Ecosystem updates / small stuff

Hi everyone!

This is going to be one of those miscellaneous update weeks — I realized I hadn't published anything on here for a full 3 weeks (chalk that up to managing to take a whole week's vacation!), and next week I'll be tied up at an offsite, so this is as good a window as any. I'll start with my own updates:

I got around to making my planned updates to my conference workshop and was happy to receive some PRs from our Japanese translators! As I mentioned, these workshops were a big push to prepare in time for AtmosphereConf, and now that I've rotated back to working on the docs, I don't want to lose track of the workshops. If you want them for an event, for an onboarding, anything else — please ask.

Speaking of the Japanese atproto community — we've had Kapa.ai running on the docs for a solid month now. I've been taking a look at our Kapa metrics, and the language distribution of our users is particularly interesting:

This, I think, speaks to LLMs' value in providing translated entry points to docs and our other knowledge sources. While we do maintain translations for most of the content of our docs, that doesn't include the low-level Specs, nor the other sources that Kapa uses for responses (eg Github discussions and the community forum). Those are on Kapa to translate, and the results speak for themselves!

I'm really proud of the Japanese atproto developer community. There currently aren't a lot of other metrics that show them as being larger(!) than the English-language community, and I'm very grateful that Kapa is clearly meeting their needs in a way that we weren't yet. We've also finally translated the docs homepage into Japanese as well, to further improve the Japanese developer experience.

I've also had a chance to do some smaller edits to various parts of the docs that I'd flagged circa the conference — the way we talk about building on the social graph, resolving Lexicons, and when to backfill the network should all be a bit clearer now.

This built up to a big refactor of the Auth section of our docs! I'd gotten some helpful callouts over the last month that atproto OAuth was still more intimidating than necessary. That made me realize I'd avoided doing a proper rewrite of the Auth docs when we relaunched the site in February, since I'd been adding to them incrementally prior to that and wasn't thinking of them as particularly outdated — but they were lacking a clear throughline. I think we have that now, and I appreciate all the nudges to get there.

Speaking of nudges, I got a helpful one from Ted Han earlier this week, pointing out that we hadn't relocated enough of the Account Recovery material specifically from individual developer blogs to our docs. Well, ta-da:

Account Recovery - AT Protocol

Self-custodying your AT Protocol identity with rotation keys.

Finally, we just this morning published a new guest blog on atproto.com from beloved For You feed maintainer Spacecowboy!

Serving the For You Feed - AT Protocol

How the maintainer of the popular For You feed serves it from their living room!

I really like this one — I hadn't realized before we edited it together how clever their approach to part-local and part-VPS infrastructure was, and I'm more convinced than ever that there's a real model here, even for those of us who haven't heavily invested in their homelab (something I am very guilty of, just not by atproto community standards 😊).

And in the meantime, I'm getting pretty pumped for my Write the Docs talk in a couple weeks...

And you know what? I think I'll leave it here for now — we can handle the ecosystem news at this Friday's office hours. Until then!