The Colorado ATProtocol community gathered on the evening of Tuesday, May 26th in Arvada, with , , , , , and in attendance. The meeting followed a four-part format: introductions, community announcements, main presentation, and roundtable discussion with lightning talks.

Introductions

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

Community Announcements

This portion included an overview of the Atproto Colorado Open Social website. Members of the Atproto Colorado community are encouraged to join.

We also discussed possible ways that members of the group could communicate with one another. After considering various options, we decided to start a group chat in Roomy.space. If anyone in the Atproto Colorado community would like to join this roomy chat, please reach out for an invitation.

Roomy
A way to be on the web!
https://a.roomy.space/

Presentation

As the main event, described how he is now running a self-hosted PDS.

Conrad's avatar
4w

Hosted my own pds :)

For those interested in the full technical details, please refer to Conrad's excellent blog post describing how he built a PDS on Kubernetes from scratch!

Building a Bluesky PDS on Kubernetes From Scratch

A field-tested guide to building a k3s, Argo CD, Traefik, cert-manager, SealedSecrets, Longhorn, and Cloudflare-backed AT Protocol PDS deployment.

Conrad|May 21, 2026

C
Conrad's Blog

Roundtable Discussion and Lightning Talks

During this portion of the meetup, demoed upcoming developments for his Beacon Bits app, which will include an enhanced 3-D map functionality.

, who recently joined the Bluesky team, was also able share details about some new features on the Bluesky roadmap. Exciting!

gave us a brief description of his work on aerie, which is a sol pbc fully Cloudflare-native community fork of the Tangled knot server. Additional details are available at sol pbc's Tangled account.

pointed us to Jaz’s talk at SRECon 2025 describing how Bluesky survived the sudden period of exponential growth in November of 2024.

Maturing Your Data Architecture in a Week: How Bluesky Survived | USENIX
In November of 2024, Bluesky saw a sudden surge in activity adding one million new users per day several days in a row, with daily active users increasing by 1,200% in a week. Through this exponential growth, Bluesky's backend team of ~6 engineers kept the site online and continued to onboard new users despite all of our core infrastructure running on our own physical infrastructure. In this talk, I'll walk you through the 11 days of hell (16+ hours a day) in which we rapidly matured our data architecture to support over 1M hourly active users producing 1,600+ events/sec.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon25americas/presentation/volpert

Following a group discussion about bots and scam accounts, mentioned that Hailey’s Labeler is a good resource for identifying spam and other unwanted activity.

Hailey's Labeler (@labeler.hailey.at)
A labeler by @hailey.at, powered by https://github.com/roostorg/osprey Labels are not absolute judgements, but rather information about the type of account or content you may be interacting with. Ruleset: https://github.com/haileyok/atproto-ruleset
https://bsky.app/profile/labeler.hailey.at

The group discussion also touched on ways in which we could explore collaborations or involvement with outside groups whose interests and values might align with the Atproto ecosystem community. Such outside groups include the Boulder Linux Users Group (BLUG), Let’s Vibe in Denver, Boulder AI Builders, and Boulder Tech Connect.

On a final note, we learned that Shwarma is playing in Denver at The Crypt this Friday! 🎶

The Colorado ATProtocol group meets regularly in the Denver metro area. Follow along at to join the conversation and attend future events.