Tech Talk: Smoke Signal Turns One
ATProto Tech Talk, July 24th, 2025: Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines returns to give an update on where the events & RSVP platform is at, a year after he launched. Written in Rust, open source, and a ton of features.
It's been a while since we've done a Tech Talk, and we're going to celebrate the Smoke Signal re-launch, open sourcing, and 1 year anniversary.
Nick was the second Tech Talk guest back in September 2024. The chatlog on that post is great, the Bluesky devs came to all the early tech talks before they got slammed by site growth.
Some of the changes and topics we'll cover:
- the Smoke Signal codebase has been re-written, re-vamped, and open sourced - on ATProto git hosting tangled of course!
- A Discourse forum for users & devs, linked with AIP so you can login with your ATProto account
- hosting your own Smoke Signal
- badges showcase and signed records with gnosco
- webhooks that work with ATProto's XRPC
And many more things, some of which Nick is still hacking on right now!
Register to join us on Smoke Signal
We're going to be experimenting with going to Smoke Signal directly for events, so lots of new things going on.
We're still going to be using Zoom, which we'll be sending out via email rather than sharing the link publicly, so make sure to share your email when you RSVP.
And yes, this is the new HTML Event Widget, although even since that widget was created, Nick also has a new search widget that is powering the Calendar page here.
If you're interested in using or extending Smoke Signal, have bugs, feature requests, or just jam with other organizers, users, and devs, head over to the new Smoke Signal Discourse forum:
Nick and Smoke Signal were one of the first recipients of a Bluesky Microgrant last year. As part of the AT Community Fund Open Collective, you can help support & sponsor basic costs for the core instance, appview, and related infrastructure.
As always, we'll record the talk and share the video afterwards, have time for questions and discussion, and do a little "off the record" hang out at the end.
