Week 6: On Integration

Well, I totally failed to start writing this before EOD on the east coast the day before Thanksgiving, so my readership is unlikely to do Ryan Lizza numbers this week, but what can you do?

I'll tell you what you can do! In honor of Pluribus also getting its weekly drop out a little early, I have some thoughts on what we talk about when we talk about integration. I would make a joke here about what the Bluesky hive mind would sound like, but I think a significant proportion of the total posts on Bluesky are already making fun of that specific idea, so I —

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OK, one joke.

Anyway. As I've mentioned, probably the largest proportion of my work in Devrel has to do with publishing docs: examples, patterns, landing pages, and so on. The second largest chunk is all about partnerships — figuring out who in our community we can work with directly on specific features or engagement goals, and then steering and seeding that collaboration. Of course, these two things are related in much the same way that documentation and support are related; the docs that we publish are meant to provide usable guidance for the widest possible audience to have an unmediated experience, whereas individual support interactions or partner discussions are much more focused (and resource intensive), to help unblock some specific goal. Often, one of these turns into the other partway through. Wait for it.

As promised, we released some new OAuth guidance this week. I want to thank everyone in our community for being patient with us and bringing to our attention that we really needed to get out ahead of the many undocumented implementations that were already running in the wild, and I'm proud to say that I think we're caught up for now. Our OAuth Introduction guide has been significantly rewritten to provide better context and examples for using OAuth with AT apps, and we have a brand new in-depth Permissions page that details fine-grained auth scopes. This was a "get it done for everyone's sake" docs improvement, but it also turned out to be a "get it done to enable partnerships" un-blocker. Here's why: over the last few weeks that we'd been improving the docs, we've also been having conversations with developers who aren't yet all-in on the Atmosphere, but who really want to integrate their applications with Bluesky, one way or another.

Integration always means different things to different people. I've written a lot here about how developing on the Atmosphere is potentially much more than just "a Bluesky integration," and I know my audience has a lot of true believers. But there's a huge proportion of devs out there for whom most of an integration is being able to log in to their app with Bluesky credentials and share Bluesky profile details — in other words, OAuth. I've only been on this job for 6 weeks, and I was pretty surprised to find how many of my contacts were waiting for this feature (and our narrative around this feature) specifically to improve; it was nice to give them the good news. Would I love to see them thinking more about the AT Lexicon ecosystem? Of course. And now I realize that OAuth is going to be a significant stepping stone for them to do that.

The other big news from this week is that we had a recent round of community grants go out! We are so thankful for our community developers for making all of this possible, and it's privilege for me to promote all of their great work.

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At the risk of being US-centric (just this once): Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!