The Colorado ATProtocol community gathered on the evening of Tuesday, April 28th in Arvada for its latest meetup. In attendance were and . The meeting followed a three-part format: introductions, roundtable discussion, and a presentation.

Introductions

We opened the evening with introductions, sharing a bit about our backgrounds and what brought us to the ATProtocol space.

Roundtable Discussion

The roundtable covered a wide range of topics that reflected our technical interests and our motivations for building the Atproto community.

We discussed possible projects we’d like to explore, touching on the kinds of applications the protocol makes uniquely possible. The discussion broadened to potential collaborations with outside groups whose interests and values might align with the Atproto ecosystem community.

We talked about how to raise Atproto’s profile among the general public, acknowledging that while the protocol is recognized in some technical circles, there’s still work to be done in communicating its value to a broader audience. The historical and ongoing developments at GitHub were also a lively topic of discussion.

Looking ahead, we explored alternative formats for future events alongside our regular meetup structure of introductions, roundtable discussion, and presentation. These included a meetup at a local beer garden and organizing a hackathon. We also discussed how a hackathon would benefit from groundwork laid at earlier regular meetings so that participants would arrive ready to build.

Presentation: Early Twitter Patent and the Original Vision

The evening included a presentation on Twitter’s early patent filing of 2007, which served as a window into an original vision for the platform. A central theme of that design was its goal of providing a unified electronic communication layer capable of accommodating messages across multiple different formats, including the web, API integrations, instant messaging, email, and SMS.

The discussion then followed how that open vision has narrowed dramatically under X, which has introduced barriers to entry on the developer side and restrictive algorithms on the user side. This highlighted some of the benefits of Atproto, which in ways picks up on what that original vision could have become.

Multipoint communication system 100 includes an entry point 102, a routing engine 104, a transmission engine 108, a message storage 110, an aggregator 106, and endpoints 114. The transmission engine 108 further includes a web transmission engine 108A, an application program interface (API) transmission engine 108E, an instant messaging (IM) transmission engine 108B, an e-mail transmission engine 108C, and a short messaging service (SMS) transmission engine 108D. The endpoints 114 further include a web endpoint 114A, an API endpoint 114E, an IM endpoint 114B, and e-mail endpoint 114C, and an SMS endpoint 114D.

The Colorado ATProtocol group meets regularly in the Denver metro area. Follow along at and join the conversation between meetups at discourse.atprotocol.community. Events calendar at OpenMeet.