atproto.nyc community day 2026

I'm super excited to share some more details about the upcoming @atproto.nyc community day. This should cover a bunch of questions you might have.

What

We're all excited about the AT Protocol. Whether you're a software engineer looking to start building, a content creator looking to explore, or someone interested in what comes after the centralized web, we'd love to have you join us for our upcoming Community Day!

This is a space to explore the AT Protocol. We'd definitely recommend poking around a bit before joining us — whether that's getting started on a project, reading resources like @danabra.mov's explainers, or, if you're already involved in the community, prepping unconference ideas! We've got an appendix at the bottom of the page of useful resources that you might want to explore beforehand.

When and Where

When: Saturday, August 22, 10am - 9pm

Where: Recurse Center - 397 Bridge St, Brooklyn, NY 11201 - Google Maps

Additionally, we'll be livestreaming talks, lightning talks, and show and tell on @atproto.nyc's stream.place.

Ticketing and Badging

We're using atmosphere.tickets for ticketing (thanks @joebasser.com!) along with @sri.xyz's really awesome badge printer in-person.

Tickets are $25 a person to cover food and supplies. We also have an optional $50 sponsor tier to both get a ticket for yourself and sponsor someone else's.

We do not want finances to block anyone from joining us and learning about, hacking on, and building with the AT Protocol. Please feel free to reach out to any organizer or @atproto.nyc directly via Bluesky DMs if you'd like to join.

Your ticket includes:

Light breakfast and coffee to get our morning started ☕️

A full jam-packed day of atproto community activity 📆

Snacks, drinks, and pizza for dinner 🍕

You'll be on your own for lunch, but there are many great options nearby and we'll be organizing some midday group lunch excursions!

To get tickets, you can head over to the event page:

Grab Your Tickets

Schedule

Here's our tentative schedule. Some things might change, and we'll start announcing talks and workshops that we've locked down via @atproto.nyc.

open to close: atproto hack space

10am: doors open

11am-11:30am: kickoff talks

1pm: lunch train with @julietshen.bsky.social

2pm-5pm: unconference

consider what you want to talk about beforehand, but mid-day additions are encouraged!

2pm-5pm: workshops

5pm-6pm: lightning talks

6pm: closing talks

7pm: show and tell

if you'd like, you can share what you've been working on at the community day with everyone else!

7pm: pizza

9pm: everyone out

Our Host and Venue, The Recurse Center

The space is graciously provided to @atproto.nyc by @recurse.com. They've shared a beautiful two floors of hacker office space in a central Downtown Brooklyn building. In total, we'll have access to:

Two large, open coworking/hacking spaces

Two meeting rooms, for workshops

Two additional tiny rooms for breakouts

Two couch areas for unconference style discussions

We're extremely grateful to @recurse.com for providing the space. Here's a quick note from their team:

Welcome to the Recurse Center’s space! RC is a retreat for curious programmers, where you spend 6 or 12 weeks building what you’re interested in with others.

The retreat is full-time and self-directed, with lightweight structure and accountability. After a batch, Recursers retain lifelong membership in the community, plus events, career services, and 24/7 access to the space.

We’re happy you can join us for the atproto.nyc community day! If you’re curious about RC - maybe you want to spend some time heads down on your atproto projects - we admit on a rolling basis and applications are always open.

A number of members of the @atproto.nyc organizing team are Recurse Center alums, and a number of attendees have either currently or previously gone through a batch. If you have questions about doing a batch at Recurse Center, please feel free to ask any of the @atproto.nyc organizers to point you to an alums to chat!

Codes of Conduct

As @atproto.nyc, we have our own Code of Conduct that you can find here. We request that you read it before the event, and we will re-share it both at the beginning of the event and restate it before workshops.

Our host @recurse.com also has their own Code of Conduct for the space and it must also be followed. You can find it here.

Related Events

The community around the AT Protocol in NYC are hosting a number of events of various levels of connection to @atproto.nyc! Here's a quick rundown of ones we'd recommend:

Thursday, 8/20: Blacksky is doing a Community Mixer. You can find more details on the Luma page for the event.

Friday, 8/21: We're partnering with Hidden Door, our usual meetup host, for a coworking day on Friday at their office just a few blocks from the atproto.nyc community day event the following day! Register here.

Saturday, 8/22: One of our organizers, @bnb.im, will be playing a set for Tachycardia at community-favorite indie arcade bar @wonderville.nyc after the atproto.nyc community day . This event starts at 10pm, and like the indie arcade cabinets, will be free.

Again, if you've not grabbed a ticket, make sure to pick one up!

Grab Your Tickets

Appendix A: Useful Resources to Explore

Here's a handful of useful AT Protocol related resources to explore before and during the community day!

Happy to hear suggestions if you've got them; I'll make some passes and add more as they come in. Would love to get as many as possible to help everyone along (and just be able to send friends this post rather than copy/pasting them all every time I bring someone into the Atmosphere).

Useful Reads:

@danabra.mov published a blog post titled "A Social Filesystem" that's particularly useful in understanding the premise of the AT Protocol

@danabra.mov also published a post titled "There Are No Instances in AT Proto" that is a particularly useful read if you're familiar with other federated platforms' approach to being decentralized. Even if you're not, it's yet another beautifully written piece on how the whole system works.

So far, everything on the AT Protocol has been public - data is available. There's now a proposal for Permissioned Data that opens the path to private data, which makes a lot more functionality applications using the AT Protocol possible.

There's an extensive series by @dholms.at about Permissioned Data that you can find on his Leaflet blog. Hiiiiighly recommended if this space is interesting!

Useful tools:

The AT Stack is a great resource from the Bluesky team directly, going over the technical components of the AT Protocol

HappyView is a tool intended to help you get an AppView up and running quickly - AppViews are one of the harder parts of AT Protocol development, typically

Both atproto.at and PDS.ls are great tools that help you explore the data that exists on the network and manage the data in your own PDS

Microcosm.blue is a collection of a few useful services for building on the AT Protocol

Marque is an AT Protocol native domain registrar — if you're looking for a domain name for either yourself or a project (you can use domains as your handle, like @natalie.sh or @leaflet.pub or @atproto.nyc!), you can pick one up through Marque

One particularly inspiring usage of Marque is @pckt.blog - you can buy a domain for your blog straight from within the app!

atmosphere.money is worth exploring if you're looking at integrating payments into what you build! (first announced by @joebasser.com at @atproto.nyc, too!)

Leaflet is a blogging platform built on AT Protocol primitives (and where you're reading this post!) - we encourage you to write about what you learn or build at the Community Day!