Integrating Better with Other ATProto Services

preview deployments with tangled, and automatic DNS with marque.at

to me, atproto is that i shouldn't have to pay Elon $10/mo just to do data analysis on my twitter posts, or pay GitHub to do CI on my code. its that i can also easily use my one account to do things across many services. the two stuff im about to talk about here shows what i like about atproto.

if you keep your repos on tangled, you can have wisp build and deploy a preview site whenever a pull request opens or updates, and then you get a comment on that pull request with the preview domain.

this works on every commit, and to clean old ones up, you can just have spindle sweep them on a cron using wispctl site prune.

setting up a custom domain on hosts sucks as you have to copy CNAME and TXT records into whatever registrar you use. then you have to wait around for DNS propagation, while clicking verify repeatedly (well with wisp hopefully not as i check your root nameserver directly but i digress).

if marque.at runs the domain, wisp can just configure it for you by writing the CNAME and ownership TXT records with just one click. they can do the same too. with one click, you can set a wisp site on marque.at's website.

i like this for atproto and you can just do things (do we still say that?) this way.

they are the company behind atproto though imo their contribution to the rest of us mostly just begins and ends at running the relay for free. beyond that how is a .bsky.social supposed to know whats outside the twitter clone?

bluesky never features or mentions other atproto apps in its client or marketing. they don't use atproto OAuth themselves which means 99% of people on the network have never even seen what the OAuth looks like or realized their account can log into anything else. dame.is's bsky38 showed this brillantly with the amount of people who thought it was as scam solely because of the OAuth screen.

instead of funding (often unemployed) people who are building libraries and apps,they host an annual conference talk (ive since learned its independently run but bsky is a major sponsor and helps orchestrate things, still misinformation on my part sorry) which barely leads to us getting jobs, and it doesn't pay server bills or help sustain people. sometimes theyre more likely to just shittalk the devs too whether they choose to not use AI, or have disagreeable opinions on their poster children

and then on top of that, they launch competing products that have an intention of turning a profit while ignoring community projects they could easily integrate with. this week they launched "Sites" in Attie, their chatbot. (anyone whos proai in this space already has a favorite chatbot they'd rather use) seemingly to compete with openai on chatgpt sites, but they just forgot to build it on AT. the sites are not on your account. they don't talk to existing static site projects (tangled and mine, lichen, theres more), nate wrote a really good post about this pattern in thoughts on attie, and a lot of devs building on atproto feel the same.

wisp talks to tangled and marque because we actually care about composing things. bsky doesn't do that, so that leaves us to just do it ourselves and not expect much from the big company.