AT Mot#

A bilingual (English / French) daily word game, native to the AT Protocol. Guess the hidden five-letter word in six tries. Your results live in your own PDS, and the leaderboard is read from the public Constellation backlink index.

🌐 atmot.herve.bzh

“mot” is French for “word” — and a play on atproto.

AT Mot uses a ”data on your PDS, reads via Constellation, no AppView” architecture for atproto apps:

• Your data is yours. Each finished puzzle is written as a bzh.herve.atmot.result record to your repo via browser OAuth. There is no server storing your games — there is no server.
• The leaderboard has no database. Every result record links to a canonical per-day permalink. The daily stats and shared grids are built by querying Constellation for backlinks to that permalink and aggregating in the browser.
• Deterministic & global. Each language is its own daily series; the day's word is computed on every client from a bundled list, indexed by whole UTC days since launch. Everyone worldwide gets the same word on the same calendar day, with no server in the loop.
• Standards-conformant lexicons under the bzh.herve.atmot.* authority, following the Lexicon Style Guide.
• Installable to your home screen. A web manifest makes it installable as a standalone app.

Architecture at a glance#

        ┌─────────────── browser (static SPA on Cloudflare Pages) ───────────────┐
        │                                                                         │
  play  │  deterministic daily word (bundled list, UTC day index)                 │
        │                              │                                          │
  write │  OAuth session ── createRecord ──▶  YOUR PDS                            │
        │     result (write-once)            ├─ bzh.herve.atmot.result            │
        │     stats   (self, mutable)        └─ bzh.herve.atmot.stats             │
        │                                                                         │
  share │  createRecord ──▶ app.bsky.feed.post  (emoji grid + puzzle permalink)   │
        │                                                                         │
  read  │  Constellation backlinks to the permalink ──▶ leaderboard + shared      │
        │     (counts + record lists)        grids + live likes/reposts/replies   │
        └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The only permitted server-side component is an optional, stateless Cloudflare Worker cache (documented fallback, not used by default). Core gameplay and reads work entirely client-side.

Lexicons#

Published as com.atproto.lexicon.schema records under bzh.herve.atmot.*:

The puzzleTarget is a canonical web URL — https://atmot.herve.bzh/p/<lang>/<puzzleNumber> — emitted from a single shared helper so the write path and the Constellation read path can never diverge. The format is frozen (Constellation compares it literally).

Validate the schemas against the Style Guide rules:

npm run lexicons:validate

Publish them (run by the account that controls the namespace authority):

ATMOT_PUBLISH_IDENTIFIER=you.example ATMOT_PUBLISH_PASSWORD=<app-password> npm run lexicons:publish

For network-wide lexicon resolution, the authority domain also needs a _lexicon DNS TXT record (did=<publishing did>) pointing at the publishing account's DID.

Word lists#

Self-curated per language, from permissively-licensed sources, normalized to uppercase, unaccented A–Z at build time (French diacritics are stripped and ligatures expanded — Œ→OE, Æ→AE — matching the accent-free convention of the official French Scrabble dictionary):

Lists are generated by npm run build:words and committed (the generated JSON is the game content); the build is reproducible (same sources + fixed seeds → identical output).

Develop#

npm install
npm run dev         # http://127.0.0.1:12520  (atproto OAuth forbids localhost; use the loopback IP)
npm test            # vitest — deterministic engine, scoring, stats, share, lexicon format
npm run typecheck   # tsc (app + node scripts)
npm run lint
npm run build       # typecheck + production build into dist/

OAuth in dev uses atproto's loopback client (no hosted metadata needed). In production the SPA serves /client-metadata.json, and client_id equals that exact URL.

AT Mot requests granular OAuth scopes (least privilege) rather than the broad transition:generic — write access is limited to exactly the three collections it creates: bzh.herve.atmot.result, bzh.herve.atmot.stats, and app.bsky.feed.post. See DECISIONS.md (#17b).

Deploy (Cloudflare Pages)#

The git remote lives on tangled.org, so Cloudflare's git-connected builds aren't available. Deployment uses Wrangler direct upload instead — build locally, then push the dist/ folder straight to the atmot Pages project:

npm run deploy

This runs npm run build (typecheck + Vite build) and then wrangler pages deploy dist --project-name=atmot --branch=trunk. The first run prompts for wrangler login.

The --branch=trunk flag is important: Wrangler tags a deployment with your current local git branch, and Cloudflare only promotes deployments whose branch matches the project's production branch (trunk). Without it, deploying from a feature branch produces a preview URL and leaves the live site unchanged.

• Output directory: dist
• Pages project: atmot
• Production branch: trunk
• Custom domain: atmot.herve.bzh

public/_redirects provides the SPA history fallback so the /p/<lang>/<n> permalinks resolve to real pages. No origin server or environment variables are required for core gameplay.

License#

Dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0 (mirroring atproto), at your option. See LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE. Third-party data and font attributions are in NOTICE.md. Design rationale and judgment calls are recorded in DECISIONS.md.