Bluesky launches Protocol Services with replay for AT Protocol data

Why it matters

Bluesky is turning Graber's open-protocol thesis into managed developer infrastructure. Jetstream v2 lowers the cost of building products that need both historical and live social data.

Founder Jay Graber (@arcalinea) and Bluesky are giving Bluesky's protocol infrastructure a clearer identity. Bluesky launched Bluesky Protocol Services on August 13, pairing a new developer site with Jetstream v2, software development kits and a rebuilt TypeScript package for applications using the AT Protocol network.

The release lands five months after Graber stepped down as CEO to become chief innovation officer and return her attention to building. In her March announcement, Graber described the consumer app as the reference client for a broader open protocol and said she was most energized by exploring new ideas and bringing a technical vision to life.

Toni Schneider (@tonidotorg), the former Automattic CEO who took Bluesky's top job permanently in July, is handling the operating side of that division of labor. As RuntimeWire reported when Schneider became permanent CEO, his mandate is to grow a network of smaller applications and communities around AT Protocol. Protocol Services gives those developers a defined front door to infrastructure that Bluesky already operates.

History becomes an API

Jetstream already allowed developers to request a filtered slice of AT Protocol activity and receive plain JSON over a WebSocket. That made the live network easier to consume than the protocol's full firehose, especially for applications interested in a limited set of record types or accounts.

The missing piece was historical data. A developer building an index, analytics product or moderation service had to backfill repositories, manage that local process and then switch to the live stream without dropping events.

Jetstream v2 moves that work to Bluesky's servers. Under the new Network Replay flow, a developer sends filters to planSnapshot, downloads sealed archive segments over HTTP and connects to the live WebSocket at the archive tip. The server keeps no consumer-specific cursor or registered subscription. The same event format covers the historical download and the live stream.

Developers can also download a point-in-time snapshot without opening a WebSocket. Bluesky says the archive covers the full network and lets developers retrieve matching records in sequence. Archive requests on Bluesky-hosted instances require an API token. The live WebSocket remains open and unauthenticated.

The hosted Jetstream v2 instances are running in US East and US West. Bluesky is keeping the v1 instances available during the migration, and the live stream behaves the same across both versions.

Bluesky packages the plumbing

Bluesky Protocol Services collects Jetstream, relay and Bluesky API documentation that was previously spread across Bluesky's developer properties. The website replaces docs.bsky.app and identifies Bluesky Social PBC as the operator. Bluesky Protocol Services remains part of Bluesky Social PBC rather than a newly announced legal entity.

That distinction matters because Graber's original argument was that developers should be able to build social products without recreating a social graph or depending on a closed platform's permission. Protocol Services makes Bluesky's own infrastructure easier to depend on while keeping the underlying software available to run elsewhere.

The new Jetstream SDK handles reconnecting, deduplication, cursor management and typed event decoding for TypeScript and Go developers. The open-source Jetstream repository includes the Go client and server. Bluesky also rebuilt its TypeScript SDK on @atproto/lex, consolidating around the generic Lexicon toolchain instead of maintaining separate legacy paths for Bluesky-specific helpers.

Alex Garnett, who works in developer relations at Bluesky and wrote the launch announcement, said the migration should also reduce recommendations from coding models that point developers toward deprecated SDKs. That is a practical maintenance problem for any developer platform with years of old examples indexed across documentation, forums and model training data.

Open infrastructure still requires an operator

Jetstream remains open source and self-hostable. Bluesky's documentation says a self-hosted server runs as a single Go binary without a separate database. A full-network archive requires multiple terabytes of disk and grows alongside the network, making the managed instances the easier option for many small teams.

That creates a useful tension at the center of Graber's bet. Developers can leave and operate the software themselves, yet Bluesky can win their usage by running the expensive infrastructure well. API tokens for archive requests show where the cost sits: retaining and moving historical network data, rather than serving the live tail.

Bluesky has enough activity to make that problem material. The company reported more than 44 million users as of May 2026. In March, Bluesky said developers were using more than 1,000 AT Protocol applications each week, generating over 400,000 monthly SDK downloads, while the network held roughly 20 billion public records. Those figures are Bluesky-reported and do not disclose how many developers currently use Jetstream.

Bluesky also disclosed in March that it had raised a $100 million Series B in April 2025, led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. Bluesky said the capital was intended to scale both the consumer app and AT Protocol development.

Protocol Services shows where part of that work is going. Graber started with the premise that Bluesky should become one application on a wider social network. The new developer brand makes Bluesky's role as an infrastructure operator explicit and gives outside builders a simpler path into the data. Its value will depend on whether those builders create durable products that stand apart from the Bluesky app itself.