Guido

Survivorship bias FTW 😂

For all of you #buildinginpublic:

"creating in public is volunteering to be misunderstood"
- @hankgreen.bsky.social

For Barazo? I don't. There is no local-first P2P in a public forum

maybe I can return the inspiration favor: bsky.app/profile/gui.... (also applies to non-Astro sites of course) 😅

And as always: feel free to send in a PR if you see any improvements that should be made 🙏

github.com/gxjansen/astro-md-alternate

Markdown, llms.txt and AI crawlers Dries is the Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and the Co-founder and Executive Chair of Acquia.

Inspired by Dries Buytaert who pioneered this on his site:
dri.es/markdown-llms-txt-and-ai-crawlers

Drupal, WordPress and Next.js already had plugins for this. AFAIK Astro didn't... so now it does 😅

For those who also want to experiment with this: I made it super easy for you (I hope 😅). Minimal config and your content collections get the markdown endpoints: npmjs.com/package/astro-md-alternate

AI slop is drowning communities. Verifiable track records can fix it. AI-generated junk content is flooding every community platform. Traditional moderation can't keep up. Portable, cross-platform contribution history is a structural fix that addresses the root cause.

Opening your site up to AI crawlers is... not uncontroversial. I get that. But I think we should at least figure out what's going on and experiment with it. Wrote more about that here: gui.do/post/ai-slop-reputation/

For the past decades, websites were optimized for humans and search engines.

AI agents are now the third, and many sites aren't ready for them, but now your @astro.build website will be!

Example: gui.do/post/practical-guide-to-building-antifragile-tech-stack.md

YAML frontmatter with title, date, categories. Clean body with all the MDX stuff stripped out. Plus a link rel="alternate" tag so (LLM) crawlers discover it automatically

Hey @astro.build people 👋

You can now make all you Astro posts available as clean markdown for AI agents by simply appending .md to the URL.

And I published it as an Astro integration so you can do the same 💪

Guido X Jansen | Community Builder | Technical Ecosystems | DevRel Leadership Building technical ecosystems that create real business value. I build community functions - the strategy, the systems, and the teams to run them.

Super cool! I right away implemented this for gui.do (apparently there already was an @astro.build plugin for this).

Thx for the inspiration! 💪

Ooh thought that was just for the evening I missed, not the series.

Done!

Oh shit I missed that, where do I subscribe for the next?

I'm creating a forum on Bluesky (github.com/singi-labs/b...), so far I can do pretty much everything I need with only this 🙂

Plus: if you want to build something that only/completely runs locally and gives you full privacy/encription, then imho basing that on ATproto is probably the wrong protocol for to begin with?... it's kind of built on the opposite assumption 😅

True, but forum posts are public by nature. You're sharing them because you want people to read and respond. That's the whole point. A forum isn't private notes. So "you own it because you can leave" makes more sense here than "you own it because nobody else has it" 😄

Yeah, fair point. But just having the option to leave is already a huge step up. Most people will stick with their default provider, and that's fine. The moment they start to enshittify things, you can actually walk away. Not perfect, but way better than being locked in 🤷

and another one just now. SOMEONE STOP ME 😡

Dammit I bought another domain name

Barazo update: threaded replies are live, and admins pick how deep they nest 🧵

So: no plan for offline-first replication, because imho it's not a problem that applies to the usecase of a forum. The PDS is the sync layer and that's the portability and ownership that matters here.

For personal tools, device-local ownership makes sense. For forums... not really? By definition, forums are publicly accessible, multi-user, real-time. I don't think anybody needs to draft forum posts offline on their laptop and sync them later? 😅

And if a user really want local: you can self-host your PDS on your own machine. It just needs to be online for the network to reach it, which is a hosting concern, not something Barazo or any other AppView needs to solve.

Local-first (what you're building) puts data on the device. ATproto puts it on your PDS: a server you control and can migrate between providers. Your posts, replies, reactions are records on your PDS.

If a Barazo instance shuts down, your data is still there and any other AppView can re-index it.

There's an assumption in this question I want to push back on: "once you want members to actually own their local state."

Do they, though?

AT Protocol and local-first are two different answers to "who owns the data."

Screenshot of the Personal account settings page in Barazo: forum/local specific settings

Screenshot of the Personal account settings page in Barazo: global/cross-forum settings

Account Settings page coming along nicely.

Split between settings that are local (to the specific forum you are currently in) versus global (settings that will apply to ALL Barazo forums you are a member of.

Barazo: community forums where members own their data I'm building an open source forum platform on the AT Protocol. Members log in with their Bluesky account, posts live on their own data server, and reputation follows them across communities.

It's alpha. Code is open. I probably have blind spots 🙈

Full article: gui.do/post/introducing-barazo-community-forums/

40M+ Bluesky users can log in without creating a new account. Forum shuts down? Your content doesn't disappear. No more starting from scratch.