Monthly 2026, 04 - Setting Up an Aether OS
Microsoft has been kind of a terrible experience to work with in general, first and all the fact that the markdown software I use refuses to be installed through my non-functioning microsoft account. I saw a Verge article about Aether OS though, and not only do I really like the idea, I can actually think of a use-case. It might work as a secondary note-taking app, and more interestingly: I could imagine using it as a file storage. I've been having the issue that the NotesHub repositories have started getting really big, and I'm not sure I want to keep dividing and subdividing the repositories to make them editable on Windows machines. I'm often in situations where I only have access to one of those, and not being able to look into my notes then makes most of my Windows machines little more than expensive toys. I don't mind expensive toys, but certainly, it would be neat if they could be used to some degree of efficiency, if they were originally designed to do so.
Aether OS bills itself as a browser-based OS experience, operating on the AT Protocol and Bluesky integration. I don't really use social media, so I predictably don't have a Bluesky. As I understand it, it's not unlike twitter, though lacking the general air of racism surrounding it. It's not appealing to me either way, but I've been known to make dead accounts on platforms with data faked by various means available at the time. You do very much need a Bluesky account, as communicated by the startup screen on https://www.aetheros.computer/, but while I think I can make it do what I need it to fairly quickly, I thought I might as well pick up a few things about the AT Protocol while I'm at it.
The AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol is a standard that took off during the great Twitter-Exodus, which funneled a large number of mostly self-identified liberal users toward Bluesky. I've not used either, so I can't speak on whether the experience of Bluesky is any notable improvement over the one that has now rebranded to "X: The Everything App", but it seems on first glance a lot less stressful, if only because it's not attached to what I'd charitably call "the world's oldest baby". The AT protocol is meant to provide an automated standard for moving user identities across federated networks. Each user identity is mapped to a cryptographic URL through a domain on the network. When user data needs exchanging, this is meant to happen through signed data repositories. Because Bluesky is the basis of the protocols API calls, they are what standardize the application interaction, and the servers write their data to a global schema (Lexicon), which encodes application behavior in terms of Bluesky interactions. This gives any developer on a federated network the freedom to place whatever user interface they might want onto these operations. All user data is saved on a Personal Data Server (PDS), but can only be accessed by a signing key, which is distributed by the decentralized ID document (DID). Each user client also has a backup of the user data, and holds a recovery key that allows them to migrate their data to another PDS. Theoretically, one could self-host every part of this process and only "cross the streams" when pushing and pulling data to the Bluesky data repository.
Once I made a bluesky account, I could relatively easily get the interface to log me in, and the introduction was kinda straight-forward. The cool stuff was primarily the Bluesky stuff, because that's kinda what atproto is meant to be doing, but it could also hold drafts for code snippets and some non-posted text files. If I were an avid Bluesky user I could see how this would be very cool, but I'm not and I have a markdown software that I'm reasonably happy with, so I don't quite see the use for it, personally. If it managed to get some quick and convenient file management system, I could use it as a much cooler digital drive, but as it is, I will have to stick with Protondrive, even though there really isn't that much space on there.