> Bluesky recently acquired the rights to the trademark for “ATPROTOCOL” and its variants—including “AT Protocol” and “atproto”—from another company that was threatening to take legal action preventing the company and others from using the term. Now that Bluesky owns it, the atproto community’s continued use of the mark can be protected.
The policy around usage is shared in the rest of the post but the goal is to make this very simple for everyone
>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future.
I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?
"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances. Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky".
When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critically, anyone can write an AppView; there are reimplementations of Bluesky as well as other social apps that use the same ATProto infrastructure. That would be closest thing to a Mastodon instance, except you don't have to host your data on it in order to use it. Imagine being able to go to a Lemmy instance and just post things with your Mastodon identity, and have everything show up without Mastodon having to know anything about Lemmy magazines or its special upvote / comment formats.
The actual centralization in ATProto lies in a combination of unfortunate design decisions and genuine friction in the self-hosted path. Being totally reliant on Bluesky is the happy path, self-hosting your PDS data is difficult but doable, and being totally independent of Bluesky is only possible if you do everything correctly right at the start.
First off, Bluesky doesn't offer any GUI tools for PDS migration. If you want to get off their PDS, you'll need to bust out command-line tools and possibly do some steps in advance of when you need to migrate in order for everything to work properly.
Second, even if you're on a PDS, you're still reliant on the Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) to host your Distributed ID (DID) document. The PLC is run by Bluesky, although they've taken steps to make it easy to notice if they were to do something fucky with the PLC. But let's say we don't like that. There is a solution: you can host your DID document on a normal web server. Problem solved?
Well, if you were setting up an account for the first time, then yes, the problem is actually solved, you're 100% independent of Bluesky. But if you made the mistake of registering an account normally, you have a did:plc identity. And one core principle of ATProto is that identity names never ever ever change. So if you go and make a did:web identity, it's like having a second account, there is no way to tie your old did:plc identity into it. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't even redirect one did:web identity to another (say if you need to switch domain names)
Regarding Bluesky's "independent protocol governance organization", they made the same promise about the PLC; but it hasn't actually been transferred yet. I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration.
> I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration.
This is exactly where I’ve landed re: ATProto. If you actually want to self-host everything you lose one of the biggest draws of it, the migratable IDs.
I was looking into it to build an alternative to Threads/IG/TikTok for one of my hobby communities that’s become almost entirely reliant on Meta/Tencent. Being able to plug into the wider AT Proto world was a big draw, but not being able to self host a true alternative to did:plc has put a halt to that for now while I figure out what I want to do.
I can’t imagine being a first time bootstrapped founder running a business without a trademark and not knowing that someone with bad faith would just register a trademark and just sue or order you to change your name.
These are the things that most startups account for when raising capital.
The community probably would have complained if they registered the trademark preemptively. But if they let the bad guys register it and then save the day it's the least bad solution.
The timeline just seems like two different brands wanted the name. atSign was using atProtocol as their thing. And trademarks are defend-or-lose. That AT Proto would grow so much more than atSign is just a thing we know now. They were both contemporaneous and it doesn't seem to have been some kind of gazumping operation so much as two groups landing on a name.
> Bluesky recently acquired the rights to the trademark for “ATPROTOCOL” and its variants—including “AT Protocol” and “atproto”—from another company that was threatening to take legal action preventing the company and others from using the term. Now that Bluesky owns it, the atproto community’s continued use of the mark can be protected.
The policy around usage is shared in the rest of the post but the goal is to make this very simple for everyone
So what about the existing AT protocol modems use?
No one cares.
Government bodies can work for us at the point we collectively decide it’s a priority.
>We plan to transfer that ownership to an appropriate, independent protocol governance organization in the future.
I never realized there is no independent governance org that should have registered this. So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity, that also runs the only viable instance?
There is an IETF Working Group these days https://atproto.com/blog/kicking-off-the-atp-working-group
Those can't register trademarks, of course.
> that also runs the only viable instance?
This is false, both in the framing ("instances") and in the viability of running alternative infrastructure.
> So AT is governed by a single for-profit entity
A Public Benefit Corporation to be precise. So they are legally obligated to favor public benefit.
"Only viable instance" is not really the correct framing - Bluesky doesn't have instances. Anyone using ATProto without Bluesky will still be "on Bluesky".
When you go to bsky.app, you're interacting with the Bluesky AppView; one key feature of ATProto is that any AppView can interact with any (consenting) Personal Data Server (PDS). So you can self-host your PDS but still use bsky.app if you so choose. But critically, anyone can write an AppView; there are reimplementations of Bluesky as well as other social apps that use the same ATProto infrastructure. That would be closest thing to a Mastodon instance, except you don't have to host your data on it in order to use it. Imagine being able to go to a Lemmy instance and just post things with your Mastodon identity, and have everything show up without Mastodon having to know anything about Lemmy magazines or its special upvote / comment formats.
The actual centralization in ATProto lies in a combination of unfortunate design decisions and genuine friction in the self-hosted path. Being totally reliant on Bluesky is the happy path, self-hosting your PDS data is difficult but doable, and being totally independent of Bluesky is only possible if you do everything correctly right at the start.
First off, Bluesky doesn't offer any GUI tools for PDS migration. If you want to get off their PDS, you'll need to bust out command-line tools and possibly do some steps in advance of when you need to migrate in order for everything to work properly.
Second, even if you're on a PDS, you're still reliant on the Public Ledger of Credentials (PLC) to host your Distributed ID (DID) document. The PLC is run by Bluesky, although they've taken steps to make it easy to notice if they were to do something fucky with the PLC. But let's say we don't like that. There is a solution: you can host your DID document on a normal web server. Problem solved?
Well, if you were setting up an account for the first time, then yes, the problem is actually solved, you're 100% independent of Bluesky. But if you made the mistake of registering an account normally, you have a did:plc identity. And one core principle of ATProto is that identity names never ever ever change. So if you go and make a did:web identity, it's like having a second account, there is no way to tie your old did:plc identity into it. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't even redirect one did:web identity to another (say if you need to switch domain names)
Regarding Bluesky's "independent protocol governance organization", they made the same promise about the PLC; but it hasn't actually been transferred yet. I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration.
> I would be a lot more bullish on ATProto if there was a way to migrate DIDs and retain all your followers and shit. And if there was proper graphical tools for data migration.
This is exactly where I’ve landed re: ATProto. If you actually want to self-host everything you lose one of the biggest draws of it, the migratable IDs.
I was looking into it to build an alternative to Threads/IG/TikTok for one of my hobby communities that’s become almost entirely reliant on Meta/Tencent. Being able to plug into the wider AT Proto world was a big draw, but not being able to self host a true alternative to did:plc has put a halt to that for now while I figure out what I want to do.
Any word on which entity was trying to trademark it first?
You can see the original application here: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97700166&docI...
Atsign, Inc. for this thing probably https://atsign.com/resources/white-papers/the-atprotocol/
I can’t imagine being a first time bootstrapped founder running a business without a trademark and not knowing that someone with bad faith would just register a trademark and just sue or order you to change your name.
These are the things that most startups account for when raising capital.
The community probably would have complained if they registered the trademark preemptively. But if they let the bad guys register it and then save the day it's the least bad solution.
The timeline just seems like two different brands wanted the name. atSign was using atProtocol as their thing. And trademarks are defend-or-lose. That AT Proto would grow so much more than atSign is just a thing we know now. They were both contemporaneous and it doesn't seem to have been some kind of gazumping operation so much as two groups landing on a name.
Interesting, I believe that's a pretty good move from them.
Thank god!
Who? What?