PDS GrandPerspective: Visualize your Atproto account

Background

If you’re on the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of apps, users and content built around the AT Protocol) you have your own personal space where your content lives. That means you own your data, your posts, and your connections.

Everything you create or interact with lands there: every Bluesky post, every Offprint article, every like, and every Popfeed review you post or like. Your personal space is called a PDS (Personal Data Server). It is hosted where you first signed up – probably Bluesky – or wherever you've "pdsmooved" since. (If you're a tech-curious weirdo like me, you might have moved to Eurosky, the biggest European Atmosphere infrastructure so far which also owns mu.social an excellent bluesky-alternative client.)

What does it look like ?

Your PDS is like a website without a face: it has no visual interface. It is essentially a collection of content files stored online in JSON, a format designed for machines to exchange data rather than for people to read.

When you view one of those records in Bluesky, the app renders it in a human-friendly way. But that is only one record. Your PDS may contain hundreds – or even millions – of records. (use the sliders):

BeforeAfter

Until now, there was no app that showed the entire contents of your PDS in one global view.

So I built one.

I have been on the ATmosphere since October 4, 2024, and I use it almost every day. I wanted to give my own space a face.

After some fooling around I remembered this oldie but goodie freeware GrandPerspective that scans a computer’s hard drive and displays its contents as a treemap: one square per file, with its size proportional to its share of the total disk space.

This type of visualization is called a Tree Map - the most awesome of all might be David McCandless' Billion-dollar-o-gram and Trillion-dollar-o-gram.

Because data on the ATmosphere is public, the tool can work for anyone—not just me. You can try it here:

A few highlights & notes

• If you sign in, you can use the app to edit and delete any record on your PDS.
• PDS-GrandPerspective downloads your data, so if you have a lot of it, make sure you are on Wi-Fi.
• It works on a phone, but it is best experienced in a desktop browser.
• You can download your visualization as an image in three formats: avatar, banner, or “as-is.”
• You can show or hide each lexicon. The script automatically hides the largest lexicon when it is disproportionately bigger than the second-largest, to keep the visualization useful; one click in the left bar reveals it again.

Example results

You can view individual records directly within the visualization, giving you a way to explore both the overall shape of your account and its individual pieces of data.

Last thoughts

I think this is just the first of many apps made possible by the AT Protocol. Because it lets anyone create visualizations from account data, the possibilities go well beyond a treemap.

You could imagine a 3D navigable information space, an artistic interpretation inspired by Mondrian’s Boogie Woogie, or a gamified version where your data becomes a city of buildings you can explore. I may try one of those ideas one day – because imagining it is already fun, and building it may be even better.

That’s all for now. I hope you like it – and if you do, spread the word!