🔖 ATProto Tools

2026 March 25 // tech

What is the AT Protocol?

AT Protocol is an open network approach to social media that associates any and all user data with their personal identifier called a DID (decentralized identifier). What this means is that users will always own their data, because it's assocated with their DID rather than with the server they live on, and they are able to use that same account with any website/app that "communicates" using ATProto. Emily Liu has a good non-technical write-up on why owning your data here and I'll use some images from that here.

Wait, isn't this just Mastodon again?

In a sense AT Proto and Mastodon are similar in that they're both federated, meaning that your account/data lives on different servers...the only difference is that with AT Proto, because you own your own data, you can freely move it to different "personal data servers" (PDS) as needed. Most people use bsky.app, but there are actually a lot of alternative PDS like Blacksky, Northsky, and Selfhosted.social!

Liu likens centralized social media to having your data beholden to Instagram or Twitter's "houses", but on AT Proto, your data is all contained "in your house" and you just need to go to different "rooms" to use different apps.

An image of 3 houses with 4 rooms each labelled Instagram's House, X's House, and Reddit's house. One room in each house is labelled "your room", showing how your data is owned and managed by these social media platforms

An image of a house with 4 rooms. The rooms are labelled BlueSky's room, White Wind's room, Smoke Signals' room, and Bluecasts' room. This shows how your data is connected to your personal identifier and not locked into one specific provider.

Criticisms of AT Proto

While I love the concept of AT Proto, I'm aware there are a lot of criticisms around it and how it's not truly federated (yet) because everything still funnels users towards Bluesky. Asterisk's post titled ATProto is a Lie explains this in better depth than I ever could, because I'm just a casual enthusiast, but the structure of BlueSky, the reliance on its CDN, how the apps inherit its content-first philosophy, etc. are all things Asterisk criticize.

As an aside, I personally just never clicked with ActivityPub/Fediverse and I'm well-aware that this is a fatal character flaw. This post is more about cool little things I found on AT Proto that I really like and hope they will stick around and not be so reliant on BSky, especially with things like Porxie in development.

I'll be updating this post as I find new things that are interesting!

Blogging

I'll always harp on just making a blog and you can actually make your own blog that other people can follow on AT Proto! The customization is a little more limited in these options, but the upside of AT Proto blogs is that you can aggregate everything easily and follow everyone from one BlueSky account. I think this is really cool! Most of these work with a thing called standard.site which makes it easier for longform blogging apps to "talk" to each other.

Pretty much all of these support markdown or forward slash inputs for editing.

Greengale.app

  • Custom theme support
  • Read the docs here

⚠️ This platform permits AI Agents/LLMs to post, so if you don't jive with that, I recommend looking elsewhere.

Leaflet.pub

  • Markdown blogging platform
  • Custom theme/CSS support
  • Currently doesn't support slugs or pinned links on blogs.
  • Supports private/unlisted doc sharing, similar to Google Docs or ellipsus
  • Read the docs here

⚠️ Currently does not support exporting backups of posts. If you choose this platform, consider saving your writing somewhere else just in case!

Mochott.site

  • A newer site so it's not as well-documented, but this is made by the developer of tokimeki.blue.
  • The most interesting feature are its "minisites" which allow you to aggregate articles by a specific category! You can see my test runs here

Pckt.blog

  • Blogging tool that supports migration from WhiteWind
  • Supports custom themes and categories.
  • Wasn't really able to find any documentation of this besides this devlog

Whtwnd.com

  • Platform that allows for people to interact with posts via Bluesky and searching for users via their DID
  • Read the docs here

⚠️ Slower development than the other platforms.

Entertainment

Popfeed.social

  • A media tracker for books, games, television, movies, and music!
  • Essentially does all of these things in one place so you can easily link it with your friends
  • A little bit buggy, but does have an app if you care about that (I don't because I kind of hate apps)

Stream.place

  • Livestream on AT Proto!
  • No public documentation that I could find, but you can get involved via their Discord server on their about page

Educational

Margin.at

  • Make annotations of webpages and save them to collections!
  • Great for deep reading and has a browser extension
  • Read the documentation and source code here

Semble.so

  • Create collections of links and share with friends via "cards"
  • Great for social knowledge sharing.
  • Read the documentation and source code here

Miscellaneous

Plural.host

  • A tool for plural systems and people with DID/OSDD to track front times, system members, and view front times
  • Syncs bi-directionally with the Discord bot Pluralkit. Essentially this means that if you switch in plural.host, the switch will be reflected in Pluralkit and vice versa.
  • Supports data import from Pluralkit and SimplyPlural
  • Encrypts data for private members!
  • Read the documentation here