Beyond Bluesky: These are the apps building social experiences on the AT Protocol

A year ago, Bluesky was opening up to the public and was known as one of the many X competitors that emerged after Elon Musk acquired the network formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky’s social network has grown to over 33 million users, while the technology it’s built upon — the AT Protocol (or ATProto for short) — is being used to develop dozens more applications designed to work together as part of an open social web. The developers behind many of these apps attended the first conference dedicated to the AT Protocol, ATmosphere, held in Seattle last weekend. There, they learned what’s ahead for ATProto, what challenges still need to be overcome, and what other things they’ll need to think about as they build for this new social app ecosystem. Others attended online, watched the talks and presentations remotely, and participated in a growing Discord chat for community members. The ATProto community is working to rebuild Web 2.0, an earlier version of the social web that included ... Read full article.