Hey 👋 if you don't know us already, we're building Frontpage; an AT Procol based federated link aggregator. We shipped an initial MVP in closed beta recently and have since been thinking about the road to general availability.
This post is an RFC (Request for Comments) targeted at technically minded folks who are interested in seeing the progression of atproto for non-Bluesky/microblogging use cases. All that's to say the language that follows assumes some knowledge about how Bluesky and atproto work! I've tried to include links to explain what all of the jargon means though, so hopefully it's not entirely nonsense for folks a little less familiar!
Please leave any comments and feedback on the Frontpage post here (TODO: INSERT LINK).
Background
We realised pretty early on that we wanted a dedicated lexicon, seperate to the Bluesky definitions. This would allow us freedom to extend iterate and experiment on our use case without being tied to the constraints of Bluesky (eg. character limit). This provides a neat seperation of concerns: when you're on Frontpage you interact with Frontpage records, while on Bluesky you interact with Bluesky records.
We think there's power in briding these two worlds, and have seen this to great effect with projects like Bridgy. This proposal sets out a way for us to build that bridge.
Proposal
Keep discourse together by mirroring every post and comment on both Bluesky and Frontpage.
When you post on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror post will also be created in your Bluesky account. When you comment on Frontpage, we propose that a mirror reply will be created in your Bluesky account.
Conversely, when you reply to one of these mirrored posts in Bluesky - we will show it as a reply in Frontpage.
Additionally, Bluesky likes will be translated to Frontpage votes and vice versa.
Example
This might sound a little abstract on paper, but the idea is quite intuitive in practice.
- Here I posted a link to Frontpage, it was automatically reposed to my Bluesky profile
- Another left a comment on Frontpage, that I also replied to. These were translated to a thread on Bluesky.
- I voted the reply on Frontpage, this vote translated to a like on Bluesky.
Now consider another user noticed this Bluesky thread, and left a reply to one of these comments from the Bluesky app. We can show this reply inside of Frontpage, now the discourse stays together with all of it's context!
In the above example @unravel.fyi has responded from the Bluesky app, and so their reply has been marked as such!
Authored by: @tom-sherman
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