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Building on the AT Protocol

· 2 min read

We believe that the future of social networking is open, and we want the AT Protocol, the open protocol that serves as the backbone to Bluesky’s open-source social network, to be your playground.

The AT Protocol is still in active development, but developers can already start building projects ranging from bots and clients to custom feeds, and eventually, entirely separate applications and experiences.

In this blog post, we’ll share what you can already build on atproto, and what you can expect soon.

Getting Started with the AT Protocol​

In June of this year, we launched the federation sandbox environment for developers to begin exploring, as we prepare to launch federation in the production environment as well.

Currently, the AT Protocol is under active development, and the Bluesky beta app is a microblogging client built on top of it. We’re using the Bluesky beta to drive and inform protocol development.

While the production network isn’t federated quite yet, developers can already currently build:

  • Feed generators
    • Third-party developers have built algorithmic feeds, community-based feeds, topic-based feeds, and more that hundreds of thousands of users view every day.
    • Get started with our feed generator starter kit.
  • Bots
    • Over the last few months, developers have created MTA Alert bots, earthquake bots, chat bots, and other interactive experiences on the network.
    • Get started with a template for a Bluesky bot here.
  • Bluesky clients
    • Because the AT Protocol is open, third-party developers can create entirely separate frontends for the network too.
    • Here's a starter template for building a Bluesky client.

You can read about more third-party projects and check them out here. Let us know what you build!

What to Expect​

We’ve still only scratched the surface of what’s possible on atproto. Currently, microblogging is the only content type that’s integrated, but we’re excited to for apps for forums, photo-centric platforms, long-form writing, and more to exist on atproto.

In the meantime, we’ve published a protocol roadmap here to give you a sense of our priorities and what’s coming in the future.