/atprotoing

name: atprotoing
description: Read Bluesky/ATProto without depending on Bluesky's AppView — interactions on a user's posts, thread replies, any repo's records, network-wide backlinks across every lexicon, an account's handle and PDS history, which collections are active network-wide, and layer-by-layer outage diagnosis. Use when bsky.app or the AppView is down or slow, when a Bluesky read returns timeouts or 5xx, when asked who liked/replied/quoted/reposted something, when pulling live Bluesky context cheaply, when reading records straight from a PDS, when asked who references a record or account anywhere on the network, whether an account has changed handle or migrated servers, or which lexicons and non-Bluesky apps are active on atproto. Complements browsing-bluesky, which routes everything through the AppView and fails when it does.
metadata:
  version: 0.3.0

ATProtoing

Reads the atmosphere from sources that stay up when Bluesky PLC's AppView does not. On 2026-08-16 the AppView timed out and Jetstream returned 503 while PDSes and Constellation served every request — this skill is built around that split.

Invoke

python3 <skill>/scripts/atproto.py <command> [--json]

Digest output is the default and is what belongs in a transcript. Reach for `--json` only when the result will be transformed programmatically; raw records are large and re-reading them into context defeats the purpose.

| Command | Answers | |---|---| | `feed [actor] [--hours 3] [--html PATH]` | The Following timeline, threaded | | `status [--actor X]` | Which layer is broken right now | | `interactions <actor> [--hours 8] [--scan 100]` | Who liked/replied/reposted/quoted recent posts | | `thread <at-uri>` | Replies to a post | | `posts <actor> [--limit]` | An actor's posts, from their own PDS | | `records <actor> <collection>` | Any collection in any repo | | `resolve <actor>` | DID, handle, PDS host | | `backlinks <target> [--collection C --path P]` | What references a record or account, in ANY lexicon | | `identity <actor>` | Handle renames and PDS migrations, from the PLC audit log | | `lexicons [query] [--hours N] [--others] [--schema NSID]` | Which collections are active network-wide |

Source model

Each read targets the cheapest source that survives independently. Prefer the PDS for anything a repo owns — it is authoritative and had no outage.

| Need | Source | |---|---| | Records of a known repo | That repo's PDS | | Who interacted with a URI | Constellation (`constellation.microcosm.blue`) | | handle ↔ DID ↔ PDS, and its history | `plc.directory`, entryway `resolveHandle` | | Which collections are active network-wide | UFOs (`ufos-api.microcosm.blue`) | | Search, feed generators, chat | AppView only — **no substitute; say so** |

`feed` is the one composite read: there is no AppView-free `getTimeline`, so it rebuilds the Following timeline from follows → PLC → each followee's PDS, then hydrates what the AppView would have inlined — facet byte-ranges to character ranges, blob CIDs to `cdn.bsky.app` URLs, quote and parent URIs to fetched records — and threads the result by reply root. `--html` writes a self-contained Preact reader (same components as `austegard.com/bsky/thread-reader.html`), so a feed request is **one call**, not a fan-out the caller re-derives by hand. Ranking, mutes, and blocks live in the AppView and are absent by construction: this is the raw follow graph.

Constellation is the persistent index. Do not rebuild one locally: it already indexes the whole network, is operated independently of Bluesky PLC, and is reachable when the AppView is not.

`interactions` walks the five Bluesky paths in `LINK_PATHS`. `backlinks` walks whatever Constellation has indexed — tangled issues, vouches, list membership, lexicons nobody here has heard of — so reach for it when the question is "who references this, anywhere" rather than "who liked this post". Both are two-phase for the same reason: `links/all` reports which sources are non-empty, and only then does enumeration cost anything.

`lexicons` answers a different question from `sample_firehose` in `browsing-bluesky`: UFOs consumes Jetstream and rolls it up per NSID, so a single call reports what is running across the whole network without sampling anything here. `--others` drops `app.bsky.`, `chat.bsky.` and `com.atproto.`, which is what turns the leaderboard from "Bluesky is large" into a list of the other apps. `--schema NSID` fetches the published lexicon document from the publisher's own repo, deriving the publisher by the reverse-DNS convention (`com.whtwnd.blog.entry` → `whtwnd.com`); publishing that record is optional and plenty of busy collections skip it, so a miss is a fact about the publisher, not a failure.

Cost shape

State is a `/tmp` SQLite scratch (`ATPROTO_CACHE` to relocate), session-scoped by design. Cold start is the only start, and that is fine because **wall-clock and token cost are decoupled** — the script absorbs the HTTP fan-out and returns a digest. Measured: `interactions --hours 8` over 100 posts ≈ 18s and ~30 output lines, against ~15 tool calls doing it by hand.

`interactions` is two-phase on purpose: one cheap `links/all` per post reports which link paths are non-empty, so per-path enumeration only runs where something exists. Preserve that when extending.

Handling failure

`Unavailable` is raised for egress blocks, 4xx, and exhausted retries; the CLI exits 2 with the reason on stderr. Report which layer failed rather than retrying blindly — "the AppView is down" and "atproto is down" are different facts and the distinction is usually the answer the user wants.

Two known limits worth stating plainly when they bite:

• **Third-party PDSes may be egress-blocked.** ~3% of a typical follow graph

self-hosts (eurosky.social, blacksky.app, personal PDSes). Those reads fail with a clear allowlist message; add the host to project egress settings.

• **Times come from TIDs**, decoded from the