AT Protocol vs Nostr: Why We Made the Call

TL;DR: AT protocol is like having a whole cake from a master baker to frost. But Nostr is like having some eggs and you need to go find all of the other ingredients

Katie: Alright, team. Let’s talk AT Protocol vs. Nostr for PeopleTok. Huge decision—are we building a car, or starting with just the engine?

Andy: Laughs I think Nostr is more like… buying an engine off Craigslist and duct-taping it to a skateboard. It moves, technically.

Katie: Wow, savage. Okay, sell me on AT Protocol.

Andy: Sure. Think of AT Proto as more like a prebuilt car and the corresponding blueprint. With software, we are always creating the blueprint (designing) and building the car (putting pieces together for the car, writing code for software). It’s got all the parts we need—user accounts, encryption, video uploads. With Nostr, we’d basically be like, “Cool, we have an engine! Now let’s spend the next two years building the rest of the car.”

Katie: Sounds… painful. But Nostr is simpler, right?

Andy: Oh, absolutely. Nostr’s whole pitch is: “All messages are sha256-encoded JSON objects sent over a websocket.” That’s it. You get a message with an ID, a timestamp, and maybe a little tag saying, “Hey, this is a video.”

Katie: And that’s bad because…?

Andy: It’s not bad, it’s just basic. Like, “Hi, here’s a paper airplane with your data on it. Good luck building TikTok with that.”

Katie: Fair. But isn’t “basic” easier to work with?

Andy: Only if you want to do a TON of work later. Imagine starting with Nostr—cool, we’ve got messages flying around. Now we need to add user authentication, video storage, media blobs, and a way to make it all secure. AT Protocol has all of that baked in.

Katie: So, AT Protocol is more like… a Tesla?

Andy: More like a truck. It’s rugged, scalable, and already hauling 30 million users over at BlueSky.

---

Scalability

Katie: Let’s talk about scalability. Nostr could scale, right?

Andy: Technically, yes. But you’d have to build all the infrastructure yourself. With AT Protocol, it’s like plugging into a power grid that’s already running.

Katie: Okay, but what about feeds? Everyone’s obsessed with custom feeds.

Andy: That’s the beauty of AT Protocol. BlueSky lets you spin up custom feeds—basically “fake servers” that serve real data. For PeopleTok, we can just plug into one of those while we’re building. No server headaches.

Katie: Love that for us.

---

Openness

Katie: What about openness? Nostr’s big on decentralization. Doesn’t AT Protocol feel… less pure?

Andy: laughs Purity’s great until you’re drowning in dev work. AT Protocol is still open-source under an MIT license. We get the freedom without reinventing the wheel.

Katie: Okay, last pitch: Why NOT Nostr?

Andy: Because we’d be spending years adding all the things AT Protocol already has. Why waste time? It’s like deciding to bake a cake from scratch when someone’s handing you a pre-made cake and saying, “Just add frosting.”

Katie: Fair enough. You win. AT Protocol it is. Let’s grab the truck and get PeopleTok rolling.

---

The Verdict: Nostr is like a cool DIY project for hobbyists. AT Protocol? That’s the pro toolset for building something big, fast, and scalable. For PeopleTok, the choice is clear: grab the keys to AT Protocol and hit the road. 🚚✨