Luke Kanies | Building on ATProtoLuke Kanies

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Building on ATProto<br>Posted 7/20/26

Bluesky’s Atmosphere Protocol has the chance to become the base for a whole generation of applications. But it’s developing in surprising and disappointing ways.<br>I spent part of last week at the Local First Conference in Berlin. I was not surprised to find that AI coding was on everyone’s minds. Less expected was how pervasive ATProto was.<br>I’ve been considering trying to build on ATProto for a few months, so this was a great chance to ask a bunch of questions from both people building on it, and the people actually building it (multiple key Bluesky people were there).<br>I want ATProto to be the answer for me. I want to again live in a world where application developers use public, community driven standards to create interoperable applications with common data standards. I think it can be. But unfortunately I think it’s not on track to be that right now.<br>In this post I’m going to describe what I have been wanting to build, and how ATProto’s current and proposed designs do and don’t work with that. And I’ll also throw in some comments about what’s been surprising to me.<br>I’m probably trying to do too much here. But my main goal is to provide feedback on the proposed design, and it’s hard to do so without being clear about what I want to build and why.<br>Start With Reviews<br>The smallest version of what I want to build is a suite of applications for recording reviews. In an ideal world, these applications would supplant Yelp, GoodReads, Letterboxd, and a bunch of similar applications for just about anything you might consider reviewing. (Yes, I know there are already people building versions of these on ATProto; I’d want to collaborate with them.)<br>I want to replace these applications not because of their function, but because of their business models. Neither my wife nor I will use them the way they’re intended, and I think most people are like one or the other of us.<br>Local First Data<br>For me, I don’t want these companies to own my data. We have more than a thousand bookmarks in Yelp, but&mldr; they’re stuck in Yelp. I can’t do anything else useful with them: I can’t publish them, I can’t share them, I can’t write scripts across them, I can’t version control them. They belong to Yelp, not me. And, frankly, the experience they provide for managing lists of bookmarks kinda sucks.<br>This is a classic local first use case. I could adopt one tool that was great for writing reviews, another that used the same data but was better at publishing best-of lists for my friends, and another that made it easy to share “best business books” lists on my web site. No single app is going to do all of these, but a shared, public data model allows everyone to have what they want.<br>I’ve lost the willingness to give big corporations a permanent right to control how I use my own data. (That’s why I’m writing this in plain text and publishing via Hugo.) The apps only get worse over time. And if I’m going to invest that much time in recording my opinions, I want to control its use, not let Yelp do it.<br>Public and Private<br>As to my wife, she will just never publish anything online. Never. If I want her to review books or restaurants or recipes, it has to be in a place where I – and maybe the rest of our family – will see it, but no one else.<br>Personally, I am willing to publish public reviews. And sometimes I specifically want to, like sharing books I found useful as a founder. But doing so is complicated. The information I would record about a restaurant for myself is quite different from what I would want the wider world to know. Yet&mldr; most apps don’t allow you to draw this distinction. Reviews are public. Your opinion affects the subject’s reputation, even if you didn’t want it to. (I’m vegetarian and autistic, so a place working for me is not necessarily relevant for other people.)<br>Fundamentally, most of these applications are built to enable influencers: People who want to build a following online for their reviews. “Oh man, she has the best book recommendations!” “If he likes the restaurant, I know I will too!”<br>But most of us don’t want to become influencers. If anything, we’ve generally learned the lesson that it sucks to be followed by a bunch of people online. I want to keep my stuff private. I don’t want my opinions to matter to anyone else.<br>I mean sure, when someone comes to town I want to be able to give them a list of restaurants they should visit and activities they should do. But I want to send it to them, not the rest of the world.<br>We can split the world into three kinds of people:<br>Those who would only record a review if other people will read it. These are the influencer-wannabes<br>People like me, who would provide a mix of public and private...