50 things i won't build on atproto

I have a full-time job working on AI infrastructure, a part-time job property managing two houses, and a lot of other endeavors besides. This leaves me with unfortunately little spare time to actually write code!

But I've followed protocol development for a long time, and that means I've had a lot of ideas that I don't have the resources to pursue. Some of them are terrible, some are weird, and some might actually work? I don't care: steal them all.

EDIT: Sorry, @minormobius.bsky.social actually stole them all via oneshot! Try again next blog post.

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fifty — fifty concepts, mostly built

The list, in no particular order

Gravatar replacement built on atproto: use your ATProto PDS / icon, on non-ATProto (yet) sites.

A longform labeler that flags accounts that have standard.site publications with some info about how frequently / recently they post, so you know to check their profile for a link. (Maybe even dynamic pub labels?)

Dungeon Year implemented on ATP. Let users design one room of their dungeon per day, and have a "viewer" mode to let users jump in anywhere in the dungeon with a minimap plus controls to navigate. Extend this to collaboratively authored dungeons!

Zines on ATProto. Multimedia documents that are written by others but that you can store into your PDS as a media library. Treat duplication of data as valuable because it shows lineage, remixes, independent copies, anti-censorship.

A hybrid between an app store and a "starter kit" for helping onboard new ATProto accounts. It looks at what records are in your PDS: have you tried blogging, click here to start one on Leaflet/etc? What about photo sharing? And tries to point out some things to try, continually updated with popular apps/lexicons.

Bluesky Community vibe check, with intra-community health indicators and cross-community baselining (but not head-to-head comparisons): see whether a community you're a member of is trending towards better discussions, and see anonymized stats on how it rates to other communities

Signed achievements: similar to a verifier (achievements issued by the game's DID), but with features like associated icons, and multiple instances or levels of the same achievement.

Linktree clone that populates from PDS contents and site activity automatically, including Bluesky Communities; but is also configurable (hide certain activity, authenticate related accounts, add non-ATProto sites). Also with features for external site/link ownership verification?

Feed targeter. I want to get this much, I want to see this many: which accounts should you follow, and which ones should you unfollow? Which words should you mute?

A curated, evidence-backed platform for labelers and blocklists focused on matters of public interest. Not just "rude" or "hammer and sickle in bio" but instead criteria like "Works for a police department", "US Senator", "30 under 30 list". Must use public info criteria like actual posts they've made, have a dispute process.

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Nucleate: post ATP app ideas anonymously, and anonymously mark interest in them as a builder, funder, early adopter, or user. When projects hit a critical threshold, kick off a groupchat to build it together!

Partially-delegated "child" (or elder, or employee, or AI agent, etc.) DIDs on ATProto, implemented at the PDS layer. This allows managing account-level scope-downs of what OAuth permissions that account is allowed to give to sites, or types of Lexicons allowed to exist.

Service that follows a PDS for new DID registrations and creates DNS records (within a configurable DNS set), TLS certs, and homepages for new users signed on that PDS. This means anyone on that PDS can get both a custom username, and a working custom website. Do the registration in the background while the user WYSIWYGs their initial website content.

Longthread to Longread: Look at your top long Bsky threads, that don't have a corresponding standard.site post they're embedded in. Suggest ones to turn into full blog posts!

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ATProto distributed wikis using the upcoming private spaces features. Permissioning is used to define the editor community, and the governing DID holds the actual page records, which include DID-linked edit history.

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ATProto community where the member-only data is context (skills files, etc.) for an agent system, so that anyone can concurrently modify it; with the PDS state being the full set of available context.

A "Review" lexicon paired with a general bidirectional service for syncing public profiles from sites like Letterboxd/Goodreads to PDSes

As detailed here!

standard.site lexicon for recipes (think "digital recipe card", embeddable, reusable, collectible)

A URL shortener lexicon that portably ties entries to your DID, including a public history of URL changes, paired with an easy to run server for the redirects

A site that uses RAG + agents to help assemble an ATProto social landscape for what you want to see. This includes surfacing existing blocklists, new labelers, Starter Packs; diffing this against ones you have enabled; but also helping construct new ones out of provided primitives (like a small DSL that can be run on hosted servers for you)

...including a Feed Simulator, that tries to simulate what ratios of various kinds of content you would have seen over the past month + provide some examples. Think high level breakdowns of "News" or "Sports", but also Netflix or Letterboxd style microniche categorizations. Turn down the "Sports" slider -> get recommendations on who to unfollow, words to mute, and other potential experience knobs

A social digital oracle reader (tarot, I Ching, etc.) including letting you do a reading and write your interpretation for yourself or for other users (with a consent handshake!), plus a lexicon for designing and offering shareware-art decks to anyone who wants to use them

An ATProto record for academic research publications, with multiple authors and bidirectional verification (such as canonical location)

An RSS-to-standard.site service so you can publish records without any ATP integration beyond DNS/HTML theming. This makes internecting easier on sites where you don't own the backend infra.

A proto-aware anonymous Q&A app (ideally, stable pseudonyms with reporting capabilities)

A new appview/lexicon that includes historical, searchable Twitter posts from users who want to be able to verifiably embed their old tweets, without sending traffic to X, and without importing them all to their main Bluesky archive

Live dashboard of the longest ever standard.site posts on ATProto (similar to the Wikipedia pages on longest English novels or whatever)

A vibescrobbling Lexicon, with your local coding agents instructed to emit short workstream updates via API periodically. These aren't Bluesky posts so they won't show up on your feed, but a corresponding appview would index and share them so you can see what your Bsky network's agents are cooking, live. (Maybe a tangled.sh or sifa.id integration??)

Roguelike where received damage reduces playtime, and when the player runs out of time, control of the run is handed over to another, random but weighted better player on ATProto - but every cycle adds less time to the clock

Daily Wordle but it's a social "game theory scenario of the day" app. You can talk to each other all you want to coordinate, but the votes lock in at the end of the period! Different scenarios may involve 1v1 vs. small-group vs. global, anonymity or not, or other aspects - but your score always contributes to your global leaderboard score.

An ATProto "clan" feature letting you mark a list of members who should get prioritized social and matchmaking features in game-like experiences, even if they aren't necessarily your "friends/followers"

A stable within-account "persona" feature so that you can have reusable and synced per-app profiles, like a gamertag or a professional version of your account

Mobile app that uses DP-3T (signature-based BLE techniques developed for COVID) to ambiently suggest nearby Atmosphere users with similar interests/followers/simclusters/etc.

Gatekeep: flexible ATP-aware tool for managing private beta signup lists, invite codes, referrals, and other features that help roll out an app to a limited set of users

Something Awful redtext implemented as a labeler. Pay tenbux to buy one for yourself or someone else.

Service that lets you livestream terminal output directly to your stream.place account, including intelligently/dynamically muxing multiple terminals

New Appview using private spaces features, as a standardized stack for managing geographic communities on ATP, including standard features like events + hyperlocal news + labelers. This allows administration to be owned by verified locals, but they don't need to maintain a huge ATP stack to do it - just a managed service

A notification broker service on ATP so that apps can send notifications to the user in a standardized way, respecting user preferences (ex default config: in-app notifs primarily show up in that app, new releases of apps go into a "new releases" feed, moderation actions cause an out-of-app push, etc.)

Tournament bracket management service that assigns Atmosphere users to compete in something: best post, MTG draft pods, an IRL basketball tournament, whatever. Built in support for tournament bracket features like random vs. seeded vs. manual. Outcome method pre-chosen: decided via a judge, via the two users mutually verifying the outcome, or via members of that ATP community space voting. Should integrate with ATP Achievements, of course!

Standard Site saved article synchronizer for X3/X4 Crosspoint (and other e-readers), with some flexible options for how saved pubs show up as on-device folders

PDS designed for rapidly/ephemerally giving ATP DIDs to devices and agents on your network(s) & appropriately flagging/labeling them as bot accounts. Let Every Computer Post.

"ATP for Workspaces" project, combining corporate identity and managed social media accounts. The core would focus on maintaining a private space, exposing ATP as an IdP (or integrating with existing IdP), and corporate-friendly DNS/PDS/etc. Admins could choose to allow/denylist Atmospheric apps from being used with that PDS, or present an "app store" of suggested ones to users. Certain apps may choose to offer paid tiers with features like dedicated tenancy.

An ATP roguelike with social bones files: on low levels you'll just see yours, at deeper levels those of your friends, and eventually those from any ATP user. If your bones file ghost succeeds at killing another player, you get an achievement!

Signed and versioned shareware app libraries on ATP, where records point to both the original code and to runnable WASM built from it. A notebook-style viewer so you can log in and run anything you've stored, browse the collections of your friends, or publish something you've coded up.

ATP virtual tabletop where character sheets and other "props" are created by and belong to individual players, but the overall campaign is run by a DM. Content like the "adventure log" becomes social and shareable, and people can borrow and remix statlines you made up for your own games!

An Atmospheric app for book/movie/album clubs, built on top of a review-focused Lexicon/Appview. Commit to finishing media by a certain date, face shame forever if you flaked out (or just get an achievement if you do). Each session of the club includes a dedicated space for discussion, which could be either public or private but is still part of the Atmosphere.

ATP records of for-sale items, with a dedicated site for managing your "virtual storefront". There's no way for your store to be completely "taken down" because "marketplace" policies are about curation visibility (indexing, labeling, etc.). Marketplaces don't do their own payment processing and a store's listing can show up on multiple marketplace appviews as long as it conforms to their listing requirements.