ATty

A telnet client for Bluesky

Live install

The client is currently running live at bsky.tel, and you should be able to telnet into it from any device that supports telnet!

Installation

• Make sure you have a JDK installed. I recommend Temurin, install it here.
• Clone the repo using git (or just download it as a zip file)
• From the root directory, run ./gradlew run (on Mac/Linux) or gradlew.bat run (on Windows)

Use

• Using your telnet client of choice, open a telnet session to 127.0.0.1
• By default, ATty runs on the standard telnet port, 23
• If you want to change this, edit port in gradle.properties
• Press return to advance the screen or to send data to the server

What works

• Home timeline
• Notification timeline
• Creating new posts
• Replying to posts
• Liking posts
• Re-sharing posts
• Quoting posts
• Threads
• Images (sixel and ASCII)

What doesn't work

• Threads (released in v0.3)
• Images (experimental ASCII and Sixel support)
• Custom algorithms
• Viewing more than 10 posts at a time (pagination)
• Following / unfollowing
• Blocking / muting

Roadmap

• Early public release (v0.1)
• Thread unrolling (v0.3)
• Images or alt text (v0.7)
• Adjustable number of posts

Supported devices

• ATty just uses UTF-8, meaning it should work on most ASCII terminals
• It also includes (hacky, limited) support for PETSCII
• Codepoints outside of ASCII will not render correctly on older terminals
• Future releases may add a compatibility mode to strip those characters

Libraries

• ATty is built on the amazing bsky4j library
• It also uses extensive code from my other telnet project, New Session / dial-a-zine