I am interested in use cases for education and research leveraging the existing open social graph on ATproto by enabling trusted and private spaces.
We are currently building a project consortium to advance scientific publishing on ATproto. We focus on open educational resources (OER) with the goal to onboard new communities who are already aligned to open practices but currently locked-in either to platforms (most of them) or siloed academic repositories.
Currently, the process of creating and publishing Open Educational Resources (OER) is heavily tied to platforms. Authors create OER materials, upload them to a repository of their choice, and hope that others will find and reuse their materials. In order to increase the acceptance of alternative solutions, use cases are needed that are capable of inspiring teachers and researchers so that they can act as multipliers for decentralised communication infrastructures. Our project aims to develop, test and support such use cases for ATproto.
We do not know yet in what ways private data will be a concern for those communities. Private data for DMs is mostly discussed and a useful application but most importantly for processes to emerge we need to support privacy while the resource (paper, OER, …) is in preparation. Even though the final publication is open it does not mean that all intermediate steps do not need private communication. Openness requires mutual trust.
Hi folks! My name is Tom and I’m one of the 3 founders of Tracklist, a music streaming application built on AT. We need private data to bring some of our future tech into the protocol, and thus we’re joining this endeavor to make that a reality!
On top of our own needs, we believe the concept of private data in a PDS will open the door for an entirely new genre of applications that can be built on the AT Protocol, and thus we feel it is imperative to make this happen within the next year or sooner. We’re willing to invest our own development and logistical resources into this project in order to be the change we wish to see in the world.
I’m Simon Horrobin. I’m working on a couple of projects which are ATproto relevant… one to handle sport and health data, the other for managing publishing workflow. Both of these need privacy to varying degrees. I think about this in a few axes… who can create, view, edit, delete, grant, revoke, all over time and state.
Hiiiii!!! I’m Jon Pincus, I blog at The Nexus of Privacy, and recently have been focusing on organizing, activism, and mutual aid on decentralized social networks. Private data is key for all of these! Most obviously, there still isn’t a viable decentralized alternative for private Facebook groups. Looking forward to the conversations here and helping things move forward!
HI everyone. My name is Carlos and I’m a sysadmin with a heavy focus on messaging oriented middleware.
I’m not a developer nor am I working on any ATProto project, but for years I’ve hoped for a way for people to have complete ownership of their data on the internet in a way that is user-friendly and were migrations are completely transparent so moving from a service provider/host to another can be done without any impact.
PDS and ATProto undoubtfully look like the path to that future, but private data is key for that, for the many wonderful projects people have mentioned in this thread but many other possibilities that can come in the future, like (crazy brainstorming following) a replacement for email that doesn’t link you to an email provider, Notion like applications, and many others.
I don’t know if I will be of any use to this purpose, with I will lurk in case a chance to be of help appears.
Thanks everyone for the job you are doing for regaining the internet for the users.
Hey Folks, I’m Mark Xue, CTO of Germ Network. We’re building interoperable E2EE messaging anchored on ATProto DID’s. We are also private-data curious for E2EE infrastructure or complementary product integration.
Hey all, I’m Blaine Cook, joining this group in my present capacity working with New_ Public’s Local Lab, building a healthy social product for local communities (on top of atproto primitives, but not federated to start!). Our product is predominantly “private” – as in “not generally available” but not “securely private.”
Based on past experience with standards work, I’m hopeful that despite the critical need for “private data” that atproto has, this group can be patient and work to first identify and prioritize product-level concerns ahead of jumping to technical solutions, so I’m grateful for Boris’ emphasis on establishing use-cases, first.
I’m Arushi and I’m working on a personal lifestyle/productivity server based on atproto’s open standards with a couple of people! We’re solidly in the prototype stage but built a simple ACL layer on top of atproto MST repos mainly to mess around with and enable some of the early use cases we are working on.
I met some of you at atprotoconf in Seattle, but this is my first time in a working group like this (still figuring out the UI as well ), excited to see where it goes!
Heyo, my name is Erik Benoist. I am the principal engineer for https://join1440.com and we’re looking at a variety of ways we can empower private and public link sharing and private commenting among smaller professional communities. We’re currently launching this link sharing with an internal feature (not atop ATproto).
Hi all, I’m Chris and working on building on atproto. Right now I manage a few small custom feeds but also interested in an appview and exploring approaches to private data on atproto
Hello! I’m Entropy, and I’m working on Flocks, a chat service where chatrooms are identified by and exist by default for external web resources (page URLs, etc). Private data has been a high priority for me as, although Flocks chats today are all public, one of the long-term goals is for it to be able to serve the same type of closed-public and private chat use cases as Discord by way of letting web resource owners claim ownership of their associated chats and assign read/write permissions.
To me, an ideal solution for Flocks is one that needs to be able to not advertise the existence of private records to users besides those that are trusted to read them, retains the ability to validate the legitimacy of those records, and gives users a similar amount of control over their ability to edit or delete a record that they have in public AT Proto today. I have a lot more thoughts on specifics, but I’ll save those for specific discussions. These are very hard design problems, and in exploring the work being done on it I’ve seen that there are a lot of different ideas on what the requirements would need to be! So I’m hoping I can be involved with the community in defining what we need to build, and how we can get it there.
Hi everyone! I’m Stephan. I’m a frontend/kinda-fullstack dev. I go between Costa Rica and South Florida. I’m kinda new to ATProto and the whole decentralization space.
Data ownership and interop is what really got me interested in ATProto. I’m really interested in the problem of trust/epistemology and navigating the privacy and (mis)/information maze otherwise known as “the internet”.
I’m also interested in exploring how the local-first approach can be combined with ATProto. I’m secretly hoping we can get Signal-level security/privacy on ATProto.
Looking forward to meeting, learning from, and collaborating with you all.
@ronentk.me and @wesleyfinck.org are the founders of Cosmik Network https://cosmik.network who are also interested in trust/epistemology, starting with a focus on academics and science communication.
See Groundmist https://groundmist.xyz as an example combining local first with public publishing to ATProto. Lots of interest in this.
E2EE Messaging (aka Signal level security) is not the core work here, that’s the WG E2EE category – but lots of overlap and work on understanding what the uses cases are that make sense for which avenue.
Hello world. I am nichoth, or Nick. I am a long-time appreciator of decentralized / new technology. Currently working on a variety of browser-based modules.
I’ve been interested in PDSes and private data for over half a decade now - I spent a couple years trying to build private-data-dependent apps on Solid solidproject.org - a frustrating experience that put me on a path through IPLD and UCANs to my current gig as an employee of Storacha (storacha.network) where I help build our IPLD/UCAN-based storage system and was lucky to be able to work on bsky.storage earlier this year. We’ve started nibbling around the edges of how to implement private data in our own system and given the overlap in data models I’m excited to take inspiration from the work of this group and hopefully contribute to implementing and testing early versions of ATProto’s private/permissioned data solutions, whatever they end up looking like.
I’m deeply convinced that private data unlocks an enormous number of important use cases for ATProto and very excited to help bring it to life, huge huge thanks to Boris for his tireless organizing!
), excited to see where it goes!