This week’s coffee is Sunday Morning from Ambros Coffee Co

Notes

• This is mostly intended as a resource that I can point people towards as an introduction to atproto, not for folks who’ve already consumed the koolaid
• I’ve been excited about the potential of atproto for awhile, initially by the data portability aspect, but more recently I’m digging the idea that it’s essentially a giant public datastore that you can work with for projects

What is the Atmosphere? A community.

What is it not? Bluesky.

That said, Bluesky is a decent starting point for most people. An account there serves as a portable digital identity that you can take elsewhere later. Steve Klabnick has an excellent article, Too many words about DIDs, if you’d like to do a deeper dive. There are other providers starting to creep out of beta, I’ll mention them later.

After you’ve created that identity, you don’t even need to actually use Bluesky. You can just use the id to access different applications which store their data in the Atmosphere. Some do their own things, some are more of a mashup with Bluesky data.

Here’s are some examples of what you can do with that identity, and a few nerdier links. No real endorsements, these are mostly the things I’ve used so far. There seems to be new apps cropping up daily.

Apps

I’m calling these apps in the sense that they have a usable mobile application. There are also AppViews, which are a different thing in the Atmosphere.

• Grain – sort of like if Instagram and Flickr had a baby (planning to get old insta photos on here but still pretty alpha import)
• Popfeed – sort of like Letterboxd
• Spark – a bit Tiktok, a bit Vine, a bit Insta
• Streamplace – this is like Twitch or live YouTube

Web Apps

These are more traditional websites that tap into the Atmosphere.

• mu.social – this might classify more as an AppView, it’s essentially bluesky with additional features, different labellers, and an option for a little companion on your social journey.
• rpg.actor – store all your role playing character data, or just collect cute fashion accessories for your character
• tangled.org – this is like Github
• sifa.id – this is like LinkedIn

Other Providers

We’re starting to get a bit technical here, but if you’d rather host your data outside of bluesky, you can use an alternative Personal Data Server (PDS). If you’re a technically minded person, you could roll your own, but you’re responsible for maintaining it.

• Blacksky – supporting black and latin communities
• Eurosky – data hosted in Europe
• Northsky – a community service cooperative for the 2SLGBTQIA+ and other marginalized communities
• selfhosted.social – run by the pds.dad
• Witchsky – the sky is an obvious place for witches

Nerd Tools

If you’d like to dive more into the records that these applications generate, you can go pretty deep. Under the hood, everything is basically linked JSON files.

• PDSls – inspect records, PDSs, or just stare at the firehose in amazement
• sonde.blue – anotherer record inspector
• synchhub.to – sync Github to Tangled
• Taproot – AT Protocol explorer

Own your identity

It’s relatively easy to use a domain name for your identity. The scary part is setting a TXT record via DNS. You can also use .well-known stuff on your server, which is an option with the WordPress plugin below.

Using your own domain means you own your identity and that makes it easier to switch between providers in the future.

Standard site

If you own your own domain and have a blog setup, you can start adding site records to the atproto network. Might seem obvious to say, but standardizing data means it’s easier to display in different places. I haven’t really explored any of the standard.site reader views yet but it has RSS vibes.

• standard.site – a bit nerdy at the moment, but the root of things, and has a list of platforms where it’s implemented, a number of blogging platforms to explore
• ATmosphere plugin for WordPress – relatively easy to use integration, which can also port in likes and replies
• Publishing on the Atmosphere with standard.site – good writeup from Declan Chidlow, on how to integrate it into your site (also a good technical read if you’ve made it this far)

I’ve added it to my own site, and backfilled a few records. You can see the data popup as little cards on Bluesky, similar to the ones for open graph.

That’s it for now.

This week’s coffee is Santa Rosa from Ambros Coffee Co

I created a simple WordPress plugin called Don’t Mess Up Prod, which adds a little environment indicator to your admin bar. If you flip around between multiple environments (local, dev, staging, prod), you might find it useful. It has definitely saved me a few headaches.

This was also partly an exercise in releasing a plugin on wordpress.org for the first time in 20 years. I found the process a bit easier in than expected, but it also helped to be using the right tools.

One of those tools was the WordPress Coding Standards. The rules are opinionated but leave a distinct code smell. They’re also being enforced in the code review process now. I had already applied my own ruleset to the project, so it made things fairly straight-forward.

The other tool that saved a ton of time was 10up’s plugin deploy actions. They make it super simple to tag a release and have it automagically get bundled up and submitted to the plugin repository. It saved a ton of time trying to faff about with SVN. There’s also an action for simple documentation changes.

It was also an excuse to explore implementing testing, something there often isn’t budget for on client projects. Have some basic Cypress tests running, but was less successful with phpunit.

Full codebase is on Github → dont-mess-up-prod.

Reviving an old blog feature. My coffee this week is Brazil Mogiana from Happy Goat, for pour over.

I’ve been enjoying using Aeronaut, a Bluesky app for mac that feels quite native. Still tend to use the site in browser, but it’s a nice dedicated option to have.

I just finished up listening to the audiobook version of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. Can safely say that I really enjoyed it and would highly recommend. That said, I loved This Is How You Lose The Time War, loaned it to a few people and don’t think any of them finished it.

I came across the book a few months ago via a Bluesky post by Erin Kissane, and put a hold on it at the library. The audiobook loan popped up first. Figured I’d likely end up returning it, since I hadn’t finished one in years, but found myself sucked in. The narration by Rebecca Calder is absolutely brilliant. Also thought that the redacted parts were handled well in this format.

I’ve read a decent amount of sci-fi, but not a ton of horror. My best mental comparison for this book in terms of weirdness, gore and mental exercises, is Embassytown¹, by China Miéville. So, if you liked that one, I’d add qntm’s book to your reading (or listening) list for the year.

1. Originally had The City & the City in here but misremembered. Seems appropriate. ↩︎

The Good Internet: How Fandom Can Reclaim the Web.

This talk by Sacha Judd at FFConf was stellar. I’m in the process of finding my back to the weird web.

[I]f you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. […] 

I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in.

This made me laugh, but it’s true.

I used to have comments enabled here back in the day, and often had interesting discussions with people. It became a lot to maintain though. I sort of regret completely nuking that database table at one point, mostly because I’d like to see some of those conversations again.

Have considered adding some sort of Bluesky, AT Proto or other indieweb commenting, but not really active enough anywhere at the moment to warrant it. Edit: Seems like I can just add an Autoblue comments block to the post and it will render replies, but might need to stick it directly in old templates.

If programming is 1/12th motion and 11/12ths thinking, then we shouldn’t push people to be typing 11/12ths of the time. We should instead provide the materials, environment, and processes necessary to ensure that the thinking we do is of high quality. 

Doing otherwise is optimizing the system for the wrong effect.