In the Atmosphere - macwright.com

Tom MacWright has "been around long enough to have tried previous attempts to decentralize the web... lived through ... open source optimism and seen how it can get weird... this relatively new and energetic community gave me renewed hope... also made me wonder where this is all going."

Atmosphereconf attendeees were "far more diverse across multiple axes... extremely dense with accomplished thinkers and programmers ... Smart people like this thing... a lot of people from specific sub-communities".

"the AT Protocol community is so new, small, personal, and altruistic... [while] The companies are also nascent... most ... at the seed stage or earlier".

As Graze's CEO put it, moreover, "fundraising is exceptionaly difficult [...] AT Proto is not growing exponentially which means functionally it is a non-starter for VC investment [...] The AI hype cycle has all but consumed available oxygen" - which may be cause or effect of the fact that the community seems to "avoid traditional corporate formats and funding mechanisms".

He gives a quick primer on where the money to date has come from: in short, US philanthropy, before explaining why he's so bored by AI and was therefore very happy that "Most of the sessions that I attended didn't mention AI", although AI was clearly being used to develop many of the tools demo'ed. He covers the two reactions to Attie:

• "it isn't a slop machine...
• definitely stomps on or near much smaller efforts ...Graze, Surf, Skyfeed, Cosmik's Hyperfeed, and I'm sure many others... Trezy's blog post about this is a great, critical explanation"

Overall, the community has "a tremendous amount of energy, creativity, and good vibes, but pretty dim prospects for business. This can turn around in an instant ... But right now, the amounts raised by companies in the ecosystem are tiny... None of the charts of Bluesky adoption look good."

But is that a problem? Or rather for whom is this a problem - eg Bluesky Social PBC - and for whom is it not? He doesn't really answer that question, but I think it's one of the most important questions we can ask.

If Bluesky Social PBC were to shut down for lack of revenue, it would make it even more difficult to raise funds for many other apps. But the protocol is already there, and the basic infrastructure isn't very expensive. Maybe we'll end up with a lot of websites and a few apps connecting tens, not hundreds of millions of people together outside of the walled gardens of China and America. It's not the best-case scenario, but it's not nothing.