"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…

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 …

Integrating ATProtocol with your website:lets you build powerful, interactive online communities with very simple code; while giving you in-built reach to 40+m users across the Atmosphere; and allowing your members to own and manage their own data.

Integrating your event co-creation community with the Atmosphere brings you increased engagement and improved reach with a substantially simpler website.

"GreenGale is a blogging platform built on AT Protocol:uses Markdown formatting ... WhiteWind compatible... read and write WhiteWind content from GreenGale, and WhiteWind and GreenGale posts are both featured in the feeds and on user profiles...Standard Site is optional ... for cross-platform discoverability... per-account as well as per-post... c…

Paul Frazee clearing up confusion surrounding Atproto, ActivityPub and Nostr. The latter two "are good examples of "federated hosts" and "magical meshes," ... Atproto draws inspiration ... but it works like neither".Firstly, though, let's not put the cart before the horse: "The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals an…

"ATProtocol already supports... Permissioned data ... a love triangle between the user, the identities they grant permissions to, and the applications [which] view controlled data".Nick Gerakines first briefly summarises a previous post setting out how to build permissioned data into atprotocol: adding an optional service field pointing to "a serv…

Good explanation from one of Bluesky's engineers about one of the choices they made - to use markdown or to use something called richtext facets?He first sets out the problems with markdown before explaining how rich text facets work:{ text: "Hello @bob.com", facets: [ {feature: "mention", index: {start: 6, end: 14}} ] } "If there's a facet-ty…

Another developer reflects on integrating his site with standard.site, finding that Sequoia "handles the core use case reasonably well, but it doesn’t ... support ... multiple publications on a single site", whereas he wants publications for notes (articles and writing), projects (long-lived project writeups) & ramblings.Another issue is that "sit…

Strongly disagree with some of this post - eg "Substack is a platform like any other" - no, it's actively profiting from and promoting Nazi content.But this is true - it is a platform, so "It can boost us. It can also quickly deprioritize us... decide ... we no longer fits their “vibe”. The goal is not to leave Substack... The goal is optionality.…

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…

Drupal founder on "Open Source alone won't deliver digital sovereignty. Europe must fix procurement and fund those who actually build it... doesn't require building the European equivalent of Microsoft or Google... [but] Europe has ... some of the world's strongest Open Source communities, regulatory reach, and public sector scale."While "Open S…

[EN translation] of Damien van Achter's "semi-automated monitoring and publishing system"This is essentially an automated, LLM-driven version of my content pipeline, where the AI actually writes and (following a human check) publishes the text to multiple platforms. The full process is 9 steps long, from (what I call) priority source identificatio…

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…