"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."

A 34 minute read: "Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances", or its competitors. It's unpolished, 100% vibe coded, and only for those at Stage 7 of the 8 stage AI-assisted coding journey, "or maybe Stage 6 and very brave", because "Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent chimpanze…

"a year filled with a lot of different trends":"“reasoning” aka ... Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) ... Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal... also exceptional at p…

Remember this next time you're arguing with someone on the internet:"Hey, can you mansplain any louder?""Yeah, sure!"

"A popular resolution each new year is to do a "digital detox"... But studies are mixed on the benefits... [the very idea] puts the blame on us ... that we have insufficient willpower and we could put our phones down at any time if we really wanted to. This completely ignores the deliberatively manipulative design of the apps ... There are literal…

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…

Necessity is the mother of invention, which is why innovation comes from the edge: here's Rudy celebrating a year of Blacksy with some quite remarkable announcements."I need to live in a world where I can privately send that friend money for anything from groceries to car repairs without it being woven into some CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY NARRATIVE and w…

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…

NotebookLM co-founder has until now "described NotebookLM as a tool for understanding and exploring the information you need... But we also think NotebookLM could be an AI-first distribution platform, amplifying expert knowledge on a wide range of topics... a preview of that vision: Featured Notebooks...the backstory... We’re going to be able to b…

"tools like NotebookLM only answer from your uploaded files. No making stuff up. No “convincingly wrong” summaries... isn’t about AI writing for you. It’s about AI helping you think through what you already collected... transforms research from a filing system into a conversation".After a brief description of how it works and what it doesn't do - …

This JRC Policy brief "outlines the EU’s strategic imperative to assert digital sovereignty while remaining open to global collaboration".Defines EU digital sovereignty as "the EU’s capacity to exercise strategic independence in the digital domain—encompassing data governance, infrastructure control, and innovation... to reduce vulnerabilities in …

No, the article's not dead, but "the real question ... whether it remains the primary way people encounter journalism".If "Personalization is coming to journalism... who controls it", and what sort of journalism will it affect? Most news is not "high-end, high-quality investigations, analysis, and commentary", which will probably not be personalis…

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…

A Guest Post from a couple of scientists from the Thomas Kuhn Foundation, created to "give science the means to see itself". They've created "a working system that can map how knowledge changes in real time... KGX3 detects and classifies the epistemic function of research papers... provide a complete understanding of what a paper does: confirm, st…

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…

Alexandra Geese on the EC's "first-ever non-compliance decision under the Digital Services Act against X ... a necessary first step in enforcing European digital regulation... [but] not sufficient to address the systemic risks posed by X... systematic amplification of certain political content and the systematic suppression of others" as part of "…

"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 …