[3] It is under development by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation originally created as an independent research group within Twitter to investigate the possibility of decentralizing the service.

[3] It employs a modular microservice architecture and a federated, server-agnostic user identity to enable movement between protocol services, with the goal of providing an integrated online experience.

[8][9][10] As of 2024, Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol's development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.

[5] Compared to other protocols for social networking such as ActivityPub, where implementations are typically designed as a monolithic server that hosts both user data and the application, it splits up these elements into smaller microservices, which can be used as needed.

[13][failed verification] AT Protocol clients and services interoperate through an HTTP API called XRPC that primarily uses JSON for data serialization.

[20] Repositories store collections in a Merkle search tree, which sorts records chronologically based on their TID.

[22] This allows network agents to access and process arbitrary media files regardless of their original schema or upload context.

[5] Platform clients access the protocol on the user's behalf by querying their PDS, which, in turn, fetches the requested data from other services within the network.

Since network events are resolved through the protocol's network-wide indexing infrastructure, the availability of any single PDS is, by design, potentially inconsequential to the user experience.

They utilize network-wide information from the firehose, such as posts, likes, follows, and replies, to create customized user experiences within their clients.

App Views can implement invite systems, custom algorithms, alternative clients, varying monetization and content moderation strategies, and off-protocol services.

[31][32][33] All posts within the AT Protocol follow a specific global schema language called a lexicon to support different service and platform modalities.

This approach allows App Views to create custom lexicons that are tailored to their specific use case while maintaining compatibility with the broader network.

[35] Lexicons are referenced within records using Namespaced Identifiers (NSIDs), which consist of a domain authority in reverse domain-name order, followed by an arbitrary name segment.

)[29] The modularity of these services allows for a customizable, stackable, user-centric approach to content curation and moderation within the protocol.

After a PDS query, they return a list of post IDs to the user's App View, which can then be used to create curated feeds.

[45] Additionally, the news aggregator Flipboard allows users to login with their Bluesky account to view and interact with posts from the service.