Relevant Overviews
Overview: Bluesky and the ATmosphere
The ATmosphere is the information ecosystem based on ATproto, the protocol developed by and for Bluesky. More interconnected apps are emerging. The potential for better online conversations is profound... if adequate revenue streams can be confirmed.
(last edit: February 2025)
Just as Mastodon is on the Fediverse, an information ecosystem where it and other apps can interact using the ActivityPub protocol, the Bluesky protocol (ATproto) underpins the ATmosphere ecosystem. In 2025, I'm betting that this is the most promising ground for #AI4communities.
Origins: Bluesky
ATproto was originally going to underpin Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. Moreover, when the Bluesky team then spun off from Twitter, they decided to keep many things unchanged, making the transition easier for people fleeing X.
The result looked and felt so similar that many people didn't spot how the open, permissionless nature of this new environment set Bluesky apart. Some key Bluesky features include:
- Custom feeds, each a subset of the Bluesky firehose, tuned to a particular community's interests and moderation preferences, created by anyone using a variety of 3rd party tools (see Bluesky custom feeds) and usable by anyone by simply pinning the feed to their interface
- Labellers apply labels to accounts - like custom feeds, anyone can create one, using a variety of tools, and anyone can subscribe to them if they want to see the label
- Block/mute lists are a sort of labeller: subscribe to one and you'll never see content from anyone on the list in your timeline
- Starter packs package a list of up to 150 people and (optionally) custom feeds relevant to a particular topic, and provide a feed of the people's posts.
- 3rd party apps: you don't need to use the official Bluesky app - there are many others, and because the ATmosphere is permissionless they won't go the way of Tweetdeck.
Enter the ATmosphere
The ATmophere is a permissionless ecosystem - anyone can build anything they like, and can access the Bluesky feed, without having to get Bluesky Social PBC's permission.
So, like Mastodon, Bluesky is not the only kid on its protocol block: in mid-2024 the Whitewind blogging platform launched, and within a few months a plethora of other apps were in beta, including Instagram- & TikTok lookalikes (all tools tagged #atproto and #tool).
Is it decentralised?
Yes, but not as decentralised as Fediverse. The key arguments in this once-fractious debate were both articulated and calmed by two protocol engineers: Christine Lemmer-Webber (ActivityPub co-author) and Bryan Newbold of Bluesky, who exchanged three enormous blog posts. After reading, annotating and generally struggling through all three (and more), I came out with a few conclusions (paraphrased from my newsletter from December 2024 and January 2025):
- There are different degrees of decentralisation, and different ways to get there. A comparison between the relatively mature Fediverse and Bluesky, with its brand-new protocol, is therefore tricky, particularly as Bluesky is focusing first and foremost on providing an X-like experience as possible for everyone fleeing X, which required certain choices to be made.
- There are too many blog posts, not enough wikis - someone should lock these two in a room somewhere until they come up with a text they both agree on
- I hope this protocol competition will evolve until the two spaces complement each other, as:
- ATProto's shared-heap model structurally favours few servers, "and thus has a natural centralizing force"
- ActivityPub has an incentive to keep the average followers/user low.
- the Fediverse will therefore probably remain a good place for cozyweb spaces, and co-exist with more global conversations on the more centralised and business-like ATmosphere.
- The world needs both.
What does the ATmosphere represent?
I first saw this when I published my December newsletter, and an extract from it as a stand-alone post, on Whitewind (see everything I Do or Think tagged #Whitewind).
When you sign up to blog on Whitewind, you use your Bluesky ID, and your blog posts live in your Bluesky Personal Data Store. So it's your content, and if Whitewind disappears, you can take it with you to another provider (or build your own), and all of your links keep working. Whitewind doesn't own you. You own you.
Moreover, there's "seamless comments integration with BlueSky: a comment posted to the blog is shared on the commenter's Bluesky account, and whenever someone shares the post on Bluesky it also appears under the post" - Thinking transparently in the ATmosphere.
The code for that integration is freely available, so this has massive implications for website-based communities, among other things.
One of those other things is #ai4communities, which was originally more Fediverse-oriented when I first started articulating it in January 2023. In 2024 I began revisiting it on my experimental wiki with a "technology-agnostic" post accompanied by sub-pages exploring how it would look on the Fediverse, the ATmosphere and (tbd) Nostr. The exercise convinced me that the ATmosphere is most promising, which is why it's been the focus of recent newsletters.
Relevant resources
www.nature.com
"Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X... according to the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky... suggest Bluesky users engage with posts more than do users of X... The results were posted as a preprint on arXiv last month and have not been peer reviewed.""Interactions…
bsky.social
Collection of posts from media publishers on the traffic and engagement from Bluesky compared to X, Threads, etc. Image: Similarweb's report, which also said:"Threads generated 24.5 million outgoing referrals in November, but 42% of that traffic was to sister site instagram.com. Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits, spread more…
www.emarketer.com
When this was written there were 23m Bluesky users: "Some publishers report traffic and conversion rates three to four times higher compared with platforms like Threads and X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.... EUobserver received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky (with 3,300 followers) compared to 1,320 from X (with 203,000 followers)…
bsky.app
X is still larger but very regularly Bluesky easily eclipses it in terms of research being shared.
dl.acm.org
"decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist... we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky... [which] decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders".The intros of Fediverse and Nostr provide a use…
dl.acm.org
A 2024 paper from the Bluesky team where they "introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; make it easy for users to switch providers; give users agency over …
www.sciencedirect.com
This study examines:"the shift in the scientific community from X to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics", following the Academic Twitter migration. Is there "evidence of a community shift", and if so "examine the differences in values and indicators..."? "provide …
www.altmetric.com
Altmetric's blog post announcing that they had "expanded its tracking capabilities by integrating Bluesky" when there were "over 20 million users".
arxiv.org
This preprint "looks at the dynamics of this migration" from X to Mastodon of academics: using "publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period... gathered follower-followee relationships ... finding that the subset of academics ... were well-connected. However, thi…
techcrunch.com
"Jack Dorsey ... invested $10 million ... fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape." Original focus nostr, but now "will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub... as well as Cashu.""operating like a “community of hackers,”... could include…
www.fabriziomusacchio.com
Some thoughts from a neuroscientist who's been kicking Bluesky's tyres: "The scientific community is once again shifting platforms... Between Mastodon’s ideals and Bluesky’s usability, we are faced with a complex landscape of compromises".Background: first he left X for Mastodon following Musk's purchase"over time, ac…
www.project-syndicate.org
"Europe’s systemic dependency on Big Tech’s social-media platforms threatens the continent’s digital sovereignty" - perhaps nothing new, but well argued nevertheless:"Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors... it must do the same for social media. dominant platforms extract va…
www.eurosky.social
"the next era of social media—built in Europe, run on our cloud, ruled by our laws... Social media is critical infrastructure, and a vital piece of the European tech sovereignty agenda... we need to build infrastructure ... on the AT Protocol... We have a plan for immediate action that can begin having an impact in 2025".Part of Free O…
github.com
Explore the definition and reference implementation of Lexicon Lenses, a transformation of records from one type to another. This working group is expected to production documentation produces lens definition, discovery, application, and best practices. It will also produce a feature complete reference implementation.
paragraph.com
"Incorporating science social media into the scientific process [as]... Sharing large scientific datasets is a pain in the ass, and finding them is even worse [so let's build] ... A true "scientific data commons".. it's called github."However Github's social dimension is totally centralised - "that people do…
www.techdirt.com
Mike Masnick notes, as the "Bluesky is dying" discourse moves into it's 3rd? week, that it's "a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can’t stop writing about it". But the premise of these critiques is wrong as they "fundamentally misunderstand what people want from social media a…
www.bskyinfo.com
"Deer.social is a soft fork of the official Bluesky client, offering enhanced features, customizable toggles, and a focus on high-impact improvements for power users" as options you can toggle on, like the ability to "see through quote blocks and detachment (nuclear block for quotes/reply chains)", ignore " !no-unauthentic…
mailchi.mp
In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere — the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky.
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere - the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky. I proposed a couple of ideas for the unconference sessions, and came away with content for at least 5 posts, none of which I've found time to write.
Think
newsletter,
collective intelligence,
myhub,
early adopter,
tools,
bluesky,
atprotocol,
ahoy2025,
ahoy,
groundmist
fediversereport.com
A deep dive into the April 2025 "censorship" on Turkish Bluesky illustrates that government censorship on ATmosphere apps is limited and will become even less effective as more people exploit its decentralised nature.Context in brief:March 2025, the Turkish "government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts ... associate…
experiments.myhub.ai
Some thoughts on how Groundmist supports the ideas I'm developing for decentralised collective intelligence, written in preparation for an online workshop with the Groundmist developer and other interested people.
atproto.leaflet.pub
Boris tests Leaflet's new ATproto integration: "Leaflet has a great rich text editor that works well even on mobile web. It’s a block based editor... you can embed various fancy blocks, like Bluesky embeds, RSVPs... Each block might be a different lexicon"(on Discord): "here’s the record in my PDS ... Blocks with rich text fac…
notes.commonscomputer.com
When I saw this "Open space proposal by Boris (Mann) at Ahoy" I shelved my very similar proposal and proposed another, which was successful (good news) and scheduled at the same time as Boris' (bad news).Boris' idea is essential, imho, to my ideas for decentralised collective intelligence - a "long form, Markdown lexicon D…
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
The 3rd post of the series focuses "on interoperability and composability—how we can combine data from multiple local-first applications, privately and seamlessly".The problem: by their nature, "Local-first software applications typically store data separately and independently", so it's fragmented. The lack of "commo…
whtwnd.com
Grjte's 2nd Groundmist post "to explore ... local-first AppViews for local-first data, similar to atproto's AppViews for public data" first points out that the protocol allows anyone "to build a wide variety of different views ... of public ... Personal Data Servers (PDSes). These interfaces are known as "AppViews&quo;…
groundmist.xyz
Came across this via Boris Mann in the runup to Ahoy2025 - the very first time I saw someone developing the #ai4community tools I want for decentralised collective intelligence: "Groundmist echoes the design of AT Protocol... but applies these ideas and select elements of the protocol to local-first software and data... It uses Automerge, AT …
bmannconsulting.com
Boris Mann's personal notes on what he wants for what is essentially the private garden segment of #ai4communities: a "multi-player personal notes & publishing stack", a place to put "meeting notes, quick scratch notes, pages on their way to be published, links and a few comments, research from multiple web pages... your co…
www.skeetsapp.com
"Skeets is a 3rd party iOS / iPad OS client for Bluesky" which I saw at the Ahoy conference. It's a good example of how Bluesky is more than a X alternative: it can be used by any (iOS-carrying) Bluesky user, but offers other features than Bluesky PBC's own app, including:"Keep reading positionEdit postsPost notificationsB…
whtwnd.com
"How would MyHub.ai evolve to become part of the ATmosphere?" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.