Hi there! I’m Tijs tijs.org and I’m a tinkerer from The Hague, NL. I mostly work within the Apple ecosystem (so Swift) but in my life I have done everything from Python to JS and a whole bunch of other stuff. My day job is making apps for a big Dutch media company but I spend some of my hobby time on making indie apps.
A recent addition is Anchor an experiment in making a social checkin app (remember foursquare?) but on the at protocol. That’s also how I ended up here. I wrote up the general idea here Building a Foursquare Clone on AT Protocol | by Tijs Teulings | Jun, 2025 | Medium
Ask me anything! I hope you like my checkin record I guess? Hopefully someday something like it will be a common record that some apps will use besides my little experiment.
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Welcome! I’m really excited about Anchor.
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Thanks! The idea of using such an app yourself, or more just the general idea that it’s using a different flavor of geo on atproto?
Both really. I was a FSQ / Swarm super user and I think there’s a lot of potential for location-enhanced records.
Great, yeah i remember you said you were a FSQ fan. I’m not sure my app will ever become as smooth as those apps but if it’s something that a few people will be happy with and will show some more people what’s actually possible on the network that would already be very cool.
Hey @tjis, just checked out Anchor and I’m working on something very similar for iOS / WatchOS (basically bringing back Swarm based on ATProto)!
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Oh count me curious! The menu bar app is just my playground. I’m laying the groundwork for an iOS app as well because that makes much more sense for a checkin app of course. Do you have something online already i can look at?
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not yet. I’m basing it off of Skeets (like all my apps 
But I’m still waiting for that gazetteer to come online for clustering checkins.
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Ah yeah that’s a nice base. And you have a solid presence already to build on so that should help! Well i would still love to see what your up to when your ready to share, and i’m always open to sharing notes. The fun thing of this network is that we can just throw apps at it and see what sticks.
Would be great to have something central for checkins, just for experiment’s sake i’ve spun up my own custom pds on val.town that can take checkins and serve up a feed GitHub - dropanchorapp/anchorPDS: A specialized ATProto server for check-in records, providing location-based social features for the Anchor ecosystem.
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