Atmospheric Computing

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".

Of course, clouds float within an atmosphere, so no surprise we're talking about connecting them using ATproto, where the "shared dataset means we can do deeply cooperative computing". A good example: "The most popular algorithm on Bluesky is For You... run by Spacecowboy ... An entirely third party service presents itself as first-party to Bluesky... The garden is unwalled... it makes sense to run a personal cloud, because ... [it] can interoperate with other people's personal clouds... BobbyCorp's Big Bob Cloud, and the corner pie shop's Pie Cloud".

With your data in the ATmosphere, the web can present it, too: " If you self-host your account and your site, you can get kicked off every app in the Atmosphere but you've still got that identity and that presence".

He then gets into a more technical explanation. Key point - the goal is to bridge clouds "using the same high-scale techniques that any cloud service might use, but incorporate techniques akin to a zero-trust architecture so that we can cooperate across organizational boundaries".

In conclusion: "Atmospheric computing is about building an interoperable world... a collectivist answer to Big Tech...; if now is the time of AI, I want a personal AI running on my personal cloud. There is zero reason for us to all become subservient clients to American corporations. The path to a sovereign tech stack is via commodification."