Shutting down atproto Sandbox Environment

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Summary: we are planning to shut down the sandbox environment soon, likely in early July.

Last year, in Summer 2023, we set up a "sandbox" federation environment for atproto services. The motivation was to demonstrate how federation between PDS instances, Relays, and AppViews would all function together. At that time Bluesky had distributed our own internal services across multiple systems, but were not yet ready to commit to federating openly and sending/receiving content on the open internet.

Earlier this year (2024) we did start federating openly on the public internet, and are currently connected to hundreds of independent instances, some with thousands of accounts, with no pre-registration and permissions required.

While a test and development environment could still be helpful for some developers, most folks doing atproto development are now testing their services in the live network, and we want to focus our attention and resources there. The current sandbox resources have not been updated or maintained in several months, and are out of date and could be misleading or confusing to unsuspecting developers.

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It's gone!