Getting in
Four ways to start
Elastic Projects runs on AT Protocol Spaces, which is alpha. Signing in needs an account on a server that supports Spaces, and most Atmosphere accounts cannot do that yet. Pick the row below that describes you.
Came from the Spaces announcement?
A space is a permissioned set of records that live in the members' own repos. You read them with a credential signed by the space authority. Elastic Projects makes that authority an organization DID rather than a person, and presents the space as a filesystem with paths, content hashes, a working checkout, and commands to publish and refresh.
Files that a company depends on should not belong to whichever employee happened to create them, but today every atproto record lives in a personal repo.
The alpha post makes one point worth repeating. Spaces control access, but they do not provide confidentiality. Members and the servers that hold the data can read it, and nothing is encrypted at rest. The other caveats are written down.
Open the public project
No account needed
There is a real project running on this deployment, open to anyone. You pick a display name, receive a guest identity, and land in an organization-owned tree you can pull, edit, and publish to. Share links work the same way for private projects.
It is a public sandbox, so treat everything in it as world-readable and world-editable. Do not put anything there you would mind a stranger reading or changing.
Run it on your own machine
About five commands
The local preview ships with a seeded organization, projects, and people, so you can pull files, edit them, and publish without any account at all. It is the fastest way to judge whether the model makes sense.
git clone <your-origin-url> cd elasticprojects npm install npm run devOpen
http://127.0.0.1:43147and choose Open local preview. This public host hides that button, because the preview seeds fake identities that have no place in production.Sign in with a Spaces account
If you already have one
Enter your handle on the home page and you will be redirected to your own server to approve access. Elastic Projects never sees your password.
If sign-in fails, your handle almost certainly lives on a server that has not enabled Spaces. That is normal today, because Spaces is an alpha protocol feature and most PDS builds do not ship it yet. You can request an account on a server that supports Spaces from bsky.network/account, or read the Spaces alpha announcement for background.
Run an Organization PDS
For a real team
An Organization Data Server is the identity that owns the files after people come and go. You can run the Docker pack on hardware you control, which needs about 2 vCPU, 4 GiB of memory, and 20 GiB of disk. You can also have Elastic Projects provision one for you. Either way the organization holds its own keys, so it can move to another host later.
Why can't I use my regular Bluesky account?
A project here is an AT Protocol space, which means one shared filesystem with a member list, owned by an organization rather than a person. Spaces are a new server capability, so your handle only works if the server behind it runs a build that supports them. Nothing is wrong with your account, but the server it lives on has not turned this on yet. Until it does, the first two paths above need nothing from your account.