Vienna's first atproto meetup

I mihaizaurus.at had been following the discourse in the atproto space for over a year now, and being a bit taken by the excitement from the last ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, I started to look for a similar type of community locally that would scratch my nerdy itch. Naturally, when I saw in march that jyc.dev was organising an npmx.dev meetup in Vienna, I got excited to meet more like-minded people.

As one thing led to another, and through common interests, when I decided to hit up localfirstconf.com this year in Berlin, I was happy to see it having such an overlap with atproto, both in ideals as well as in community. I met bmann.ca and introduced myself and in talking about not having any atproto meetups yet but seeing a lot of people from there online and in our circles, he put me in contact with cypherhippie.bsky.social and emily.space who had the same idea. With the occasion of there being the IETF 126 in Vienna the following week, we decided to organise our first (of many) atproto meetup.

The First Meetup

Coming back fresh from LFC, energized by the talks and the people, a new account joined the atmosphere, with the first post announcing an upcoming meetup in Vienna to celebrate IETF and the atproto working group there:

As the date grew nearer, we ended up having close to 20 participants showing interest. Paul had graciously offered the Metalab and its biggest room (the Otter Space room) for the event and a few of us even gathered there early to stream the IETF atproto working group session on the big screen

Paul also generously offered to cook an industrial batch of amazing vegan curry and rice for the attendees.

For many of us locals, this was the first introduction to the Metalab and everyone's excitement about this amazing hackerspace, the oldest and largest in Vienna, was quite palpable. It made many of us want to spend more time there and help support it.

The Talks

emily.space felt really creative and wrote up a pretty awesome and welcoming whiteboard agenda for our first session:

The first session saw trueberryless.org and mihaizaurus.at give a shortened version of the npmx.dev talk from LFC with a focus on community projects and how it can be an entry point to atproto, and how "you can just do things".

emily.space gave an inspiring talk about science communication on atproto, why it's important, how atproto is a great medium for it and for making it available to the masses easily, but also how there were some hurdles, due to the lack of support for floats in the current implementation of JSON for data.

Markus (@peacekeep3r.bsky.social) gave a presentation about DIDs and how he had used other types of DIDs beyond did:plc and did:web on a local version of the atproto stack as a proof of concept and what that opened up.

We also had dholms.at and bnewbold.net give a quick recap of how the IETF 126 session had been for them and how they saw the atproto working group moving forward beyond this point, and while I have no photos of that, the general idea was that it was quite an entertaining session. The whole session can be found here:

To close out the talks, cypherhippie.bsky.social presented msonnberger.com's Masters project from the University of Vienna, Fedisky, an ActivityPub federation sidecar for ATProto PDS.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you to cypherhippie.bsky.social and to Metalab for offering us a space and making us feel at home. Everyone who came for the meetup seemed to enjoy the space, the chats and the talks, and that curry was really delicious.

Thank you to the folks who came from the IETF session and who stayed late with us, even though some were planning on going to more sessions the next morning. It showed us that you had a great time.

Thank you to dholms.at, bnewbold.net and Bluesky for the beers 🍻.

And to the locals, let's make this the first of many more to come!

P.S. for the next meetup, we're staying more grounded and down to earth, with it being in the Library of the Metalab. See you in person or online on 31.08