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Germ DM now defaults to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), protecting your messages from being harvested now and decrypted later by a quantum computer. We will deprecate non-PQC connections this year, making Germ conversations fully protected by post-quantum encryption. We’re joining Signal and iMessage in deploying ongoing PQC rekeying, bringing this level of security to messaging with AT Protocol…
You shouldn't have to scroll and search just to talk to your friends. We built Germ so your connections could follow you from social—and now they do, from the moment you log in. More Friends, live in beta today, pulls your atproto mutuals from Bluesky, Blacksky, Mu Social, and across the Atmosphere and brings them into Germ DM.
We spent the end of March in Vancouver at the Atmosphere Conference, and being with fellow builders in the protocol ecosystem powering Bluesky and 1000s of other apps solidified something about our place in it: Germ DM is a social media messenger. We’re like Signal, rebuilt to talk to your friends from social.
A month ago when we announced that Germ now launches directly from Bluesky user profiles, we also shared our developer guidance for bringing this feature into your own AT Protocol app. Since the launch, a few teams have asked us for images and suggested language for describing Germ.
It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Germ DM for AT Protocol is here! Germ DM for atproto is live for all to enjoy, and Bluesky users can now drop directly into end-to-end encrypted DMs from Germ DM buttons on friends’ profiles. As Bluesky continues integrating compatible apps from across the AT Protocol Atmosphere, Germ DM becomes its first connected end-to-end encrypted messaging service.…
Last year, we began testing our end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messenger Germ DM's integration with AT Protocol in a private beta. The integration used a link in users’ Bluesky/Blacksky bios that served two purposes: to prove the binding of a public key to their atproto accounts, and to let people quickly start a conversation from viewing an atproto profile.
It’s been a year of growth at Germ—for our product, our userbase, and our community. In January, cofounders Tessa and Mark decided to integrate our secure messenger Germ DM with Bluesky’s AT Protocol. In March, we flew to Seattle to introduce Germ DM to the ATProtocol community and the Bluesky team.
We’re excited to share that Germ was awarded a Cypherpunk Fellowship to complete a portion of our open-source work extending the IETF end-to-end encryption standard Messaging Layer Security for decentralized systems. This fellowship capped off a fantastic three days at Cypherpunk Camp, an initiative of Protocol Labs and Web3 Privacy Now that Germ co-founders attended this fall outside Berlin.
Germ DM is now a Bluesky messenger. We’ve integrated AT Protocol, the open social layer that powers Bluesky, directly into our iOS app—which means E2EE DMs have finally come to the Atmosphere! ATProto lets us meet and discover, but real connections form in private.
End-to-end encrypted Germ DM is now a Bluesky messenger. In this technical post, we introduce the architecture of Germ’s integration with AT Protocol. From the beginning, Germ has been building for an interoperable E2EE ecosystem, and this extends to our integration with AT Protocol. We’ll define the goals that we set for this integration, detail our first steps toward those goals, and outline our…
