a terrible job explaining it because her gameplan here is clearly to get other people to do the explaining for her or whatever, but that may go horribly if the people who need the explanations leave the main app before they can see them. Well, worry not! Because I'll explain it! Badly! Because I'm not good at this kind of thing either!

A protocol is a thingy that a site can have so it can talk to other sites that have the same thingy ^_^ The thingy being the protocol. They use the same protocol. Yea. ActivityPub is another protocol, the one Mastodon and Akkoma and Misskey and Peertube and Pixelfed and Wordpress (with plugins) use. These get collectively known as the Fediverse. Maybe you've heard of it. If you make an account on one of these, you have access to content on all of them*. Depending on where you're starting and going, you can generally transfer your follows/followers and sometimes even your posts when you decide to change your homebase. The Fediverse is decentralized -- if one site goes, the others will still be up (and if your instance, or the site you made your account on, warns that it'll be closing soon, you have time to transfer to somewhere else), and it's not that hard to make your own federated social network too.

*Your server admin can block certain accounts and whole instances from interacting with their own. This is usually for Nazi or CSAM reasons, but sometimes it's for very, very petty reasons. Good luck navigating that!

But there's a new kid on the block... They call it AT Protocol, and sites/apps that use it are part of the ATmosphere. When you switch accounts in the ATmosphere, you retain all your followers, follows, posts, and all other data that's attached to your account. However, since the data is very public, they have trouble implementing things like private accounts/posts, which are things Fedi apps have had for a while now. Bluesky was basically meant to be a proof-of-product type deal, and clearly everyone who works on it resents the audience it attracted and wants it to die/become a barren husk of center-right commentary. But it's okay! You don't have to use Bluesky, or just Bluesky! You can use other apps in the ATmosphere, and you'll still be able to talk to people who remain there. Here's a bunch of links to cool things people are doing with ATproto to prove you can use it while avoiding the big website, and other helpful or interesting things:

• First things first, here's how to leave Bluesky without leaving ATproto. See, if you leave Bluesky you can still see posts from Bluesky, but you won't be subject to their moderation nor will they be able to punish you. Bluesky might hide your post from their website if it breaks their rules, but it may still be on other sites depending on those sites' rules. By the way, you can log into your usual account on other websites if you don't feel like changing your PDS but hate the moderation/aesthetics/whatever, but if you personally break the rules of your PDS... something bad might happen to your account, I dunno. Shrug. Unlike the Fediverse there aren't many PDSs, but hey, the ATmosphere is new. Give it time.


• Don't wanna be [username].bsky.social or whatever? Handles Club has you covered. They have dozens of free domains you can use so that you can be [username].loves.yaoi.fyi instead :)


• Anisota, a client that renders posts as cards that you swipe through instead of an endless vertical scroll of posts. Instead of numbers the cards have rarities that show how much attention a post has gotten, there's a stamina meter that stops you from doomscrolling, and there's even items to collect and (soon) quests to complete.


• Make a blog, newsletter, or collaborate on writings with Leaflet! If you're like me, when you saw this you were like "why would you make a blog connected to your Bluesky account? What happens if you lose your account somehow?" but it turns out all data connected to your ATProto account is saved onto your PDS. Meaning, you can take the data from your Leaflets and put them elsewhere any time.


• Tangled advertises itself as a platform where you can collaborate on git projects and yap. Of no use to me, but maybe someone will read this and be like "this is something I've been looking for for years...!"


• Final words, where you can see posts that are being deleted float on like bubbles into the air. It shows every post ever, so don't be caught off-guard by shocking or offensive ones.


• nooki is a Reddit-like that I've heard might be of questionable quality, but 1. I don't know what those pictures and words mean, and 2. at least someone actually made something new! If someone doesn't like it, they should show nooki how it's done and make a better Reddit-like, or show the creator what's wrong and how to fix it so nooki can be better.


• There's going to be a last.fm-like called teal.fm. Pretty cool, pretty cool.


• Another way to microblog would be using TOKIMEKI, which has many pretty themes and ways to control what and how much of it appears on your timeline. This was the way I used ATproto for a long while, but I use Anisota now.


• But wait, there's another way to read your feed. Windows Vista fans, now's your time to shine.


• What the hell, why not. Here's another one.


• I use SkyFeed to create custom feeds, similar to antenna on Misskey/Sharkey if you know about that. For example, I created a feed that collects every post that mentions any series started by a certain video game studio because... I wuv them ♡


• And here's a site that catalogues basically every PDS, regardless of whether you can actually use it or not. Lots to check out.


• If you have an ATmosphere account but would like people on the Fediverse to be able to interact with you, or vice versa, try Bridgy Fed. It's totally opt in, so you won't see everything from everyone, only those who have their account bridged. If you're on the Fediverse your instance may have chosen not to cooperate with this for their own reasons -- consult with your admin(s) if so.


• Or... you can make an account with Wafrn, which is a network that is both ATproto AND ActivityPub compatible! Wow! If you have an ATproto account you can transfer it to Wafrn in its entirety, but if you have an ActivityPub account you can only transfer your follows and following, not your posts or anything else.


• You can also use Openvibe to combine your feeds on multiple sites into one and crosspost. I haven't used this, so if you do tell me how it goes.


• Article time! This one patiently explains how the AT Protocol works for laypeople, this one explains why what Jay is doing with Bluesky is stupid and how she could improve if she cared, and here's a buuuuunch more stuff made on the protocol. (← I just found out about SkySpace from there and it's sooo cute.)

This took me an embarrassing amount of time to write and I'm not proofreading it o7 I hope this helps someone out! Sorry if some of my wording on technical matters isn't very correct or precise -- I'm a humanities major.