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.
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:
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).
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):
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.
There are a lot of reasons to use Substack: apart from doing "all the basic things of a newsletter writing platform well", it's free to get started and - crucially - helps you build an audience. But "Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform", as they're pursuing a classic lock-in strategy. Any competitor must provide sim…
At last, a single page setting out the What and Why of Blacksky, which "builds infrastructure for social groups to control how they show up online: how their feeds work, how harm is addressed, and how costs are covered. Instead of one-size-fits-all rules set by a company with growth targets, Blacksky enables groups to govern themselves, and pool r…
How Graze raised funding for NPR and PBS "while also learning more about the future of sponsored content on ATProto".Results: "The Graze.social NPR/PBS donation campaign's 168% ROAS is exceptional performance in the nonprofit digital advertising landscape. Industry benchmarks from M+R show that typical Facebook/Meta campaigns achieve only 48% retu…
The always good Laurens on the ActivityPub-ATproto open letter: "There is a large group of people who are actively moving the space forward, and who have signed the open letter that calls for mutual respect and working together for a better open social web. The number of people who voiced objections and concerns is minimal, but by focusing on proc…
"We’ve built a network of scientists and researchers active on Bluesky. The goal is to better understand how this group of users interact on the platform... we arrived at a science-oriented network of 17,980", computed centrality measures to identify influential members, and created an interactive 3d visualisation.They also provide details of the …
"The first thing I noticed is how strange it felt to use... strange and empty, every interaction felt like it took an eternity... any interaction with others to require multiple levels of intentional actions".After acclimatising, however, "I began to feel comfortable ... very calming... [then] I ran out of stamina" - the site ceased 'working', so …
An open letter trying to calm troubled protocol waters: "the Social Web Community Group has seen an increase in heated discussions online ... a hotbed for conflict, disagreements, and misinformation. There has often been significant biases exhibited within these conversations."Points out that the 2 protocols have more in common than what divides t…
"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 on Bluesky wer…
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 evenly ac…
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)...Fo…
X is still larger but very regularly Bluesky easily eclipses it in terms of research being shared.
"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 useful spectr…
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 the c…
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 valuable insights into whether Blue…
Altmetric's blog post announcing that they had "expanded its tracking capabilities by integrating Bluesky" when there were "over 20 million users".
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, this strong intern…
"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 new consumer social apps…
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, activity on Mastodon — at least …
"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 value from Europe…
"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 Our Feeds, …
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.
"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 still share (small) data this way regul…
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 and who gets to decide what constitu…
"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-unauthenticated labels", which I thi…
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.
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.
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 ... associated with the prot…
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.
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 facets"More on leaflet:…
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