Where your account lives
Vox Pop doesn’t have a signup form or a password field. You sign in by proving you control a handle on the ATmosphere, the open network Bluesky runs on. Here’s what that means.
What the ATmosphere is
The ATmosphere is the set of services built on the AT Protocol. Bluesky is the biggest and hosts nearly every account today, but anyone can run a server: the protocol is open and the server software is open source. The server that holds an account is called a PDS (personal data server).
An account on any of those servers can sign in to Vox Pop.
What signing in actually does
You type a handle. Vox Pop looks it up, finds the server that holds the account, and sends you there to approve the sign-in. You enter your password on that server. Vox Pop never sees it or stores it, so there’s no Vox Pop password to reset or leak.
What comes back is permission to act as that account, and nothing else.
This is a different handle from the one you pick during onboarding. Your sign-in handle identifies your account on the network. Your Vox Pop handle (@yourshow) is the public address where your prompts are published.
Why it works this way
Vox Pop didn’t issue your account, so Vox Pop can’t take it away. The same handle works in every other app on the network.
The platform underneath Vox Pop is Antiphony, which stores the audio and produces the transcripts. It’s open source under the MIT licence, so anyone can run it. The idea is the same as with sign-in: the parts your show depends on shouldn’t depend on one company staying around.
If you do not have an account yet
Create one at bsky.app. It takes a minute, and you’ll get a handle like yourname.bsky.social. That’s what you type on the Vox Pop sign-in page.
If you run your own server or signed up somewhere else on the network, it works the same way. Use your full handle, including the domain.