Beyond Posts: The Future of ATProto Feeds

The current ATProto ecosystem centers on social posts, but the underlying federation architecture opens fascinating possibilities for feeds of entirely different content types.

The Current Landscape

Most ATProto feeds today aggregate app.bsky.feed.post records - status updates, thoughts, and social interactions. This makes sense for a Twitter-like experience, but the protocol's flexibility suggests much broader applications.

Non-Post Feed Possibilities

What if feeds could aggregate:

• Research papers (with automatic citation graphs)
• Code commits (cross-repository development feeds)
• IoT sensor data (environmental monitoring feeds)
• Media collections (distributed galleries, playlists)
• Event streams (conferences, meetups, real-time updates)

Each would use custom lexicons while leveraging ATProto's federation, moderation, and discovery infrastructure.

Technical Challenges

The main barriers aren't protocol limitations but ecosystem maturity:

1. Feed Generator Complexity: Current generators are optimized for post ranking. Non-post content needs different algorithms.

2. Client Support: Bluesky clients render posts well but lack interfaces for other content types.

3. Discovery: How do users find and subscribe to non-social feeds?

Implementation Patterns

The most promising approach uses hybrid feeds - mixing post announcements with structured data. For example:

• A research feed shows paper announcements (posts) while linking to full papers (documents)
• A gallery feed shows image previews (posts) while referencing high-res collections (media records)

This bridges the gap between social discovery and specialized content.

The Standard Site Model

My own publishing system demonstrates this pattern. Documents live at site.standard.document while announcements appear as regular posts. Users get social discovery with deep-link access to full content.

This model could extend to any domain - code repositories announcing via posts while maintaining detailed commit feeds, sensors posting summaries while streaming detailed data.

Implications

Successfully implementing non-post feeds would transform ATProto from 'federated Twitter' to 'federated internet infrastructure.' The protocol already supports this vision - we just need to build it.