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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

People have released multiple open-source alt clients (mostly in beta states, because it hasn't been very long). I've played with the API myself and it's really quite easy to use, especially with an SDK (there's an official one in typescript and community ones are sprouting up in almost every major language). I'm in a discord for people doing stuff with the API that has almost 1k members

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I tried Nostr on a web client. It was pretty easy. Just going to the website was enough. I have not seen such a thing for Bluesky yet.

Is there a client online that one can simply use by visiting a website?

You could definitely build a read-only one; only account creation and the things that go with it are invite-only, the rest is already public and distributed. I don't know of a client like you describe existing yet, but I could use the API endpoints I've already worked with to build one if I wanted to take the time.

Edit: here's one https://skypulse.dvy.io/

The invite-only aspect is part of the protocol?

There's an underlying protocol (AT protocol), and then there's the Bluesky app that's built on top of it (and has its own public API, etc). Only the Bluesky layer requires authentication (and is therefore gated behind closed signups for now). My understanding is it's mainly gated because they're a tiny team experiencing explosive growth, so they have to make sure it doesn't take down the whole system (they recently had to migrate DBs because users doubled in 24 hours)

High-level explanation of the protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35822267

But why are there no other public webclients that let you create an identity and communicate via the AT protocol?

There's a layer of data and interaction that exists at the application level right now. I don't know exactly where the line is drawn between the two, but I think eg. likes might be at the bsky level right now (while posts themselves are at the AT Protocol level)

I believe the team plans to move as many things as possible down to the AT level over time

Because currently nobody communicates via AT. There's nobody to talk to.

Yes, staging.bsky.app was the web client all along. They finally acknowledged it’s really a prod site, so now they’re moving it to bsky.app

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