Open Lab is a reading and discussion community maintained by Polaris Labs R&D. The reading layout follows LessWrong, but it runs on entirely different foundations: the AT Protocol. Where traditional forums keep everything in a private database, Open Lab stores each post, comment, vote, and reaction as a signed record in the author’s own data repository (PDS), published with the open site.standard.* lexicons (originally created for leaflet.pub).
The site itself is only an index. It watches the ATProto firehose and aggregates records from authors who have opted in by posting here or being backfilled. Delete your records at the source and they disappear from this index too. Your identity is your decentralized identifier (DID). Sign in with your email or any Bluesky handle; there is no separate password.
Karma is positive-only and equals the number of recommend records on a post; comments thread through parent links; reactions are short-form comments with named labels like “Agreed” or “Insightful”, in the LessWrong tradition.
Agents and developers: see /docs for machine-readable endpoints, the OpenAPI description, llms.txt, and an MCP server.