Moving atprotocol .dev off of Ghost

bmann.ca · April 15, 2026, 12:34am

I was initially going to not use this category for “software stuff”, but ultimately things like the atprotocol.dev that we used for the 2025 conference, kicked off Tech Talks with, and ultimately used to grow a decent subscriber list, is in fact also community infrastructure.

AtmosphereConf Website

This was a great experience in @essentialrandom.bsky.social’s work in getting a great base set, going wild with lots of extra features, and then the community contributing on top.

I had initially been thinking that we could put upcoming events, maybe to support regional events, and basically EVERYTHING here… but realistically, it is a conference website, and we can put ~~wild amounts of~~ effort into it every year and have archives. But the domain is a conference domain, not a broader place to send people to.

atprotocol dev vs community

There is a place and a need for developer content, and the atprotocol.dev domain is perfect for this! TODO: see who wants to run with this, in collecting developer resources and topics, as a landing page for getting started, and so on.

I know dev tools is close to @ngerakines.me heart, @zzstoatzz.io has been hosting dev chats on Sundays, @trezy.codes has a number of tools, @essentialrandom.bsky.social is doing this for her community, and it’s in @brittanyellich.com’s dayjob wheelhouse.

I’m a good “I know a guy who knows stuff”, and can MC / host tech talks to a certain degree, but me leading dev tooling when I’m not ~~agent whispering~~ code typing isn’t maybe the best person here.

Which brings us to…

community landing page

Maybe we swap out atprotocol.dev for atprotocol.community to make it a broad space for community energy and infrastructure.

The blog at atprotocol.dev is on Ghost today and has a decent subscriber count. There are another 1000 people we’re going to email via Tito as a wrap up post – where do we send them to “subscribe by email”? We’ll make a form where people can stick their email and capture some preferences, and then we can start sending email from…

…a cool new blog aggregator community website.

Here’s my pitch of features:

atprotocol community blog: it’s an aggregator, we do some sort of allow list or otherwise figure out which standard.site compatible posts get aggregated there (and maybe it’s actually open, but we only “highlight” certain ones?)
mailing list: we do do email, and “just” email only sign up if people want (conference, events, and atproto community announcements are my rough three categories of lists to optin / out)
upcoming events: we figure out a standard for shared / group calendars and show a calendar building on all the amazing stuff that happened for talks for the conference → manual wiki version is here 2026 Events - ATProto, Open Social, Dev and More + we include all the regional events so there is one stop shop of all atproto related events
community badges: much like the badges that @essentialrandom.bsky.social already started, we make some community badges – our friends at npmx want this, others might too, this becomes a pattern / example

Is this something you want to work on / discuss further? Thoughts on which domains go where? More of a comment than a question?

katproto.girlonthemoon.xyz · April 15, 2026, 12:45am

i really like this idea! as someone kind of in the middle of “dev” and “community,” i think the latter would go a long way in helping people understand the atmosphere, as well as introducing them to more of atproto beyond bluesky.

so yeah i think swapping out the landing page is a great idea. i don’t have any objections to it except maybe posting a warning beforehand for the current following?

also +1 to a standard for event calendars! and i adore the community badges concept!

let me know if there’s any way i can help though i doubt there’s much i can do as a non-dev haha

bmann.ca · April 15, 2026, 1:01am

Look, number one professional sysadmin @katproto.girlonthemoon.xyz can certainly help out with hosting and deployment crimes!

(Thank you for feedback!)

brittanyellich.com · April 15, 2026, 1:08am

Are you trying to nerdsnipe me? Because if so it will probably work. I’d be interested in helping with this!

In the recent “atmosphere account” discourse I was working on a login page and I realized I really wanted something to link for “what is an atmosphere account?”. I wonder if that could be something that lived at the .community domain? And having the .dev domain be a one-stop-shop for accessing and getting started in the dev community would be super neat!

bmann.ca · April 15, 2026, 3:03am

@quillmatiq.com is making moves there with a crew and should have something to share soon. I think with a straightforward single serving domain.

Woot!

Choosing one or more Semble collections and curating them is maybe the easiest start? I have some ATProto Advocacy links too — yes Dan’s posts keep converting people, I saw another new atmosphere entrant just today.

Might need like “language champions” identified too?

Unblocked from doing this, have to get other stuff moved over to community domain before we can flip the domains…

flo-bit.dev · April 15, 2026, 7:23pm

i’m also down, already planning shared calendars for atmo.rsvp so I can work on that (maybe also email notifs for events? we’ll see), i’ll draft something for community calendars one of these days and post that in the events discourse

quillmatiq.com · April 15, 2026, 10:06pm

Hi yes, we have a group of folks starting to think through the legibility of an Atmosphere Account and what it means to be in the Atmosphere. Happy to chat if you’re interested in discussing it

captaincalliope.blue · April 16, 2026, 12:07am

I’m exploring how to migrate a ghost blog over to atproto that’s intended to have multiple authors. The solution I’m playing with is to have a CMS lexicon at the blog’s domain that I can import the ghost archive into and has additional data types to facilitate who’s invited to submit tagged leaflet posts into a draft queue.

Content would be mirrored between their personal accounts and this aggregator, but the aggregator would also push their author metadata forward via standard.site. And then I’d have a single page atproto CMS dashboard app for managing all these workflows.

I’m seeing a bunch of people building on top of Astro in different ways and I’m looking into how much that simplifies vs adds complexity to the architecture I’m hypothesizing. So far I haven’t seen anyone do multi-author blogs or blog migrations yet, so it’s a little uncharted. If I get further on on my migration before anyone else has had a chance to tackle the community blog, I’ll do a shareback/demo.

bmann.ca · April 16, 2026, 4:55am

It’s not a multi author blog it’s a blog aggregator.

With standard site there are already some readers and aggregators, so I think that lowers complexity.

@brittanyellich.com’s groups stuff might be used, one could do a simple allow list, maybe this is the place to make standard site “feeds” a thing.

Don’t have the whole thing figured out, doing something in Astro to prototype and lean into our AtmosphereConf learnings seems good, requirements are pretty loose. Iterate with community feedback, regional groups, other identified stakeholders.

I think directionally it is: “aggregate community long form writing for and by the atmosphere community”

With email to a shared list of 1000s of subscribers and selective highlights, the brief continues as “help community members announce and highlight happenings”

Any other goals we should include? If the pattern seems replicable, someone might want to productize standard site community aggregators.

There are only like 25 posts in Ghost so I could spend a day cut and pasting them. We’re unblocked from doing this, the rest is net new functionality that seems useful. I’ll experiment with the different long form platforms and see which one makes sense. Ghost also has a very good API for larger pubs wanting to do this where cut and paste aren’t feasible.

Drafts and permissions and such are definitely a thing for larger / more formal publications.

brittanyellich.com · April 16, 2026, 10:07am

Awesome! I wonder if Offprint would be a good choice, since I think it has an email newsletter component?

For content I think it would be fun to put together a regular newsletter around what’s happening in the Atmosphere, and have a spot for community members to post about what they are up to!

And yes, agreed on using Astro for it! I think I should have time to tinker with this and put together something this weekend! It sounds like:

Home page
About
Blog
Events
Local communities
Newsletter signup
Contact (probably)

bmann.ca · April 16, 2026, 2:40pm

Yes I was going to try Offprint but was attempting to be sneaky about it

And yes this outline sounds about right.

The home page would be some sort of featured news, pulled from the aggregator? See the current atprotocol.dev, featured + latest.

We’ll want to show little widgets of stuff on home - eg the next 2-3 upcoming events.

When I say “planet planet” I mean the planet software that was popular 20 years ago

Sharing this not for design inspiration but conceptual setup https://planet.mozilla.org/participation/

Leaflet’s Reader https://leaflet.pub/reader/hot effectively has this functionality today, I think the design is a little flat - highlighting the person / organization behind each Standard Site Publication likely appropriate for a community site like ours

I don’t think blog is needed? Or maybe that’s the full feed page of the community aggregator

Content wise for community newsletter, we (mostly me) post very rarely (that energy went into Conf updates). I’m totally up for handing the keys to more people for a weekly cadence.

I think goals I wrote above apply:

@brittanyellich.com I sent you an invite to the community GitHub if you want to start there ATProtocol Community · GitHub (but also feel free to start in your own space)

bmann.ca · April 17, 2026, 2:23am

OK, I think I can just move everything to Offprint → https://blog.atmosphere.community

I set up the DID TXT already, so can just swap out the handle for @atprotocol.dev → atmosphere.community.

@aka.dad can I import the 500 subscribers I have in Ghost?

I can create a new account for atprotocol.dev and share credentials (and/or use it as the DID for a group owner?)

essentialrandom.bsky.social · April 17, 2026, 4:18am

“I heard someone mentioned Astro—”

Jokes aside, I’m specifically planning to spend some time working on Astro plugins for various ATmosphere integrations, building partly on what we learned from the AtmosphereConf website. I’d love to use this as a base to experiment with aggregators tied to an independent blog rather than a specific app. I’d also been thinking about a similar model to showcase coding tutorials from the community alongside our “professional” technical content (published via Astro Starlight), but I’d be even more delighted if I could leave the content curation layer to someone else and focus on prototyping the infrastructure.

@brittanyellich.com, if you have room to tinker, I’d love to see what you come up with here. And if there are particular Astro + ATProto integrations that would be useful, I’d love to hear about it. I’m right now starting to look at surfacing our own company updates via standard.site (so Astro => ATProto, which I’ve seen less of), and I’ve already prototyped admin-only pages on Astro sites using ATProto OAuth.

I’m pretty flexible on the exact shape of the site (definitely not the right person for week-to-week content management), but I’d be very happy to help streamline the experience of building and administering ATProto-enabled Astro sites.

bmann.ca · April 17, 2026, 4:40am

@essentialrandom.bsky.social atmosphere .community is the domain that we’re going to use, and I just pushed a bunch of buttons in prod, and @atmosphere.community is the “old” atprotocol .dev account.

And https://blog.atmosphere.community exists on Offprint.

And… Atmosphere Community exists here https://app.opensocial.community/communities/did%3Aplc%3Alehcqqkwzcwvjvw66uthu5oq (it’s open, anyone that pays attention enough to scroll way down here can join)

brittanyellich.com · April 17, 2026, 5:09am

I’ve got a repo going here in case anyone wanted to check it out it’s really just a starting point, I’m sure there are many other things to add still (like a bunch of apps that aren’t on the list yet, sorry!)