Feel the ATmosphere: it's 1995 all over again

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.

(So this newsletter will have to do. Browse them all and subscribe.)

TL:DR; At the risk of oversharing my age, Ahoy! made me more enthused about the potential for building a better online world than I’ve felt for 15 years — at some points I even felt echoes of 1995, when I learnt HTML 1.0 and began to glimpse the future I’d been reading about since the late 1980s.

Bluesky is both its own thing and an onramp for the ATmosphere

The number of new apps previewed or demo’d, in particular, convinced me that we just might look back on 2025 as the year when the narrative shifted from comparing Bluesky to everything else - How does it compares to X? Is it as decentralised as Mastodon? — to people realising that Bluesky is both its own thing and an onramp for the ATmosphere, the main event.

The challenges of Adoption

But events taking place during and just before the event have convinced me that this promise won’t be fulfilled until more users like me actually use the protocol’s decentralised possibilities and move away from the infrastructure of one company (Bluesky Social PBC, obviously).

“Adoption” is therefore a two-phase challenge: not just helping people and organisations develop and implement their eXit Stategies to Bluesky, but also helping them move onto alternative infrastructures. A move I myself have yet to make.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself: at Ahoy!, one of my proposed unconference sessions was Helping large organisations best use Bluesky, and to my surprise it was accepted.

I’ll be following up with those in the above photo this month (ping me, below, if you want to join in), so my next post will focus on Adoption.

If I haven’t followed up yet, it’s for two reasons: I’ll have to tackle the Bluesky Purity Spiral (which terrifies me), and I’ve been focused on my second proposal at Ahoy: using the ATmosphere as the social connective tissue of decentralised collective intelligence. I didn’t actually put it forward, preferring Boris Mann’s suggested session on knowledge graphs (same ideaspace, higher level). Unfortunately my session was scheduled at the same time as his, so I’m playing catch up with his ideas and exploring Groundmist, a technology he introduced me to in response to my proposal.

Bridging private to public with Groundmist

Groundmist could be crucial to decentralised collective intelligence on the ATmosphere.

Developed by @grjte, Groundmist bridges the gap between “local first” computing, where your files live on your computer rather than the cloud, and the ATmosphere. This matters because everything on the ATmosphere is public, while nothing is more private than your local files. 

With Groundmist:

• you do your thinking, notemaking and content drafting locally (ie a folder on your PC, bottom left, Fig 1)
• when you have something to publish, a Personal Synch Server (PSS) pushes it to your Personal Data Server (PDS), where all your ATmosphere content lives
• from your PDS, Bluesky and other “appviews” (5 mentioned below) distribute it to your followers (top right):

Add an inbox to complete the social loop

I’m excited about Groundmist because it provides the connections needed for decentralised collective intelligence, as identified in 2023 (Thinking and writing in a decentralised collective intelligence ecosystem and Social knowledge graphs for collective intelligence). 

All we need is a multi-protocol “inbox” in that local app (Fig 2, below), fed by multiple content streams from the people you follow (left), allowing you to save stuff you like into your local library:

Add thinking & collaboration tools

What you do with your local files is your business. Personally I want to:

• use a tool4thought to read my local files and draft content, and collaborate on selected files with people I trust (bottom, Fig 3)
• plug in a content management system (CMS) to take content from my PDS and build my personal website or newsletter (right):

This connects your thinking/writing stack, your social networks and your personal website as follows:

• (IN): you read content from people you follow using your local app, and save stuff you like into your locally-saved library 
• (THINK & WRITE): use a tool4thought/notemaking app to use that content and develop your ideas, sometimes with trusted collaborators*
• (OUT): when you have something to publish, push it to your PDS, and from there to your followers and personal website.

I’m hoping I can get @grjte and a few others together on Discord to discuss how these ideas can develop, so ping me (below) if you’d like to join in. See also everything on my Hub tagged groundmist.

(*) Several local-based tools already allow collaboration. See, for example, Why I’m massively into MassiveWiki (MassiveWiki has relaunched as MarkPub with basic ATmosphere integration). 

Five more apps

While grjte didn’t make it to Hamburg, so many app developers did that I can only summarise and link to them here:

• Sebastian was there (above) with two apps (Bluesky client Skeets, and photo/video app Flashes), demoing how the same content can be presented differently by different apps, allowing users to customise their Bluesky experience and incentivising innovation
• Spark, presented by its founder Joe Basser, is a completely independent photo & short-form video ATproto app; they’re building their own relay, and will soon offer PDS hosting
• graphtracks.com, presented by its founder Marat Shakirov, is the most powerful Bluesky analytics platform I’ve seen 
• tangled, presented by one of its founders Anirudh Oppiliappan, is the most original application I saw in Hamburg: they’re replacing GitHub’s social layer (aka “onlyfans for developers”) with ATproto to create an environment where developers have complete ownership of their code, and open source communities can freely self-govern
• @sill.social, a link collection tool inspired by Nuzzel but spanning Bluesky and Mastodon, shows you what the people you’re following are liking and reading. But chatting with founder Tyler Fisher in Hamburg, he mentioned a very intriguing idea: what about showing you what your followers are reading and liking?

Indiesky: European social media sovereignty

Ahoy!, however, was only partly about technology.

The second day in Hamburg focused on unpacking #Indiesky Europe, which narrowly avoided becoming officially known as #wurstsky, and aims to ensure Europe has its own ATmosphere infrastructure.

Having crops in the field may be resilient, but so is having seeds in the barn

Of course, it’s probably not actually necessary for Europe to roll its own relay if Bluesky Social PBC’s is doing the job — as ‪@warpfork‬ remarked, “Having crops in the field may be resilient, but so is having seeds in the barn”. Which is why a backup relay was just one of the ideas discussed: others included developing a European app store, creating a healthy PDS hosting economy, and building EU-level CSAM moderation services for startups.

While I came to this session full of ideas for Horizon Europe funding, plenty of people there had already tried that route and were deeply, deeply uninterested in taking it again, particularly as the most relevant EU research funding organisation seems to be purely ActivityPub-focused (they never actually answered my query to confirm this).

While that idea went nowhere, there’s now a dedicated Indiesky working group which meets reasonably regularly, underpinned by some philanthropic funding from Free Our Feeds (who were there), so ping me (below) if you’d like to get involved.

Particularly relevant to this discussion was a presentation from one of the first speakers. @Aendra is the brilliant FT data visualisation engineer behind News, the most popular news-oriented custom feed, which she is now monetising with graze.social, aiming to channel the resulting funds to other ATmosphere projects. 

Where Canada goes, Europe should follow

She’s also setting up Northsky, a co-op to host PDSes in Canada, in case US regulations force Bluesky PBC to ban trans content. Where Canada goes, Europe should follow (or even team up?), — as I mentioned earlier, my next post will explore why more users need to use decentralised infrastructure if actual decentralisation is to be achieved. Easy-to-use, independent European hosting services should therefore be an Indiesky priority.

ATmosphere University

Having technology and infrastructure will achieve nothing if people don’t understand why they should use it.

Just before and during Ahoy!, two things happened: 

• Bluesky apparently “went down”, leading to a predictable flurry of snark from Mastodon users across the Fediverse and (strangely) Bluesky
• Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of the Turkish government, leading to inevitable claims that Bluesky is “just like Twitter”.

I’ll look at both stories in depth in future posts, but both reflected a profound misunderstanding of what Bluesky is and isn’t. Seeing this, some of us at Ahoy! committed to trying to launch some sort of online ATmosphere University. 

The very earliest start can be found in the Explainers page of the AT Protocol Community wiki, where among other things you’ll find my far-from-finished deep-as-you-like dive into the ATmosphere. If you really know you’re way around ATprotocol and would like to partner up on this, or just have another explainer you’d like to add, ping me (below).

But a few technology explainers will not be enough, I realised, as I watched the Ahoy! talk by social science PhD student Nathalie Van Raemdonck on power concentrations in the ATmosphere, which convincingly showed that social technology built in ignorance of social science will never end well.

The permissionless nature of the ATmosphere means anyone can take insights from academics like Nathalie and turn them into code, without having to answer to the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or their investors. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

PS Contact, comment, subscribe, follow

The above is only my first pass at processing what I learnt in Hamburg, so I’ll return to these themes in the future. If you’d like to learn more:

• enjoy the Ahoy! participants custom feed
• reach out to me via my Hub, or book a moment via Calendly or ping me on Bluesky or (checked infrequently) LinkedIn.
• Subscribe to and Browse my newsletter, check out the Overview I maintain here on Bluesky and the ATmosphere, or grab the RSS feed of everything tagged ATprotocol.