Post

Hey #GameDev and #ATProto! I'm working on tools to decentralize the ownership and management of video games by putting them (or at least their data... for now) on ATProto! I'm looking for feedback, so if you have any interest I'd love to hear your thoughts. ♥️ 🎮 ♥️

wasn't there a whole thing about how bluesky's ATProtocol can't be decentralized currently because there's something missing from the open source stuff? Or was that fixed at some point?

Bluesky itself was centralized when they launched, but they've successfully decentralized the protocol. At this point it's in a very good place: self-hosted PDS, alt AppViews (like deer.social and blacksky.community), and even distributed relays. It's a really great architecture, honestly.

Deer.social doesn't have an AppView, I'm not sure if Blacksky's has launched publicly

Aren't their public-facing websites considered AppViews? Or am I mixing up terms?

Nah, AppView is what I've seen them also call "app server" lately - mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/i.... Things like deer.social (and bsky.app) are just JS frontend webapps that connect to your PDS and/or some kind of AppView (right now all to api.bsky.app).

Yeah, based on the definition from atproto.com I've always understood it as the system rendering rendering the PDS data is the AppView. It's such a strange term for essentially an aggregate API. 😅

Yeah it's definitely confusing… the "view" is kind of from "database view", but that's not what it means to most people

I was talking to someone about this recently and got wondering - is there a list of independent AppViews somewhere? I managed to find a list of Relays on debug.hose.cam (iiuc there are 4 independent ones atm) but I wasn't able to find something similar for AppViews

@bmann.ca a slightly belated reply - thanks for this! I was actually wondering more generally, but I suppose for bsky decentralisation chat the microblog AppViews are the ones we care about ("AppViews indexing the bsky lexicon"? - to try use terms I'm not super familiar with 😅) 1/3

From what you're saying, the rule for the wider atproto context is: 1. If an app is working with a different lexicon, it _will_ have an independant AppView 2. If it's working with the bsky lexicon it _may_ have an indie AppView or it may just be using the Bsky one 2/3

For the latter, afaict there's currently only one indie, full-network AppView and that's Blacksky's - is this correct? Caveats: - zepplin.social did it too a few months ago - Red Dwarf exists too but it's a bit weird and different (doesn't use an AppView?) 3/3