Before starting on the forum aspect, I needed to know if I was going to be responsible for all of the atproto again (hopefully not) and wanted to try Happyview
if you're building on atproto, you've probably reached for "sign in with bluesky" as your auth story. it works! the OAuth flow is fine. but every time a user shows up without a bluesky account, you have to send them to bluesky first, watch them get confused by a totally different brand, and hope they come back. that's a weird seam in your own product.
pollen just got an AMA feature, and it works differently from everything else on the site. everything else — posts, reblogs, follows, reactions — is written directly to your PDS.
right now you can upload blobs to the PDS with no limitations. that'll have to change some day
you can just build things from an open set of tools