The Last Social Account You'll Ever Need

Joe Basser, Spark founder, is also one of the best explainers on the Atmosphere.

Building on his previous post, which explains that "When users can leave without losing [everything]... platforms lose the ability to quietly tighten the screws forever", Basser explores what happens as a result: "What does social media look like when anti-enshittification is proactively built-in?"

He starts with a great, simple definition of the Atmosphere "the ecosystem of apps that operate on the same ... shared social contract about how social data is created, stored, and exchanged. Apps don’t need permission ... to exist. They just need to agree on how data should work so users can move freely between them... when social apps ... start behaving more like the web ... many places, many interfaces, one connected space... It brings back openness without asking you to give up the things we actually like about modern social media: discovery, aggregation, interaction, and momentum."

It's an #everything ecosystem", as opposed to an everything app "controlled by one [all-powerful] organization, that tries to do everything... An everything ecosystem lets everything get done... power is distributed”

"There’s no gatekeeping ... because the data doesn’t belong to the apps. It belongs to the users. Power stops accumulating in one place and starts distributing outward.

He explains coopetition: "apps compete at the product layer - design, UX, moderation, tone - while cooperating at the infrastructure layer. They share identity, shared data formats, and shared social primitives... cooperation is what allows real competition to exist at all. It's the killer feature. "

And then identity ("One Identity, Everywhere") and the impact of lexicons: "just a shared agreement about what a piece of social data looks like... When apps adopt the same lexicon, they don’t need custom integrations or special partnerships" - interoperability happens without permission. He provides some examples - longform (standard.site), events, culture and music, etc...,

Before turning to feeds, which "act more like windows.. A Bluesky feed might highlight new long-form posts from Leaflet. Another might surface upcoming events published through Smoke Signal, letting you tap through to RSVP without turning your main timeline into an events app. Feeds become a lightweight layer of awareness", allowing you to "choose a perspective, not surrendering to a mood imposed on you. Switching feeds feels less like changing who you are and more like walking into a different room... no single algorithm quietly decides culture for billions of people... Open algorithms are censorship-resistant".

All of this I knew, but find he explains it really well. The last section, however, was new to me: What is a follow?

It's of course great that "apps can reuse follow records from elsewhere ... to reduce cold start. A new app can show you a familiar social graph immediately, and users can switch apps without losing their audience or who they follow."

But should your follower count on App B really display your followers on App A who are not using App B, and so will never see your App B content?

Referencing Erving Goffman, "we perform different selves for different audiences ... Offline, those contexts are physical. Online, they’re interfaces... [so] follows [should] remain meaningful within the experience they’re attached to. Apps can still take hints from each other ... Spark will look at your Bluesky follows and suggest people who also use Spark, or auto-follow overlaps, without importing followers who will never engage in that context. Apps that serve the same audience and intent should share social graphs... while competing on experience", but if two apps have different contexts they shouldn't: "No one has a single social graph."

All this means "small apps can matter again... Ten thousand users can be enough", and if it dies "Your data still lives with you. Someone else can build a new interface and bring it back to life... the internet stops feeling like a series of hostage situations."