One for the Adapters Box

I love the promises made by the AT Protocol. Having ownership and control over your data? A means by which to move it between platforms if necessary? That's the sort of thing I love to see, and I feel knowing what all is possible with this new protocol is part of being able to use it responsibly. Not just because the landscape is new, but because I've been around the block on new technologies before.

I'm a millennial. I've seen technology, both physical and digital, rise and fall over the years. I've still got a box of cables and adapters "just in case" lying around my house. It's part of why I try to rely on formats like txt, csv, or json. They're just durable, and most software these days will let you import/export in one of those formats. Being able to work with them not only lets you keep your data long term, but lets you make connections in ways people don't expect.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol are new. Because of this, it's easy to be reliant on others to make tools and connectors to have the data work reliably with existing software. You know what a lot of those tools do work with, though? RSS feeds.

As someone who lamented the demise of Google Reader, back in the days of "do no evil", I have a big appreciation for RSS feeds. Miss me with that "just sign up for email alerts"; I don't want you having my email on your marketing list. No, RSS is clean, private, and versatile. And it's ubiquitous enough that you can often find RSS feeds for sites that don't even have the little icon. It just works.

That being the case, I made this project that fetches RSS feeds for a given Bluesky profile. It's not fancy or supremely useful; it really just puts a nice UI over what Bluesky has set up on fthe back-end. But it was a nice practice project that adds a convenient tool in my toolbox. Someday it too will sit unused in the box of adapters and cables, but for the moment, it serves its purpose.

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