Atproto Is the Context Window You Own

I don't think it's a coincidence that atproto is taking off at the same time AI is. Well, okay, it kind of is a coincidence. I don't think anybody planned these things to work out at the same time. But it's a lucky alignment that I think is worth savoring: AI is maturing at exactly the moment the atproto ecosystem is getting diverse enough for your data to really mean something. AI is the tool, and your atproto data is the substrate.

Quick disclosure before we go further: I'm an engineer at Bluesky, and I spend my days building Attie, an AI tool built on atproto. This post is about what I've learned while doing that. It will probably sound a bit like an advertisement, and I suppose it is (please check out Attie if it interests you, it's in beta and we love feedback!!), but these are also my own thoughts that have been evolving over time as I’ve become one of the biggest Attie users.

The context you're accumulating without trying

Anyone who has used AI tools seriously knows that they're only as good as the context you give them. You can spend a lot of effort assembling that context by hand, or, in the case of your atproto data, you can realize you've been accumulating it all along.

Every post I write, every blog entry I publish, every like I leave behind lives in my PDS (Personal Data Server, the folder where your atproto data lives) as structured data. And because there are so many different shapes of atproto apps now, my PDS has insight into a lot more than my social feed: games I play, hobbies I'm interested in, what I've liked and found interesting, who I interact with. All of it also sits in a wide graph of other people connected to the same thing.

That's a fundamentally richer starting point than a traditional algorithm that looks at "things you like and how to show you more of that." A recommendation engine sees engagement signals and infers a shadow of you, colored by what they think they can advertise to you. My PDS contains things I actually said, actually made, actually did, in schemas any tool can read.

Who gets to build on it

Meta has rich context about you, too. Even richer, in some cases, given I started a Facebook account when I was 16 years old. Facebook has known about your hobbies and your social graph for twenty years now!

The difference between that and atproto is who gets to build on it. Right now, Meta is the only one that gets to know your context, and it uses that knowledge to figure out how to manipulate you into buying things from advertisers. That's literally their whole business.

On atproto, anyone can build tools on that data. Any new tool can access your context and build something highly tailored to you and your interests on day one. There's no cold start, no moat, and even better: you can build those tools yourself. You can customize your tooling to fit your exact needs, interests, and wants, instead of waiting for a platform to decide your niche is worth the efforts of an engineering team.

What this actually feels like

This is exactly what we're building with Attie: AI personalization that you want, that serves you and your community. Here's what that looks like, as I've become one of Attie's most enthusiastic users.

I've used Attie to assemble pages summarizing events I had major FOMO about, gathering all the relevant links and conversations in one place so I could catch up like I'd been there. That only works because the event, the people who attended it, and everything they said about it all live in the same open graph that I'm living on.

I've used it to pull together the links and conversations around specific areas I care about. I've used it to more deeply connect to the Fiber Arts community, which my PDS knows about because I've actually posted about my crochet projects, not because an algorithm watched me linger on yarn websites. And I've used it to find the people to follow and what's happening each week in the atproto community, which amounts to building my own "what's happening on atproto" newsletter that Attie updates for me every week.

Notice what none of these are: none of them is "show me more posts." Every one is an artifact I asked for, in a shape I wanted, pulled from my connections and my interests. That's the shape of personalization I want more of, and it's a shape that engagement-optimized feeds structurally can't offer.

But everything is public

The obvious problem with all this openness is that "anyone can build on your data" cuts both ways. Open data is open to the tools you love and to the scrapers you don't. It also means there isn't really a way to have the deep and meaningful conversations that you can only have in private spaces on the protocol, and that shapes a lot of the ways the data shows up. Something I haven't mentioned here is the ways I could have been using Attie to show me parenting content, because that's something I rarely talk about in public. I don't share things about my kids on the public internet, other than the fact that they exist, because I don't think everyone needs to know about those things. That context doesn't exist on the protocol at all, which means no tool can serve me with it, no matter how much I'd want one to.

Right now atproto is open by default, but it won't be forever. Atproto spaces are here, in alpha on the protocol, which means real control over who you consent to read your data. And my bet is that this makes the whole graph richer. People are likely to put more into a store they control (I know I would). The data will continue to get even more rich as atproto spaces are released, and new apps are going to evolve to leverage them to build incredible new experiences for individuals and communities.

Go build something

There's a second half to the lucky alignment I opened with. AI isn't just the tool that makes this context useful, it's also what makes building on it reachable! You can describe the tool you wish existed and have a coding agent help you make it real, in an afternoon, without a platform's permission and without an engineering team behind you. The substrate is here and it's yours. Atproto is the context window you own, go see what you can make for you and your community.