Knight Foundation - "a private foundation with roots in local journalism and civic life" - on why they invested in Bluesky Social PBC "with venture capital firms like Bain Capital Crypto and Bloomberg Beta... [because] we saw a unique opportunity to invest in scaling ideas and values that are core to our mission".After all, they argue:It was the "…

Dainel, head of protocol at Bluesky, has published a series of leaflets on permissioned data for atproto.The first post introduces what permission data actually is - "a broad term, it covers many different social modalities & data flows. In its most basic sense, it means “not public”... data that lives on your PDS but isn't broadcasted... only acc…

One of a series from Habitat Network, who are "building a privacy-first platform, we're thinking about permissioned data... building pear: a permission-enforcing ATProtocol repository, tied to your ATProtocol identity through a service".Their first toy-demo is Greensky. Building it raised a lot of interesting questions around UX/design, , elucida…

Eurosky sets out their vision (not before time).A Eurosky account is "a personal account for the web. Most people use it today as an entry point to Bluesky, but it's much bigger ... it could become people's main online identity... because the AT Protocol... has the potential to reshape the whole web", particularly with the upcoming appearance of …

"We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?" asks this brilliant 4-part series, which I'm Hubbing in one post as I await part 4.Part 1 basically sets out the problem: today's online communities resemble platforms, in that the community's stewards (OCMs) determine every…

I first met "Agora — a platform for public deliberation using Polis-style clustering" a year or so ago. Now they're moving to ATprotocol and "proposing the Decentralized Deliberation Standard (DDS) as an open protocol for deliberation, built on AT Protocol". This post goes through their history, which started by investigating how to "use zero-know…

Laurens uses Mastodon's new Share button - which frames Mastodon "not as one implementation of a shared protocol but as a platform" - to explore protocol ownership, showing how "The fediverse built its federation layer on an open standard, but left the client layer to be captured by its dominant provider". That dominant provider is Mastodon, and …