microcosm: atproto building blocks

After half a year of focused building, it’s time to open up some space for community support. Join the microcosm discord and say hello!

(discord is not perfect, we know. temporary home until we get something more open set up!)

six months ago today!

Six months of microcosm What's happened and what's next

Today is the six-monthiversary of microcosm! Wrote a few reflections on where things are and what's next.

take 2: microcosm rust sources now on @tangled.sh, this time at @microcosm.blue instead of my personal account oop.

tangled.sh/@microcosm.b...

the main advantage over fogejo/gitlab instances is that you can use the existing global infrastructure such as constellation (from @microcosm.blue) for querying all forks of a project everywhere. or push notifications with spacedust from the same

alright we should be back up: notifications.microcosm.blue

note that notifications start out paused by default, so make sure you enable them after reconnecting.

the notifications themselves are all stored locally on your device, so they'll still be there, but your preferences (muting etc) will not

closeup of a pi zero with a pink usb cord and purple hand-drawn googly eyes on its cpu

it's not coming back up. rip baku 2025–2025.

moving the demo to another host now. if you were using this demo, you'll need to log in again once it's back up.

service note: the demo app notifications.microcosm.blue is down since 7:13AM ET

the pi zero host is offline and its power LED not lit -- rebooting by unplugging and plugging it back in now.

main text: This server has indexed 7,008,150,030 links between 1,236,698,829 targets and sources from 18,202,546 identities over 183 days. above is a paragraph: It works by recursively walking all records coming through the firehose, searching for anything that looks like a link. Links are indexed by the target they point at, the collection the record came from, and the JSON path to the link in that record. and below is a note: (indexing new records in real time, backfill still TODO)

a raspberry pi 5 with active cooler on top with googly eyes on its fan a white raspberry pi-branded power cable is connected to its USB-C port, and a black networking cable connected with green and amber LEDs lit. it's on a dark wood surface with part of a power strip behind. several networking cables are messily crossing the edge of the frame.

oh hey SEVEN BILLION atproto backlinks indexed on a little raspberry pi called Cassiopeia who's served millions of requests for apps building on @microcosm.blue

nothing-happened no-impact microcosm incident this morning, the best kind of incident

friday is for demos bsky.bad-example.com/zero-bluesky...

at://giveaways 🎉 Host a giveaway from a Bluesky post.

I wrote a mini atproto project today. Meet at://giveaways! Host a giveaway from a post and choose winners from likes, reposts, or both!

giveaways.baileytownsend.dev

All hosted from a single index.html tangled.sh/@baileytowns...

and uses @microcosm.blue's constellation to see who liked/reposted the giveaway post

and we're back up! just under 12hrs of replay for UFOs to catch up on, which you can monitor on its status page: ufos.microcosm.blue/status/

should catch up pretty quick!

🛸 UFOs service note: we just crashed. Cause known, solution available, will fix in the morning.

“This server has indexed 6,103,826,252 links between 1,025,088,794 targets and sources from 17,196,578 identities over 153 days.” screenshot of a mobile browser with url https://constellation.microcosm.blue

🌌 constellation reached two big number milestones over the weekend: another billion backlinks (6B now), and:

ONE BILLION distinct link *targets* indexed

i'm using constellation now ;) thanks @microcosm.blue / @bad-example.com

and we're back!

screenshot of the constellation home page but running at http://cassiopeia:6789 (the new pi host)

three raspberry pis and a 2.5" ssd on a wooden surface, with a dark purple coiled cable messily in the foreground. two of the raspis have google eyes and so does the ssd, but the middle pi does not (yet!)

🌌 constellation will be down for some brief maintenance:

💾 new fast 1TB nvme disk (current index: 177GiB)
🤖 newly ansibilized automated host setup

the index is already restored to the nvme. downtime will be for minor surgery to swap nvme.

They are watching us 🛸 @microcosm.blue

ufos.microcosm.blue/collection/?...

Least important of anything happening in the world right now but: the raspberry pi running the UFOs API crashed, and i'm away from home for the weekend. sorry and it will be back up monday!

little service blip for UFOs but it’s back up now 🛸

🛸 UFOs: Explore atproto lexicons Sample records and timeseries statistics for *every* collection seen in the ATmosphere.

Launching: 🛸 UFOs, a global ATProto lexicon explorer! 🛸

Find sample records for every collection NSID ever published!

+timeseries stats, unique user counts, and more!

🛸 App: ufos.microcosm.blue
👾 API: ufos-api.microcosm.blue

🛸 UFOs release checklist:
✅ automated db backups
✅ reverse proxy w/ metrics
✅ raspi4 host metrics
✅ app metrics for consumer, storage, api server
♻️ per-endpoint cache config

🔜

and we're back up!

🏃‍♀️ EU relay: relay3.fr.hose.cam
🛩️ EU Jetstream: jetstream2.fr.hose.cam

sorry for the disruption

the microcosm france jetstream instance (jetstream2.fr.hose.cam) is down -- investigating

✅ reboot done, constellation back up.
✅ built new release
✅ restarted on new version

done!

✅ reboot done, constellation back up.
✅ built new release
🔄 restarting onto new version...

✅ reboot done, constellation back up.
🔄 building for new release...
☐ restart onto new version (next)

deploying the fix for this and taking the opportunity to reboot the raspi this morning. constellation will be offline briefly twice.