AT Protocol: How to Scale a Decentralized Social Network
ATProto for Distributed Systems Engineers
AT Protocol adapts stream-processing architecture—NoSQL clusters, event logs, and view servers—to build a decentralized backend. It introduces user data repositories with signed JSON records, synced via event logs, enabling interoperable apps. The protocol merges peer-to-peer techniques with high-scale systems practices, aiming for global convenience without sacrificing openness.
Our solution was to take standard practices for high scale backends, and then apply the techniques we used in peer-to-peer systems to create an open network.
- danabramov
Shameless plug, but if this got you interested, I have a couple of longreads on the topic:
- https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
- https://overreacted.io/there-are-no-instances-in-atproto/
From the official site, I'd also recommend https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-ethos
- LelouBil
I feel like it's the best ATProto architecture explanation on the web.
I hope it will make people who argue that "there are no instances in ATProto" is wrong, understand that it is actually true and not just a naming debate.
- nikhilsimha
Shameless plug, we built Chronon to solve a very similar problem. Chronon is now open source (apache 2) and used at Netflix, OpenAI, Airbnb, Stripe etc.
It is used to serve features/context to ML/AI models and rule engines, along with app views.
We are more scale and perf oriented as project given the use-cases and less decentralization oriented.
We also ship with a dataframe / prql like declarative api.
- evbogue
The article seems to forget about content addressable storage and signing key cryptography and how these tools might make their software more distributed.
- myshapeprotocol
A very thoughtful perspective on distributed protocols. Getting the data primitives right is always the hardest part.