The ATProto Sharing Problem

This is an unroll of a thread I posted on Bluesky on 2024/11/02. I believe it's still valid, although I think badge.blue is no longer what it was back then. If I'm wrong and this problem has been solved, feel free to reply! I'd love to be corrected.

🧵 Blaze: Been diving into #ATProto stuff today because I'm bored and curious. Very dangerous things for an AuDHD system to be. There's the start of interesting stuff like badge.blue, smokesignal.events, and frontpage.fyi. And it's neat that everything goes into PDS Collections under my handle

But compared to even the barely put together 'do what Mastodon does because the standards mean nothing' interoperability of #ActivityPub, ATProto is losing. If I get a Blue Badge, or post a comment on Frontpage, or RSVP to an event on Smoke Signal, nothing happens on my BlueSky.

There's not a way to share any of that directly, outside of just posting a link to the actual app site. I can throw an ATProto link to something in my PDS in this skeet, and it doesn't embed anything! at://did:plc:6nrykjezbxfxeubizsoipwbo/events.smokesignal.calendar.rsvp/3l7ymyelukn22

(That's an RSVP on smokesignal indicating I intend to vote this year, for anyone who doesn't want to paste that into atproto-browser.vercel.app)

Like, outside of the handle verification that it's me and my content going into my Decentralized IDentifier, there's nothing linking these places together as an ATProto thing. Maybe I should write that as a project? Bot that monitors your PDS and can autoshare off-bsky stuff on your behalf.

Because like, even going back to the hell site that is Facebook, if something used your Facebook account, it was beyond easy to share stuff you were doing in Farmville or whatever to your feed. It was so easy people did it by accident.

And I'm not saying that the current way ATProto stuff works isn't cool, it is. Having all your stuff in one central location instead of spread out is great, you just have to backup your PDS and you're done.* It's a crypto wallet without everything that makes people cringe at that comparison.

*Some stuff is off-protocol so mileage may vary

I'd definitely rather have all the data for the absurd list of sites on my Linktree in PDS Collections under my DID, but it feels like we're missing the next step. Everything's still in little silos that nothing else touches, like hidden app-specific Google Play Games folders in my Google Drive.

(Also, that's an idea. Games that save to your PDS and leverage your existing bsky social graph!)

Summarizing a reply by Nick Gerakines I replied to: None of the unfurling stuff has been figured out yet, either on a high or low level.

My reply: There's definitely something interesting here for sure. Posting the appview link that created the URI with is one way. But assuming that trying to keep things comprehensible in a world where the ATProto landscape has been entirely rebuilt from PDS backups is a goal, we can only rely on AT-URIs.