ATProto Community Hack Day 2025

Heads up — this post got truncated and I gotta re write the end lol sorry

I had a really great time at the ATProto community hack day 2025.

I mostly was there to see what people were working on, I largely figured that my hopes for a reddit-like that I had built the plumbing for were largely low because I don't have the bandwidth to do the community building (this was especially illustrated for me by my lack of ability to get my Nathan For You social network off the ground, but that is a topic for another post). And I got to see a lot of really cool/inspiring stuff that gives me some hope for the future of the web. And that is not something I get to experience often!

I will leave other follow up posts to cover the topics, and talks. But I left with some especially fun impressions and wanted to highlight some posts here and leave a little bit of color and commentary alongside them. A nice little recollection of the day as it went along told by attendee's.

As I headed over, I stopped for cinnamon rolls to bring everyone. There is a bit of an East Village cinnamon roll war going on right now, between two establishments called Swirls and Sunday Morning. They don't quite reach Hatfield and McCoy status, but there is certainly some fight here. Anyways, Sunday Morning's are better, so I picked up a dozen.

@henryzoo.com brought in some wonderful stuff. Including a receipt printer that would print posts that @'d him for the duration of the event. This got me really thinking, more on that below.

Just about everyone had stickers

@piss.beauty just whole ass decided to ship payments (soon)

The folks at Leaflet brought wonderful notebooks

More stickers

@knotbin.com really inspired me, coming out to really deliver and work on things like this as a dev that young is crazy impressive!

The ATProto map is WILD

Takeaways

Overall this was just a great event. It hit that perfect mixture of great people, fun stuff to work on, plenty to do, and just a beautiful day in a cool space with everyone living in the moment and appreciating it.

I am going to make a receipt printer like Henry's

More on that process in a follow up post

I also need to get some higher order thoughts on what the protocol means for the internet as a whole together.

But what a nice day, really felt like we were hanging out with some people about to actually change the internet.

Thanks to everyone who came and helped make it happen. And sorry again to @devingaffney.com for having my phone announc