Background

Everyone on the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of apps, users and content supported by the AT Protocol) gets its own personal space to hosts the content we create. That's neat, because it means the user owns its data, its content and friends.

All of it: every Bluesky post, offprint article, every like, every popfeed review we post or the like we give to one, everything lands in the user's own personal space. It's called a PDS (Personal Data Server) and if you're on the ATmosphere, you have one, hosted where you initially signed up (probably Bluesky for most of us) or where you've "pdsmooved" it since because you're a tech-curious weirdo like me (i moved to Eurosky, the biggest European Atmosphere infrastructure so far who also makes the excellent bluesky-alternative client mu.social).

But what does it look like ?

Your PDS is like a website without a face, a "frontend". It's basically just content files stored online in a syntax called json. Json is great for data exchange between machines, but not so much for us humans.

This is an example json record... Not exactly sexy, right?

But when you view it on Bluesky, it renders it for us humans (use the sliders):

That above is just one record. We usually have hundreds, some of us have millions....

There is no app (that I know of) that shows an entire PDS content in one global view.

So I built it.

In my case, I've been on the Atmosphere since Oct 4, 2024. I've used it almost every day, quite vividly!

So I thought I would give my space a face.

After some fooling around I remembered this old-but-awesome freeware GrandPerspective.

It scans your computer's hard drive and displays its content using a simple system: one square for each file, the size of which is relative to its size in bytes vs the entire disk space.

This type of visualization is called a Tree Map - the most awesome of all might be David McCandless' Billion-dollar-o-gram and Trillion-dollar-o-gram.

What's great is that all data being public on the Atmosphere, it can work for everyone's not just mine. So go ahead, try it out here:

A few highlights & notes

• If you sign in, you can then use the app to edit and delete any record on your PDS!

• PDS-GrandPerspective downloads the data so for some users, that's a lot of data. Make sure to be on a Wifi connection.

• Although it works on a phone, it's best viewed on a desktop browser.

• You can download your visualization as an image in 3 format: avatar, banner or "as-is".

• You can show/hide each lexicon. In fact, the script auto-hide the biggest lexicon when it has too big a size compared to the second one, to make the visualisation more interesting. A simple click in the left bar reveals it if you don't mind it.

Example results

Last thoughts

I think this is just the first app of many, as it is pretty unique to the AT Protocol as a technology that allows anyone to create data visualizations of all types. One could even turn it into a 3D navigable information space! Or link it to artistic explorations, such as Mondrian's Boogie Woogie... Or one might go explore data with a more gamified approach, as a city of buildings that you could visit...

In fact, I might give it a go one day, as this is very fun to imagine and then build.

That's all I got for now. Hope you guys and gals like it and spread the word!