Hi everyone!
I’d like to share Off the Clock, a members-only community site for friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors, built on atproto spaces. This started as a hands-on experiment to model and work through communities, sub-communities, and feeds in the context of atproto space and has been instrumental in working through the quirks and processes.
(The screenshots are from a working demo community with made-up members.)
What it is
Off the Clock is a community container that implements a data-plane and feed service both with “service identities”. There is one top-level community that requires an invitation to join, and within it are groups and spaces that are functionality independent, but still within the larger community container. This means that a community can have groups for clubs, activities, neighborhoods, and social circles each with their own lifespan and exclusivity.
Nothing is readable without signing in, so there are no drive-by replies or pile-ons from strangers. Every member was added by an admin, and the grant can carry a note saying who vouched for them.
What people do there
Within a community members can create posts, events, polls, and bookmarks. Content exists in the community that it was created in.
Events show times in your own time zone, a map, and RSVPs, and members can subscribe to a space’s events from their calendar app. Polls show who voted for what, with write-ins.
Each space can set a policy that members accept before they read or post, and admins can label posts as a spoiler or not safe for work, so they arrive folded, or hide them entirely.
Posts carry pictures, voice notes, video, link cards, and players for YouTube, Spotify, and the like. A link to a public Bluesky post shows the post in place, read from its author’s own PDS, so the conversation about it stays inside. External records are backfilled lazily.
How it’s built
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One community identity owns every space. @off-the-clock.us holds a management space and a content space per community space. Everything members create is written to their own PDS in the context of that community’s space. Off the Clock indexes content and makes it available to the members of the community, but doesn’t control or own the data.
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Membership as command records Admins write grants into the management spaces for communities which are in-turn converted to space management commands. The AppView projects who is in which space from those records, and as the spaces’ managing app it answers the PDS’s access checks on every credential and every write.
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Feeds are records too. Admins write a feed’s rule in JSON Logic (posts with media, upcoming events soonest first, a hashtag), dry-run it, and publish it. The feed server is also a member of the space and can observe membership and content changes from the management space and content space for each community.
I think atproto spaces are going to be really useful for creating data containers for people to engage with each other. I also think that in context of shared services like feed providers and functions like moderation, there is a lot to work out. I’m especially interested in feedback on the delegated membership model and how service identities can be leveraged.
Let me know if you are interested in hopping on a call some time soon to talk through the details. I have some product and technical slides that I can go through, especially around the engagement and feed bits.