Earlier this year, I started diving into ATProto and thought I was largely excited about finding a way to contribute to the development of the apps and tools in this community, my enthusiasm floundered as I became overwhelmed by everything. But I’ve started slowly coming back to it.

I recently came across @danabra.mov’s overreacted blog and have been perusing his AT Protocol posts. If Dan Abramov excels at one thing, it’s mapping mental models in such a way that the thing he’s explaining feels natural. Reading his work on anything from JavaScript fundamentals to AT Protocol records is like having someone carefully unwind the knots in my thinking around these topics.

I’ve been working my way through his post, Open Social, and though I haven’t finished reading the entire thing at the time of this writing, I already feel much more empowered about stepping into contributing to and collaborating over ATProto apps and services. And discovering innumerable services now exist to support the open social protocol’s continued development and expansion means I’m no longer mired in the scaffolding process.

For example, a service like Quickslice (site | tangled) lays the foundation for indexing posts. It’s like serverless for ATProto apps: spend less time on the backend and more time launching features. This wasn’t available a year ago (I think?); its availability, along with others like it, suggests how far the community has come in building on ATProto, and lowers the barrier for others interested in building their own apps.

Powerful.

I’m also still very much diving into what else is available out there in the ATProto world since I last took a peek. I’m excited to see where these explorations take me.

Are you building an app or service over ATProto? I would love to see what you’re creating.

Background for the cover image from Unsplash.