Laurens Hof analyses the Pope's Magnifica Humanitas on “safeguarding the human person in the age of Artificial Intelligence”, finding Leo has a lot to say about the challenges facing the fediverse and atmosphere.

Wesley of semble has "been thinking about standardization and sharing lexicons" for a while, as "saving and organizing links" is a pretty common activity. He's inspired by standard.site's approach: "they define a content property on the site.standard.document, leaving the actual shape of the documents content up to the app that implements it" and…

Michael asks a good question and opens a can of worms, and starts by noting that "the community bookmark lexicon... [is] minimal: a URL, timestamp, tags". He wonders whether it also needs "additional fields...visibility (public vs unlisted)notestitledescriptionauthorpublication datesite namethumbnail imagecanonical URLprovenance (where a bookmark …

Nate Silver starts with a history lesson from the March 2014 re-launch of FiveThirtyEight, when "Publishers believed that maximizing “reach”, particularly as measured by the number of monthly unique visitors, was the key to success", which meant gaming Facebook's News Feed algorithm. That didn't work, as facebook and publishers were "locked into a…

"Disperse is a website, bookmarklet, linkable service, and (soon) a browser extension that allows you to share in several different formats across the Atmosphere all at once... a service like Buffer ... for the Atmosphere... giving the user a view of all of the different destinations they can share to without needing to create multiple accounts.…

Interesting post on WSocial's announcement and its aftermath: "The contrast between the media hype and the reality was so jarring, that I decided to start collecting evidence and share what I found". An accurate summary of the "disbelief and a touch of anger" created by the launch, particularly how they presented Bluesky as American whilst not men…

The Verge redesign their home page because "a single, fixed homepage has a hard time serving everyone well... Some of our best work simply didn’t stay visible long enough".The new home page, on desktop at least, is clearly divided between "part magazine, part firehose of news". The former highlights top stories and "story sets... collections of st…

An absolutely wonderful speech at AtmosphereConf 2026 from Blaine Cook, who is developing Roundabout for New Public. No slides, almost nothing about technology ... but lots of cheese. The following distinction is essential to understand "what it means to build the sort of software we want to see in the world:Engineering trains you to specify desir…

New_ Public "is creating Roundabout... help ... you start a healthy online space... in rural and suburban towns, and city neighborhoods — areas with about 10,000-50,000 people."Features include:event calendarlocal guideshelps and recommendationsinformation and updatebusiness openingseducationparentinga newcomer's guide to town.An alternative to "N…

"My labeler uses data from Open Secrets to add labels to politicians on Bluesky... Democracy dies in darkness, so let's shine a light. This is just the start for what's possible on Bluesky."

The feeds you want, the moderation your community needs, and the people you trust — all under your brand.

The Continuous/Modular science pioneers have "taken the first step toward bringing scientific documents onto" the Atmosphere: "OXA now defines an AT Protocol lexicon ... This post introduces the lexicon, explains the design decisions behind it, and describes where we’re headed"It starts by pointing out that although atproto was developed for socia…

"ATmosphereConf 2026 was recorded live on Streamplace. All talks are now available as VODs ... But there's no frontend yet. That's where you come in." - and the competition is on!The basic idea here is specific to video but can be applied anywhere: "Solving video for everybody forever means: many apps, many websites, thousands of unique experience…

The author posted something that led to some controversy... "The subject that had proved so contentious? Bluesky’s user numbers." So here he provides "an attempt to get some more concrete numbers to look at", as well as some nuance. Some key points:"In the first few days of April 2026, average daily posters had fallen to the level of September 202…

"One account for all your apps. Yours to keep, wherever you go." - a 1page explainer of what an atprotocol DID* is.* we seem to have settled on "Atmosphere account"

Tom MacWright has "been around long enough to have tried previous attempts to decentralize the web... lived through ... open source optimism and seen how it can get weird... this relatively new and energetic community gave me renewed hope... also made me wonder where this is all going."Atmosphereconf attendeees were "far more diverse across multip…

SF author and IT specialist Jason Butterfield is a Gander beta-tester, and in his feed people ask “Why would I want to see Bluesky posts on my feed?". His answer, he believes, "requires moving beyond the concept of ‘apps’ and into the realm of digital sovereignty. We have to stop thinking like tenants and start thinking like citizens [as] For the …

If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that the ATProtocol was the future of social media. If you'd asked me at the end of last year, I would have told you that it was the future of the web, as well. Today I think it could be bigger even than that.

"My personal path through AtmosphereConf 2026 was all about making the web social; streams, gardens and communities; and science, AI & news. Welcome to the linkfest"

As my ATScience workshop in Vancouver wasn't streamed, I thought I'd throw together a quick video and publish some first thoughts and supporting notes, just to get a record of the content online before I turn to the rest of what was probably the best conference I've ever attended.

I've always been a fan of Laurens' work documenting the Atmosphere's development, but his AtmosphereConf recap is next-level good, drawing parallels between a museum near the conference venue and the keynote by Erin Kissane, "one of the sharpest thinkers working on the question of what our digital infrastructure is actually doing to us... “Landsli…

Brookie's Atmosphereconf inevitably mentions her wonderful creation, YouAneMe.at: "nearly every attendee had made at least one connection. And together, we made over two thousand connections" in 4 days, plus of course developments like SuperConnectors and hardware integations by Bailey and Jim.On the commonly found topics in these recaps:Money: …

Echoing (unconsciously!) my thoughts of a year ago, Mike Masnick's recap opens with "It really does feel like the early days of the web... “we can just build things” is real... opening up a wonderful level of creativity... SO MUCH NEW STUFF".Apart from the general celebration;while the Atmosphere is not just Bluesky, the ecosystem is unbalanced: …

According to Bluesky Social's new CEO, "what struck me most about this one was the wide range of projects" - not just social apps, but also "wildfire coordination tools for the US fire service, decentralized AI and biomedical knowledge networks, and creating shared infrastructure to connect astronomy observatories".He was also a youandme.at enjoy…

Tynan Purdy's Atmosphereconf recap is also a quite moving account of someone finding his people: "In less than a year, I went from some rando ... to a community organizer, founding contributor at @ecosystemaction.com, and speaker at the ATmosphere Conference. I have relationships with not just the biggest names in the atproto space, but in interne…

Instead of depending on "large proprietary vendors" or building your own, "Open protocols offer a third path. Infrastructure that no single actor owns, that evolves through distributed processes... can be implemented by anyone with the technical capacity... allow governments to reduce dependency on individual vendors without cutting themselves of…

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 "…

My atproto.science workshop in Vancouver, end March, will involve founders of three of the most important apps on the Atmosphere (Leaflet for longform publishing, Semble for curation, Sill for knowledge discovery via social graph), as well as some newcomers to be unveiled on the day (Skysquare).We'll meet to unpack, discuss, tear apart and rebuild…

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…