Olamaelcu Olamaelcu

On Livtet, ATProto and the First Release

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Intended Audience

Anyone interested in Livtet but also having some understanding of ATProto primitives

Livtet, Who Art Thou?

Livtet is a project I've mulled over and over (and over - and over!); starting it from scratch when I discovered a new form of organizing content that worked with my sense of library sciences. I've decided to take a hard shift and put it into the public again. It used to live on SourceHut but I brought it to GitHub so I can take advantage of a few things:

  • Sponsorship: this project is not cheap to develop and I want it to survive
  • Availability: it's one thing to work with advocates of AT on https://tangled.org but it's another to get the platform that holds everyone who considers themselves a member of the open source community on it.
  • Collaboration: It's not to say that SourceHut and Tangled aren't collaborative platforms; we as a developer community were so burned by SourceForge that we let GitHub become [our one and only "VCS"]1.

Protocol Implementation Driven-Development (PID2)

With all that said, Livtet has become my gateway project into the complexity of AT Protocol. I have plans to have it work with Nostr soon and had a small prototype generated by DeepSeek but I need to scale up infrastructure to handle both2. In order to really operate in a communal fashion, I decided, after some conversation of not taking the initial approach that applications like Bookhive and Popfeed have in making custom lexicons for their tracking of information, and leaned into the spirit of https://lexicon.community in a small prototype called Bibliograph. I initially had a custom lexicon for it under the NSID net.olamaelcu.livtet but interoperability is way more important to me.

Bibliograph is the result of conversation with folks interested in tracking books on-protocol and some early research on what that'd look like for a real application, like Livtet to make use of it. For example, my profile page shows information that apps like Bookhive and Popfeed can start consuming to show today, thanks to the XRPC methods provided by Bibliograph. You can see the conversation that sparked it on AT Protocol Discourse - be sure to chime in!

One could eschew using Bibliograph and ingest the AT firehose themselves to compose a graph of information about books and the information around it today, combing over existing lexicons that emit such information so it provides a "community-powered backfill", so to speak. However, having folks move to the new lexicon for new work helps test out the kinks in the spec and schema.

First Release?

This brings me to the more interesting page for layfolks: Livtet's web experience should have an early release sometime this month. I'm slating it for late August as I'm also trying to work on the native mobile applications to go with it as well. Those are actually open source as I hope to demonstrate how to use the core library with it but it'll support communicating to the Livtet API (to be documented) as well as eventually using the Bibliograph XRPC directly, making it a "native" AT Protocol client. I'd love to see clients like Heron sneak in support for this, the same way it supports Standard Site subscriptions as this will show the plural power of AT Protocol and the things you can unlock with a simple API.

Let me know what you think by mentioning @olamaelcu.net on AT Proto, about Livtet on its UserInput page or sending e-mail to jacky@olamaelcu.net!

Footnotes

  1. My words here - I understand that the act of making things easier to use and hiding complexity is Actually Good. I wish, at times, that the D in DVCS was something that the executive product team at GitHub focused on but that'd eat into their money. ↩

  2. Would you believe that all of the apps under <olamaelcu.net> are running on a 2GB RAM droplet? ↩