Nick's Blog

Signaling AI Preferences on ATProto

Atproto users need a way to express granular AI preferences and carve out exceptions for specific entities or content types. This post introduces community.lexicon.preference.ai, a lexicon schema that decomposes AI usage into distinct categories and adds a scoped override mechanism built on top of Bluesky's User Intents proposal.

April 04, 2026

Payments on Protocol

atprotofans.com was a proof of concept for payments on ATProtocol built at Graze Social. This post is about what we built, why proof of payment on protocol matters, and what it makes possible.

April 02, 2026

Graze Social and the IETF

Graze Social sponsored my first in-person IETF meeting in Montreal last November. This post is about what it was like to be there and why standards participation matters for small companies.

April 01, 2026

If This Then AT: Automation on Protocol

IFTTA is an automation platform built on ATProtocol at Graze Social. It started as a hack-day idea and became a working system for event processing on protocol.

April 01, 2026

Building AIP: An ATProtocol Authorization Gateway

OAuth is the first challenge developers face in the atmosphere. This post is about AIP, the authorization gateway we built at Graze Social to alleviate some of the pain.

April 01, 2026

Spaces as Layers

Public anchor records paired with sidecar records in permissioned spaces give ATProtocol apps a composable pattern for blending open discoverability with controlled access.

March 26, 2026

ATProtocol Patterns: Record Elicitation

Record elicitation is a pattern where a client asks an AppView to construct a record from the user's intent, rather than building it locally. This lets the AppView handle business logic, validation, and schema complexity while the client retains full authority over what gets written to the user's repository.

March 04, 2026

CIDs: What You Need to Know and Why, Part 2

How ATProtocol uses Content Identifiers to create a versioned, verifiable, and portable data model.

February 20, 2026

CIDs: What You Need to Know and Why, Part 1

A deep dive into Content Identifiers, the self-describing cryptographic fingerprints that form the foundation of ATProtocol’s data model.

February 20, 2026

B-Sides: Permissioned data is a love triangle

This is a B-sides post with unpolished thoughts that didn’t make it into the main article.

February 19, 2026

Permissioned data is a love triangle

Permissioned data is a love triangle between the user, the identities they grant permissions to, and the applications everyone uses to view controlled data. We don't need to change or reinvent the protocol to have it, because ATProtocol already supports it.

February 18, 2026

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Lexicon Garden is growing

Lexicon Garden is growing and moving! With community support, the service is migrating to new infrastructure in Europe, offering better hardware and more space for new features.

February 18, 2026

Making Lexicon Garden AI-Friendly

Lexicon Garden can help you explore and interact with lexicons both in the browser and with the help of your favorite agent.

January 12, 2026

Lexicon Validation

Validate both lexicon schemas and records against those schemas.

January 07, 2026

Lexicon Management

You can use Lexicon Garden to create and manage lexicon schemas right from the browser.

January 07, 2026

Authenticated XRPC Calls in Lexicon Garden

ATProtocol OAuth pairs effortlessly with Lexicon Garden to make it easy for developers to experiment with authenticated XRPC endpoints.

January 06, 2026

Lexicon Garden

Lexicon Garden helps you browse, view, and understand ATProtocol Lexicons.

January 05, 2026

2025 in Concerts

Ben Folds (Oct 5)

December 22, 2025

Community Manager Pattern: Forums

In my last post, I talked about the community manager pattern. I focused on the basics including how membership attestations work, how the wrapper pattern handles content, and what the lifecycle of a book club community looks like.

December 22, 2025

The Community Manager Pattern

This post looks more closely at Brittany Ellich's work on representing groups in ATProtocol. It builds on earlier conversations and explores how these ideas might work in practice.

December 21, 2025

Sign In With Your Internet Handle

Authentication is an area that generally has really difficult UX constraints and the language really matters.

December 17, 2025

Why Inter-Service Auth Needs Client Identity

ATProtocol's inter-service authentication currently has no way to identify which client is making a request on behalf of a user, forcing services to rely on forgeable headers or clunky workarounds to establish trust relationships. Adding an optional client_id claim to inter-service JWTs would solve this cleanly, enabling service-to-service trust, rate limiting, and feature flags using the cryptographic infrastructure we already have.

December 01, 2025

Don't Feed the Trolls: Why This Old Internet Wisdom Still Matters

"Don't feed the trolls" emerged as folk wisdom in 1990s Usenet culture and became internet gospel, grounded in solid psychological research showing that trolls seek negative attention and ignoring them removes their reward.

November 15, 2025

ATProtocol Attestations: Cryptographic Signatures for the Decentralized Web

This post introduces the formal ATProtocol attestation specification, a framework for adding cryptographic signatures to ATProto records through two complementary patterns: inline attestations that embed signatures directly in records, and remote attestations that store proof in separate repository records. The specification prevents replay attacks through repository binding, uses CID-based content addressing for integrity, and provides the cryptographic foundation for verified credentials, trusted content, and authenticated interactions in the decentralized ATProtocol ecosystem.

October 18, 2025

Unforgeable Endorsements Technical Deep-Dive

Deep technical implementation of the unforgeable endorsement system. Covers step-by-step CID computation, complete code for the endorsement workflow, validation algorithms, firehose event processing, and detailed security analysis of attack vectors. Includes working code examples, lexicon definitions, and the cryptographic mechanisms that make forgery mathematically impossible.

October 13, 2025

Building Unforgeable Professional Endorsements with ATProtocol

Traditional professional endorsements on platforms like LinkedIn lack cryptographic proof—anyone could forge them, and the platform controls the truth. This article introduces a two-record architecture using ATProtocol's Content Identifiers (CIDs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to create mathematically unforgeable mutual attestations. By separating proof creation from endorsement acceptance and leveraging the firehose for distributed validation, we build a system where both parties cryptographically consent and no central authority can manipulate the record.

October 13, 2025

Introducing at://work: A Job Board That Puts You in Control

at://work is a modern job board built on ATProtocol where your profile and job listings are stored on your own Personal Data Server, giving you true ownership of your professional data. As a full AppView with XRPC APIs and remote MCP server capabilities, it makes job market data accessible to both users and developers while proving that professional networking can be decentralized and user-controlled.

October 06, 2025

Ohio's New Porn Age Verification Law: Big Brother Dressed Up as Child Protection

Ohio's new age verification law requiring ID to access adult websites (starting September 29, 2025) fails to protect children while forcing adults to surrender personal data to access legal content. This "small government" Republican law creates a surveillance system that invades privacy without addressing the real online dangers kids face.

September 24, 2025

Launching QuickDID - Fast, Open Handle Resolution for the AT Protocol

QuickDID is a high-performance, open source handle resolution service for the ATmosphere that serves as both public infrastructure at https://quickdid.smokesignal.tools and deployable software under MIT license. It offers flexible caching strategies (memory/Redis/SQLite), scales from single-instance to distributed deployments, and includes production features like rate limiting and proactive cache refresh. Currently a release candidate, it provides a drop-in alternative to Bluesky's resolver while giving developers full control over their handle resolution infrastructure.

September 09, 2025

AT Protocol and SMTP: When Old Tech Powers New Identity

Exploring how AT Protocol and SMTP can work together to make secure messaging possible by combining 50-year-old email infrastructure with modern cryptographic identity. Building on Chris Boscolo's AT-SMS proposal, this post introduces ideas for adding SMTP services directly to DID documents and leveraging PDS-level cryptographic operations through XRPC methods. The result: verifiable, encrypted communication where messages work like signed JWTs over email, handles prove identity without centralized authorities, and users maintain complete control over their messaging infrastructure. A technical deep-dive into how "boring" technology like SMTP and DNS, combined with AT Protocol's identity primitives, could finally deliver truly portable, private, and permanent messaging.

September 03, 2025

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If-This-Then-AT Blueprint: Payment-Proof Access Gates

Another if-this-then-at blueprint I've been exploring:

September 01, 2025