Building an atproto account typeahead search service

tldr; tern is a single binary atproto account typeahead search service that reflects handle changes within a few seconds and is a drop in replacement for the Bluesky service. There are lots of places in modern apps where you want to be able to discover and fill in user account names, like selecting a username in a login page, or when mentioning a user in a document. You can type my handle into the login page for pckt.blog and it shows up, or in a Bluesky post, and a bunch of other places in the atproto ecosystem. It's such a common pattern for interacting with software that it might not really stand out as anything special at all, until you think about the fact that pckt.blog and Bluesky are not the same company and don't run on the same software. Not only that, but my account doesn't even live on either app's services, it lives on my own self-hosted Tranquil PDS instance. So how do you search all the atproto accounts in the world? The first, and still the most common, way is…

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