• by Colin Kirkland , March 11, 2024

In an effort to further compete with X, decentralized microblogging app Bluesky is offering a series of “AT Protocol Grants,” intended to prioritize its growing community of developers committed to building the social network’s new protocol of the same name.

In a post from last week, Bluesky announced that it is launching the AT Protocol Grants program in an attempt to foster the “growth and sustainability” of its evolving developer ecosystem. In the program’s first iteration, the company says it will distribute a total of $10,000 in micro-grants of $500 to $2,000 per project based on cost, usage, and more.

“Over the last few months, we’ve seen independent developers create projects ranging from browser extensions and clients to PDS implementations and [AT Protocol] tooling,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The AT Protocol is the protocol that Bluesky’s network is built on, providing a client and server API (application programming interface) for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notification and content to users. It is comparable to ActivityPub, which drives competing decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and, eventually, Meta's Threads app.

Developers interested in participating can fill out a form to apply for the Bluesky grants.

Although there is no precise deadline to apply, Bluesky will make an announcement when the $10,000 has been used up.

The company says that it has already distributed $3,000 of the $10,000 in a pilot program to developers behind two leading SDKs (software development kits), including SkyFeed, a custom tool that has already facilitated the development of over 40,000 unique feeds.

“To be eligible for a grant, your project must be open source,” the company noted. “We pay out grants via public GitHub Sponsorships.”

In addition, Bluesky has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer $5,000 in AWS Activate credits to AT Protocol developers, who can apply the credits to their AWS bill in order to cover costs from cloud services, including machine learning, compute, databases, storage, containers, developing tools and more.