I was reading this blog post which is an introduction to the AT Protocol the system that powers Bluesky. Sounds like the basic idea is to try to separate the problems of hosting and how apps interact with data in an effort to give back a sense of control to users. I like that. Reading through the post, they encourage a mental model of the AT protocol as you just writing files that conform to a nice sort of spec, and then different apps can all use those files to build out different sorts of experiences.

From there, it seems like the most complicated aspects have to do with authentication, as this is meant to be something on the open web. The thought occurred to me that if you had a shared unix box, like we do here with ides.club that you could replicate the functionality with actual files in some standard directory.

So I built (with Claude's help) porch a little CLI and TUI for building out a social network on a shared unix box. Every user simply writes files inside their ~/.porch directory and these are readable by other users on the machine. In this way you can post posts, replies, reactions, links, rss feeds, etc.

Feel free to check it out. Users of this machine should have porch on their path.