Overview: Bluesky and the ATmosphere

In case you're not following the development of the Atmosphere yet, I thought I'd share the snowballing energy I see every morning when I open Bluesky’s For You feed.

"the most enduring social networks ... [are] the ones that empower organizers... coaches, teachers, volunteer coordinators, union stewards, event planners, health workers, running club hosts, activist organizers, and owners of community-based businesses ... making decisions on behalf of a group ... turn a collection of individuals into a functi…

Joe Basser, Spark founder, is also one of the best explainers on the Atmosphere.Building on his previous post, which explains that "When users can leave without losing [everything]... platforms lose the ability to quietly tighten the screws forever", Basser explores what happens as a result: "What does social media look like when anti-enshittifica…

In 2026 Bluesky will double down on a feature which gives them "a real advantage... Closed platforms are structurally limited in how they can respond to live moments... one algorithm, one team making decisions, one set of product surfaces, one content policy. An open protocol doesn't have those limits. Anyone can spin up a feed for a live event. A…

"What makes Bluesky expensive?", asks Jacqueline.not the user data: a "PDS... is little more than a JSON-returning webserver wrapped around a SQLite database. A single PDS on a raspberry pi can host and serve data for tens of thousands of users"nor the relay, which can "run just fine on a raspberry pi... [with] beefy storage drive (a dozen or two …

"CLI tool that can take your existing self-hosted blog and publish it to the ATmosphere using Standard.site lexicons... run inside your existing repo, build a one-time config, and then be part of your regular workflow by publishing content or updating existing content ... fully interoperable... if it's a static blog with markdown, Sequoia will wo…

"Blacksky Cash ... to let communities that already support one another socially do so materially... raises three essential questions:How do we translate communal, often Indigenous traditions of money-sharing into a heavily regulated financial system?How do we make sharing money online feel meaningful rather than suspicious?How do we frame financia…

A perfectly brilliant way to introduce AT protocol."What do files have to do with social computing? Historically, not a lot—until recently."Dan first reintroduces files: how they were not originally intended "to live inside the apps... [but] somewhere that you control. Apps create and read your files on your behalf, but files don’t belong to the a…

The creators' account of their co-development of, and move to, standard.site, "and how we plan to grow publishing × open social together".Standard.site is "a set of shared standards for longform publishing on the open social web...a set of AT Protocol lexicons for:publication metadata: what a publication is, like its name, description, and basic t…

My proposal to the atproto.science conference: "I'm interested in exploring how we can manage competition and cooperation in the atmosphere."

A POSSE-oriented publisher "discovered Standard.site, a new set of lexicons designed especially for publishing ... [with] canonical URLs that point to my site... a journey that significantly boosted my knowledge of ATProto and how Standard.site could be a new gateway for publishing content"It gets a bit technical as he builds his new site using St…

"I was in Berlin last November to present at a satellite event around the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty. The two posts which resulted are below, followed by the latest from the growing ATProto4Science movement."

How to study the ATmosphere, which "consists of multiple layers: Layer 4: Social phenomena (communities, discourse, norms) Layer 3: User behavior (posts, follows, moderation) Layer 2: Applications (Bluesky, various clients, Feeds) Layer 1: Protocol (AT Protocol, DID) Layer 0: Infrastructure (servers, networks) Each layer falls under different acad…

Good example of ATScience: "Paper Skygest is a personalized research feed that shows posts about papers from accounts in your following network."

"Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere" - by the makers of leaflet, pckt & offprint - a good example of how builders can just collaborate on the ATmosphere without drama: "The standard grows when builders identify shared needs and ali…

Bluesy's Paul Frazee on where cloud computing went: "the clouds are closed... they'll do everything well except interoperating with others. But there's nothing that says clouds have to be closed. Closed networks are a big company thing, not a cloud thing... We need to bridge our clouds... Atmospheric computing is a paradigm of connected clouds".O…

The producers would "love to make Leaflet better for scientists", and set out some ideas how.Annotations: "Semble is working on a lexicon for inline annotations which sounds cool and may have some overlap with Leaflet... Something like post references is closely related"References and backlinks, referencing Semble's "trackbacking... basically a b…

Articulates what I was saying in Berlin, but makes a better case from the researchers' perspective:"Researchers' identities are fragmented. Grant IDs, ORCID, institutional email addresses, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and various social media platforms... The core of "who I am" depends too heavily on institutions and platforms."Instead of thinkin…

Bluesky's "Find Friends ... makes it easy to find people you know on Bluesky... protects your privacy and keeps you in control", unlike other platforms' approach to contact import, which have resulted in "phone numbers have been leaked or brute-forced, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for dubious purposes". Key point: "It only works if both …

Laurens Hof, chronicler of all things open social web, uses Semble to curate interesting resources for his one-man media operation. And now he's built this one-page interface to all the stuff he's curating on Semble.But he's not getting that content from Semble - he's grabbing it from his own PDS, and combining it with links to where people are di…

Laurens Hof's report from EuroskyLive looks at Robin Berjon's use of Elinor Ostrom's observation that "The properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same", and how this is illustrated by Bluesky's recent changes to their reporting system, which expands the "6 reporting options t…

"Composable moderation decentralizes rule-setting, reducing pressure on any single platform and limiting attempts to “work the refs... pressure a singular trust and safety team into making decisions that favor their side”.Gives a good summary of how "Composable moderation ... uses labels to describe issues with content or accounts, leaving individ…

"Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto".A repost onto Medium of version 4 of a wiki page I've been developing for most of the year.

New features from Semble, focusing on "supporting non-linear discovery ... the fun comes when browsing Semble pages, collections, and profiles". In particular, there's "'Discover on Semble' will surface related cards based on your recent Semble activity... [and] sort cards based on the date added or by the number of accounts that have saved the sa…

Nekomimo "built cutebook, a tiny library that lets you add a guestbook to any website. Visitors sign in with their Bluesky account, leave a message, and that message gets stored in their own data repository. No database on your end. No user accounts to manage. Just two web components and a few lines of configuration" - and she explains how, and ho…

Barry's call to "find collaborators to experiment with AT Protocol and explore new ways for researchers to publish, share, and collaborate". As he points out, there's real potential for AT4Science:"Open standards ensure transparency and long-term accessibility...Data interoperability makes it possible to connect tools, repositories, and datasets w…

"What happens when you put politicians, media businesses and protocol engineers in the same room to discuss European sovereignty?" - my post following Eurosky.Live in Berlin, November 2025.

Some thoughts on technical issues surrounding building communities on ATproto, although it doesn't address the issue of what happens to someone's "community posts" when they leave a community?"AT makes it easy for individual accounts to publish things, and to build global aggregations from them. But community spaces are a bit different... forums …

Newsletter as I head off to Berlin to talk about digital sovereignty, social media and ATprotocol.

"blogging and long-form writing on atproto is rapidly developing, and it gives some interesting insight in what decentralisation on atproto looks like".Decentralisation describes two different things at once: a technical architecture for how networks are structured, and the actual behaviour of people using those networks" - so while ATproto looks …