Check this out: https://nooki.me/
Looks like someone’s built a Reddit-like on top of ATProto. Would be really interesting to see whether it could interact with the threadiverse through something like BridgyFed, which currently only works with microblogs (I think?)
Opportunity? Existential threat? You decide…
Why do ATProtocol projects tend to look so much more polished even in their infancy? Is that where the front-end people dwell?
That site looks like it’s closed source. FOSS projects tend to not be well designed in the frontend except the occasional gem. Not sure why it’s such a pattern, considering this project isn’t making much money and it’s made by a single dev.
In a nutshell, it’s because you don’t have to build the entire kit and kaboodle all at once.
Lots of BlueSky is centralized so you don’t have to worry about distribution, user, hosting, scaling, etc. and just focus on the frontend.
It’s the same reason why all the Lemmy and Mastodon apps look way better than the web versions, because all those other parts are no longer relevant and the creator(s) can focus on just putting out a polished product.
I’d argue that the modular design is a more radical approach to decentralization.
Form over function. They probably have aspirations of getting VC funding and for that you need to look like every other web app.
That wouldn’t surprise me. The PDS handling both authentication and data storage makes it easy to get started quickly without needing to do backend work.