Nick Gerakines

Protocols, platforms, and machine learning; GitHub

Alt: myself with a thick mustache, septum ring, and hat

We can just do things.
9 days
20 hrs
36 min
36 sec
Hybrid

ATmosphereConf 2026

Thu, Mar 26, 2026 at 4:00 PM - Mon, Mar 30, 2026

ATmosphereConf is the global AT Protocol community conference Join us in Vancouver, BC, Canada, at the UBC campus Nest building. Come early for two days of extended events, deep dives, and local activities on Thursday and Friday, then gather for two full conference days with topics for everyone on Saturday and Sunday. We Can Just Do Things. Together. Early bird tickets will be on sale soon! Add your email to this RSVP or enter it in the ticketing system https://atmosphereconf.org

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Taking a small mental health break from social media for a bit.
5 90
My latest bluesky post

Atproto users need a way to express granular AI preferences and carve out exceptions for specific entities or content types. This post introduces community.lexicon.preference.ai, a lexicon schema that decomposes AI usage into distinct categories and adds a scoped override mechanism built on top of Bluesky's User Intents proposal.

atprotofans.com was a proof of concept for payments on ATProtocol built at Graze Social. This post is about what we built, why proof of payment on protocol matters, and what it makes possible.

Graze Social sponsored my first in-person IETF meeting in Montreal last November. This post is about what it was like to be there and why standards participation matters for small companies.

IFTTA is an automation platform built on ATProtocol at Graze Social. It started as a hack-day idea and became a working system for event processing on protocol.

Public anchor records paired with sidecar records in permissioned spaces give ATProtocol apps a composable pattern for blending open discoverability with controlled access.

Record elicitation is a pattern where a client asks an AppView to construct a record from the user's intent, rather than building it locally. This lets the AppView handle business logic, validation, and schema complexity while the client retains full authority over what gets written to the user's repository.

Permissioned data is a love triangle between the user, the identities they grant permissions to, and the applications everyone uses to view controlled data. We don't need to change or reinvent the protocol to have it, because ATProtocol already supports it.

Lexicon Garden is growing and moving! With community support, the service is migrating to new infrastructure in Europe, offering better hardware and more space for new features.

Lexicon Garden can help you explore and interact with lexicons both in the browser and with the help of your favorite agent.

Validate both lexicon schemas and records against those schemas.

You can use Lexicon Garden to create and manage lexicon schemas right from the browser.

Lexicon Garden helps you browse, view, and understand ATProtocol Lexicons.

This post looks more closely at Brittany Ellich's work on representing groups in ATProtocol. It builds on earlier conversations and explores how these ideas might work in practice.

ATProtocol's inter-service authentication currently has no way to identify which client is making a request on behalf of a user, forcing services to rely on forgeable headers or clunky workarounds to establish trust relationships. Adding an optional client_id claim to inter-service JWTs would solve this cleanly, enabling service-to-service trust, rate limiting, and feature flags using the cryptographic infrastructure we already have.

This post introduces the formal ATProtocol attestation specification, a framework for adding cryptographic signatures to ATProto records through two complementary patterns: inline attestations that embed signatures directly in records, and remote attestations that store proof in separate repository records. The specification prevents replay attacks through repository binding, uses CID-based content addressing for integrity, and provides the cryptographic foundation for verified credentials, trusted content, and authenticated interactions in the decentralized ATProtocol ecosystem.

Deep technical implementation of the unforgeable endorsement system. Covers step-by-step CID computation, complete code for the endorsement workflow, validation algorithms, firehose event processing, and detailed security analysis of attack vectors. Includes working code examples, lexicon definitions, and the cryptographic mechanisms that make forgery mathematically impossible.

Traditional professional endorsements on platforms like LinkedIn lack cryptographic proof—anyone could forge them, and the platform controls the truth. This article introduces a two-record architecture using ATProtocol's Content Identifiers (CIDs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) to create mathematically unforgeable mutual attestations. By separating proof creation from endorsement acceptance and leveraging the firehose for distributed validation, we build a system where both parties cryptographically consent and no central authority can manipulate the record.

at://work is a modern job board built on ATProtocol where your profile and job listings are stored on your own Personal Data Server, giving you true ownership of your professional data. As a full AppView with XRPC APIs and remote MCP server capabilities, it makes job market data accessible to both users and developers while proving that professional networking can be decentralized and user-controlled.

Ohio's new age verification law requiring ID to access adult websites (starting September 29, 2025) fails to protect children while forcing adults to surrender personal data to access legal content. This "small government" Republican law creates a surveillance system that invades privacy without addressing the real online dangers kids face.

QuickDID is a high-performance, open source handle resolution service for the ATmosphere that serves as both public infrastructure at https://quickdid.smokesignal.tools and deployable software under MIT license. It offers flexible caching strategies (memory/Redis/SQLite), scales from single-instance to distributed deployments, and includes production features like rate limiting and proactive cache refresh. Currently a release candidate, it provides a drop-in alternative to Bluesky's resolver while giving developers full control over their handle resolution infrastructure.

Exploring how AT Protocol and SMTP can work together to make secure messaging possible by combining 50-year-old email infrastructure with modern cryptographic identity. Building on Chris Boscolo's AT-SMS proposal, this post introduces ideas for adding SMTP services directly to DID documents and leveraging PDS-level cryptographic operations through XRPC methods. The result: verifiable, encrypted communication where messages work like signed JWTs over email, handles prove identity without centralized authorities, and users maintain complete control over their messaging infrastructure. A technical deep-dive into how "boring" technology like SMTP and DNS, combined with AT Protocol's identity primitives, could finally deliver truly portable, private, and permanent messaging.

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