I don’t post to or visit the social network formerly known as Twitter, but as a very early Twitter user, I can’t quite bring myself to delete all my old posts. There’s so much history there, not just personal history but the stories of a lot of the work I’ve done. This is the problem with social networks, we use them to document our lives but we don’t own that data. The platform can become a place we aren’t welcome or don’t want to be, or simply vanish, taking all our data with it.

This doesn’t happen if you post to your own website, with a domain that you own and control. If your host goes bad, you move your content elsewhere, point your domain to it, and your visitors won’t even know that you’ve moved. However, on your own website you don’t have the social aspect of posting to the place where everyone else is. At best you can publish on your own site and syndicate elsewhere.

AT Protocol (often referred to as atproto) solves this problem by allowing you to own your social media posts, linked to a domain that you own. For an explanation of how this works read Open Social. AT Protocol was created by Bluesky, and seems to have generated a lot of momentum in a relatively short time. This week, Bluesky announced that links to posts using the standard.site lexicons would display an enhanced link card. I’d been intending to explore atproto for a while, this helped push me over the edge.

Adding the standard.site lexicons to this site was straightforward, thanks to the ATmosphere plugin for WordPress, which installed as described. I updated my Bluesky handle to my own domain rachelandrew.co.uk.

I also set up a profile on Sifa ID, which is a place to store a professional profile. As with all atproto sites, you register using OAuth with your atproto identity, and my profile immediately populated with my Bluesky posts. The site lets you import a LinkedIn profile export to start your Sifa profile, which makes getting set up really quick. I found a few contacts from Bluesky—if you are on Sifa, connect with me.

I can now be found in a few places in the atmosphere. I was curious what this looked like in the records, and discovered that I can put my domain into the search at https://pdsls.dev/ and explore my data.

None of this took me very long at all, any complexity was due to the off-the-shelf theme I’m using with WordPress rather than anything to do with atproto. I’m now itching to properly redesign this site, but also to explore more of the atmosphere ecosystem.