Periwinkle launches managed AT Protocol to make self‑hosted social media painless
Berlin startup Periwinkle is rolling out an easier path for people and organisations that want to own their social presence outside Big Tech: a fully managed Personal Data Server (PDS) service built on the AT Protocol — the same open standard that powers Bluesky.
Instead of joining a centrally operated app, or wrestling with a DIY server, Periwinkle lets anyone run a social account on their own domain while keeping posts, follows and profiles on a privately controlled PDS. The company sells domains, handles hosting in the EU or U.S., and takes care of updates, backups and monitoring so non‑technical users don’t need to babysit infrastructure.
“We’ll be the first‑to‑market fully managed PDS service; there is nobody else that is doing this right now,” Periwinkle founder Charles Blumenthal told TechCrunch. He contrasted the service with other emerging options — like Blacksky — that target builders of self‑governable communities rather than mainstream users.
The company frames the product with a familiar analogy: the choice between a hosted blog on WordPress.com and a self‑hosted WordPress.org install. Periwinkle sits in the middle — a managed hosting layer for decentralized social, aimed at people who want to own their identity and content but don’t want to run servers themselves.
The target customers are broad: public figures and political offices that need fine‑grained control over accounts, small businesses that want branded social feeds on their own domain, and individual users who care about data portability and privacy. Bluesky’s growth — more than 43 million registered users on the AT Protocol — indicates demand for decentralized alternatives, Blumenthal told TechCrunch.
“It’s really not a great idea that a couple of billionaires have control over the way billions of people communicate,” Charles Blumenthal told TechCrunch. “If you could leave Twitter to some competitor and all of your followers and all of your content and everything — it just is there with you, and you just log in — you would do it, right?”
Periwinkle also offers custom enterprise plans. Planned features include automated post deletion, archiving tools and other admin utilities aimed at organisations with regulatory or record‑keeping needs.
On the tech side, Periwinkle’s PDS implementation participates in the AT Protocol ecosystem so users can continue to interact with Bluesky and other clients while retaining control over their data and domain.
Blumenthal, a former software engineer at McKinsey, is currently the sole founder and the company is self‑funded. He says he’s been talking to European investors and plans to hire an additional engineer plus someone for communications and marketing as the product matures.
“There’s a real market for people who want to own their own personal data,” Blumenthal told TechCrunch, outlining the company’s long‑term vision for user ownership and portability across the AT ecosystem.
Whether Periwinkle can translate that idea into a sustainable business depends on converting privacy‑minded early adopters into paying customers and on the broader growth of AT Protocol‑based clients. For now, it solves a practical problem: making self‑hosted social as simple as buying a domain and signing up for a managed hosting plan.