Some community branding and access thoughts

Discussion
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I had a couple quick thoughts on how to make it easier for interested folk to find and engage with our community. Wrote them up in a Looseleaf here.

A few improvements I would suggest

Handle

There are two accounts that pop up when you start typing “atproto” in a username field: @atproto.com and @atprotocol.dev, conspicuously titled AT Protocol Developers and AT Protocol Community respectively.

Change handle of @atprotocol.dev to @atprotocol.community

This will clear up the confusion caused by the handle saying .dev but the screen name of the @atproto.com account being the one that says AT Proto Developers.

Links

The two main community spaces are the forum and discord. Both have nice shortlinks but they are confusingly different, especially given the overlap mentioned above.

discourse.atprotocol.community

discord.atprotocol.dev

It would help if these TLDs were the same as each other and the account handle for consistency (and verification!).

change the discord shortlink to discord.atprotocol.community

Link discoverability

Make sure links to community spaces are easily discoverable by prospective community members and builders. Namely the forum and the discord server. We can even do this on protocol! @woosh.link is a linktree-like app made by @aka.dad. I’ve put a redirect on my domain for links.tynanpurdy.com that goes to my Woosh page.

I would suggest either

Put the forum and discord link in the @atprotocol.dev Bluesky bio

or

Put a links link (woosh) in the @atprotocol.dev Bluesky bio, which in turn links out to the discord and forum.

The advantage of a links link would be we could feature more links without cluttering the bio. Upcoming event pages, spotlight blog posts and community efforts, fundraising links, all sorts of stuff!

Website

I realize as I go through all of this that the web blog is at atprotocol.dev and there is nothing at atprotocol.community. I think as this community grows we will need to quickly shed any focus exclusively on devs.

change the website domain to atprotocol.community and redirect any old .dev links to .community

If it becomes useful later to use the .dev domain for dev specific resources and spaces, sure use it. If we are going to have one main space for our community (across different platforms like discord and forums and whatever comes next), I’d rather the namespace focus on community than developers for the sake of inclusivity and alignment with the mission.

That’s all I’ve got for ya for now. Lmk what you think.

@tynanpurdy.com

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For context, here is the exchange which motivated the suggestions

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Thanks @tynanpurdy.com, appreciate the write up.

Rather than a link tree or whatever - I’d prefer to just make a page on the atprotocol.dev Ghost site with any links we need. Can I give you an account so you can manage that page?

I think you meant .community for this one because .dev is what it is currently. The ATProto Touchers really IS dev only so I think it’s useful as is?

More broadly - what should go on the web at atprotocol .dev vs .community? Do we need both?

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Yep I did mean discord.atprotocol.community. Perhaps we could map the social events server to that one?

And yes, happy to write a page on the ghost site. atprotocol.community/links?

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Invited you to the Ghost site at https://atprotocol.dev by email

I think it’s probably a Resources page and we can add lots of things there. Get yourself set up and give it a go – thanks for taking this on.

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I see a need for organizing around the community broader than developers. I would go so far as to say that community is more important than devs as it is a larger pie. We need to include designers, creators, community leaders, unions, politicians, sponsors, NGOs, journalists, businesses, etc. Yes devs are a critical component but putting their domain on the top level namespace of our community is a limiting factor.

The website and account should be atprotocol.community imo.

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I agree with you - I just don’t know if that is what I want to / can take on and if that Ghost website is the right thing for it.

That’s what I’m saying - there aren’t many collected dev resources AND there isn’t a whole community landing page.

So: what should go at .community? What software should it run? Who is going to maintain it? And a thesis of what goes there and how new stuff gets released.

I’m also super reluctant to do “one true website” for anything. So: @tynanpurdy.com - got ideas on what you’d like to personally work on and maintain, what you need help with, etc?

One thing I’d like to get back to personally is regular video calls (maybe interleave working group themes with everything else?) - but most of my time is post conference.

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