While it's easy to talk about the atmosphere as a bunch of connected apps the reality is that even following a link from bsky to tangled you need to remember that you should log into tangled with your bluesky account. Some of the work around an atmosphere login button will help but there's no reason we can't do something low lift.
I propose a query string referrer_did that includes the did of the logged in use that clicked a link being sent along on links that go to other atmosphere apps. What those apps choose to do with that data is up-to them but the obvious thing is to trigger a login with the given DID. This means that moving between Atmosphere apps will bring your identity with you.
ATStore seems like the right first place to do this because by default we know that it is a list of atmosphere apps that could support this parameter. Additionally it's log in to review mechanism is a good way to show how a thoughtful implementation of the other side of this could work.
Considerations
It's worth calling out that including a query parameter has drawbacks.
- It is effectively a tracking cookie across the atmosphere - DID alone is not enough to be too worried about but when combined with other information readable from the request we can potentially start to capture information about people.
- Each site can choose how they handle the auth process leading to uneven experiences.
Overall I think the basic idea is sound even with these considerations. If the tracking was a major concern there are a variety of approaches that could be leveraged such as writing a "no-track" record to a PDS that sites would honor.
While it's easy to talk about the atmosphere as a bunch of connected apps the reality is that even following a link from bsky to tangled you need to remember that you should log into tangled with your bluesky account. Some of the work around an atmosphere login button will help but there's no reason we can't do something low lift.
I propose a query string referrer_did that includes the did of the logged in use that clicked a link being sent along on links that go to other atmosphere apps. What those apps choose to do with that data is up-to them but the obvious thing is to trigger a login with the given DID. This means that moving between Atmosphere apps will bring your identity with you.
ATStore seems like the right first place to do this because by default we know that it is a list of atmosphere apps that could support this parameter. Additionally it's log in to review mechanism is a good way to show how a thoughtful implementation of the other side of this could work.
Considerations
It's worth calling out that including a query parameter has drawbacks.
Overall I think the basic idea is sound even with these considerations. If the tracking was a major concern there are a variety of approaches that could be leveraged such as writing a "no-track" record to a PDS that sites would honor.