On January 23rd, Daniel Roe — a core contributor to Nuxt and thoughtful voice in the JavaScript ecosystem — posted a question on Bluesky:
🙋♂️ so ... for reasons: I would love to know people's frustrations with: - the current npmjs.com - admin user flows on npm web ui (and cli, locally) 🙏
— danielroe 🇺🇦 (@danielroe.dev) 2026-01-23T08:43:07.258Z
It was an open-ended question. No product announcement attached. No repo linked. Just curiosity, directed at a community that had opinions.
What happened next is one of the best case scenarios of building on atproto.
40 days
The replies came fast. The code browser is difficult to use, to the point of feeling broken. There’s no social layer. No dark mode in 2026! Developers were clearly frustrated with the NPM site being the primary way of interacting with an ecosystem critical to their development.
Within days, a repository appeared. Then contributors. Then more contributors. 123 of them, to be precise. In 40 days, they pushed 144 commits to main, changed 314 files, and wrote, reviewed, and refined over 57,000 lines of code. (Those 30,000+ deletions are as impressive as the additions. That's not a hackathon building a throwaway demo, that's an engineering community that cares about building great tools.) The result is npmx.dev: a fast, modern browser for the npm registry.
What npmx Is
At its core, npmx is a fantastic way to browse npm. Faster, cleaner, and more useful are the heart of why it works wo well. You don't need an account to use it — just go, search, browse.
And there's a layer built on top of the core developer experience that’s genuinely exciting, a social layer built on atproto.
If you want to save favorites, maintain a profile, or carry your npm identity with you across the web, npmx supports sign-in via atproto. And here's the part worth paying attention to: you don't need a Bluesky account. npmx runs its own PDS — a Personal Data Server, the identity and data layer at the heart of atproto. If you don't have an atproto identity yet, npmx will create one for you. An account that's yours, that you can take with you, that works across any app built on the same open protocol — including Bluesky.
This is what Matias Capeletto — maintainer of Vite's ecosystem and key contributor to npmx — meant when he wrote:
adding social features to our websites will accelerate atproto adoption faster than building pure atproto apps
— patak (@patak.cat) 2026-01-30T19:59:57.553Z
The community building npmx isn't trying to create another social network, it's trying to be a great npm browser. AT Protocol is infrastructure that makes npmx better, with baked-in features like portable identity, social features, data you control. That's the pattern we've been calling atmospheric websites: existing web experiences made richer by atproto, rather than new apps built from scratch on top of it.
Our Support
We believe in what this team built, and we believe in the community that built it. We're proud to be supporting npmx.dev with a $6,000 grant as a part of our ongoing ecosystem support.
To be clear about the sequencing: we didn't fund this into existence. We saw it happen — fast, in public, with real engineering rigor — and we wanted to back it. The best ecosystem development isn't top-down, it's recognizing the things that are already working and making sure they have room to grow.
You can see the full contributor list on GitHub. Go thank some of them.
Go build things with npmx
As of today, npmx.dev is live.
If you're building something on atproto, even — especially! — if it's not a "social app" in the traditional sense, we'd love to hear about it. The atmospheric web is bigger than any one application, and projects like npmx are exactly what it looks like in practice.