---
title: "Increasing Users' Data Agency: From BlueSky's AT Protocol to the Local-First Software Movement"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/increasing-users-data-agency-from-bluesky-s-at-protocol-to-the-local-first-software-movement-gdelmv11w
source_url: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/increasing-users-data-agency
type: article
source: "InfoQ"
published: 2026-06-15T11:01:02.911Z
updated: 2026-06-15T11:01:25.901Z
tags: ["distributed-systems", "decentralization", "local-first"]
reading_time: 36
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Increasing Users' Data Agency: From BlueSky's AT Protocol to the Local-First Software Movement

**[InfoQ](https://daily.dev/sources/infoq)** · 36 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and associate professor at Cambridge, discusses two major trends in data systems: the shift from monolithic databases to modular cloud-native building blocks, and the movement toward user data sovereignty. He explains the AT Protocol underlying BlueSky, which balances decentralization with a consistent user experience by using Personal Data Servers and a global firehose aggregator, allowing users to switch providers without losing data. He then dives into the local-first software movement, which advocates storing the primary data copy on the user's device to enable offline access, faster performance, and resilience against service shutdowns. Kleppmann highlights Automerge, an open-source Rust library with bindings for TypeScript, Swift, Java, Python, and Go, that enables real-time collaboration and Git-like version control for non-text formats like spreadsheets and CAD files. He also discusses limitations of local-first (not suitable for authoritative server data like bank balances), retrofitting existing apps, and the growing local-first conference community.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/increasing-users-data-agency>

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---

Tags: [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#decentralization](https://daily.dev/tags/decentralization), [#local-first](https://daily.dev/tags/local-first)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/increasing-users-data-agency-from-bluesky-s-at-protocol-to-the-local-first-software-movement-gdelmv11w)