A good friend of mine, Emil, recently stopped using Facebook. Something about cookies, and principles, and all those things. Unfortunately, up until then we had been using Facebook’s Messenger to coordinate lunches. He also felt burned having adopted big services a few times only to watch them go under or turn hostile. So we had a hard time figuring out what chat program to use next.
WhatsApp was out—centralized, and owned by Meta anyway, which he had quit. Signal too—all the data lives on their servers. Telegram the same. In the end we decided to try Element. It’s cool and runs on Matrix. But it’s kinda janky, and setting up your own homeserver is quite a bit of work.
Which made me think: would ATProto be feasible instead? Their concept of personal data servers (PDS) would mean that users comfortable trusting a central authority can just log in with a Bluesky account and stay on Bluesky’s infra for all their message posting. Whereas people who want control can run their own PDS.
I played around with the idea for a bit, bounced things back and forth with Claude and ChatGPT, and started to see the outlines of an architecture that would be fun to try.
So here it is. Moat is messaging on ATProto. It is also some comforting cryptographic water around your data keep. Try it in your terminal. Log in with your Bluesky account.
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