Hello, I am Edouard, I am managing the atproto.fr ( @atproto.fr on Bluesky ) on the Atmosphere. I apologize for the lack of activity here and in other atproto community spaces, I will try to be more present.
My day-to-day job is software engineering, I am slowly learning community management. It is one reason for the low activity on Bluesky, I do not want to make mistakes and the editorial line is mostly technical because that is easier for me.
I created the meetup, only because I wanted to discuss of atproto IRL and there was no regional initiative where I live. I received the atproto.fr domain from Matthieu of the Bluesky team, it is not an endorsement from him, He just had no project for the domain.
I met him and some members of the community at FOSDEM 2026, but that’s it. My engagement with the global community will certainly grow once I meet more of you in real life.
Metrics
- 2 meetups done.
- Lille, 2026-01-28, 3 attendees (counting me)
- Lille, 2026-25-04, 4 attendees (counting me)
- Next meetup: Paris, 2026-08-29
- 135 followers on Bluesky
- 12 people in the matrix rooms
- 150 visitors per month on the website.
Infra
- atproto.fr: The website, using Astro engine, fetches the standard.site and community.lexicon.calendar.event records to build the HTML pages. The goal is to keep most of the content hosted on the PDS.
- https://matrix.atproto.fr: a Matrix server using the apenwarr/atlogin OIDC provider to authenticate with PDS oauth.
- http://pds.atproto.fr: a tranquil.farm PDS, that we will use for delegation of accounts.
- http://knot.atproto.fr: a tangled.org knot, for self-hosting code repositories.
They are all hosted on the same ovh vps.
Core values
Core values that I presented at each meetup.
Honesty
Atproto has some trade-off, People need to be aware of them before being bitten by them (especially the entirely public nature of the protocole). We also owe it to ourself to progress.
French tech community (the main audience right now) is highly suspicious and overall by nature pessimistic. It is generally welcomed to not overpromise and underdeliver.
No moral judgment on users digital usage
Our attendees are technical users for now, they know how to self-host and migrate their data. They generally have good knowledge of the trade-offs, but even them do not have a digital life free of evil corporations. Practicality is the real usage driver, more than ideology. We want to help people, and for that we have to welcome them without judgment.
Atproto FR does not have a social platform to build or a product to sell, it will grow with the French tech community interest for the protocole.
No code of conduct Yet
It is a priority.
What are our objectives? What’s next?
- grow the meetup and maybe reach a size where we can do talks. The community is still very small.
- Widen the discussions to include people who aren’t developers.
- Building trust, so I can delegate more to create more publications and events.
How do we see ourself in the global community?
I would like us to grow much more so to not have an individual answer. We might be able to answer to this question in a year or so.