A new platform, W, aspires to be European alternative to X.

This has a lot of people annoyed that more silos are being created, rather than choosing open social protocols.

The last thing anyone needs is a new "platform" for microblogging. The whole point is we should be moving beyond silo'd platforms into an open social world. So my response to the launch of "W" as a competing platform to "X" is simply: "but Y, tho?" cybernews.com/tech/europe-...

[image or embed]

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick.bsky.social) January 20, 2026 at 3:52 PM

But what if I told you that W is planning to launch, powered by ATProto?

We've heard that the initial launch is going to be a fork of the Bluesky social-app (link to open source code on Github) - the main app that the Bluesky team runs and maintains, and that people use on web, iOS, and Android.

By pitching itself as an alternative to X - with potential features around verification and photo ID - this is a "microblogging clone". Great! One more product option that people can use with their ATProto accounts, picking and choosing between app interfaces, moderation, verification, and features.

You can check out the resources page on the ATProto Community forum for a list of other alternate social apps, some of which are simple forks, and some of which are running fully separate infrastructure (Blacksky, with account hosting, moderation, a network index) or a completely different architecture (Red Dwarf, fetching content directly from accounts you follow without a network index).

And of course, all of those are microblog flavours, with Smoke Signal handling events, Leaflet (and Standard Site) handling long form writing, Semble handling bookmarks, or things that don't make you think about open social at all, like Flushes or Recipe Exchange.

EuroSky as Innovation Commons

At last year's ATmosphere conference, we welcomed Free our Feeds, which blossomed into IndieSky, the EuroSky initiative, and now the Modal Foundation, a Dutch-based foundation that is part of the roadmap of Free our Feeds.

And yes, support for the AT Community Fund.

EuroSky is building out commons infrastructure. Account hosting, shared moderation, network infrastructure protection, all on European hardware and software.

From their website:

Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale. 

EuroSky provides a platform for innovation, where developers, communities, regions, and even national governments can start small, and grow big, with a solid, sovereign foundational infrastructure.

This is a W for ATProto

W, planning to be an alternative to X – and to the Bluesky product – could choose to run all of their own infrastructure. Or they could contribute to EuroSky. Or something in between, where they run their own verified account scheme, lean into some shared network protection homed in Europe.

We don't quite have the analogies for this. Was Hotmail mad when Gmail launched? Of course! Corporate competition. But this was a win for email usage and growth of the "email network" overall.

And that's what protocol adoption of open social looks like. Not just co-opetition, but growing a network that supports many approaches to microblogging and beyond, where users can make choices from many options.

This is a W for ATProto.

Anna Zeiter and W - welcome to the ATmosphere, the network of all the apps and account hosts that build the ATProto network together.

We'd love to see you at ATmosphereConf 2026, in Vancouver, Canada this March. We're excited to see more organizations building on ATProto, and look forward to building, growing, and communicating together.

The next ATProto Community Conference is coming to Vancouver, Canada, March 26th to 29th, 2026.

You can read the full announcement on Leaflet, and subscribe to the publication there for future news and updates.

Thank you to Bluesky, Streamplace, Cosmik Network, and Graze for stepping up as our very first sponsors!

The atmosphereconf.org landing page is where you can leave your email to get notified when tickets go on sale.

Stay tuned for a call for proposals, early speaker announcements, and other news. Get in touch if you want to talk about sponsorship, volunteering, or anything else.

You can RSVP on Smoke Signal below.

P.S. We've archived the 2025 and 2026 conference lists on this site and will continue to evolve it as more and more ATProto tools come together. Major announcements still get posted to the list, and we'll take you along as we move elsewhere.

See you in the ATmosphere!

Today we’re announcing our first Indiesky grant, a $5000 USD contribution to NorthSky, their PDS migration tools and the migration efforts for their community.

We started the ATProtocol Community Fund to grow a healthy, robust, and independent social and dev community around ATProto. We believe that ATProtocol is a key, evolving set of technologies and standards for building a stronger and open internet. We see the ATProto's potential to bring users and developers new options and opportunities to take control their experiences and lives on the internet through ATProto apps and tools.

As part of that work the Community Fund runs a grant program to encourage and support the development of projects which turn these opportunities into real and usable software for users and communities. This initial IndieSky granting effort is thanks to funds raised through Free Our Feeds.

We’re excited to announce that the first Indiesky grant will go to NorthSky, a worker owned cooperative comprised of and serving the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, hosted in Canada.

NorthSky has set out to build the tools and educational resources that allow their community take unrevocable control of their accounts and data, and migrate accounts onto servers run by the communities they trust.

This grant comprises of two pieces, the first being PDS account migration tools for all users of the ATProto ecosystem, and second educational resources and a migration campaign for the NorthSky community as they move to NorthSky's PDS.

We look forward to NorthSky's contributions to the ATmosphere and more tools that provide users sovereignty over their data and accounts, and communities the capabilities to build the apps and infrastructure that their particular needs and goals.

If you're interested in the ATProtocol Community Fund's granting program, drop us a line to [email protected], or join the new ATProto Community Forum and ask us any questions you have.

We're hosting an all day community hack session in East Williamsburg on Friday, August 22nd for the ATProto community, plus an evening social of presentations and networking.

Register

The tickets are pay-what-you-can, with a suggested donation of $10, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Paying more helps pay for the space and meals for all, and for future AT Community Fund events.

Thanks to Hex House members for hosting us! The art studio & community space is in a 4000 sq ft warehouse in East Williamsburg, close to Cooper Park. You'll receive the full studio address after registering.

Hack Day

We'll gather at Hex House in the morning starting at 10am and do a mini round of introductions on what people are interested in and spend time in small group discussions, demos, and hacking.

Some of the topics of interest include:

• the new OAuth scopes release - how does it work, what can we do with it, what questions do we have?
• Private Data - what are use cases and requirements, what are some approaches to this
• Ecosystem event planning - local NYC meetups, 2026 plans for FOSDEM etc.
• IndieSky topics, Rudy's Blacksky and the independent rsky codebase and interoperating

And anything about learning how to use, hack, build, or experiment with ATProto with a group of people interested in the same thing!

Everyone is welcome to come and hack on a project of their own, dig into different elements of ATProto and share knowledge, and/or propose a group discussion.

Evening Social

The evening social starting at 6pm will include a number of planned talks & speakers as well as small introductions and demos of ATProto apps, including:

• Rudy, Blacksky
• Nick, Smoke Signal
• Peter, Skyseed Fund
• Eli, Streamplace
• Stellz, ATProto Wallet Linking
• Tori, Skylight
• Additional Hack Day lightning talks and demos from the days discussions

Then we'll break for light snacks and drinks, plus some music and late night hacking.

Sponsors

Thanks to the Streamplace team for helping to cover costs for the event and providing video recording & streaming.

Get in touch if you'd like to help support the event with a sponsorship!

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It's been a while since we've done a Tech Talk, and we're going to celebrate the Smoke Signal re-launch, open sourcing, and 1 year anniversary.

Nick was the second Tech Talk guest back in September 2024. The chatlog on that post is great, the Bluesky devs came to all the early tech talks before they got slammed by site growth.

Some of the changes and topics we'll cover:

• the Smoke Signal codebase has been re-written, re-vamped, and open sourced - on ATProto git hosting tangled of course!
• A Discourse forum for users & devs, linked with AIP so you can login with your ATProto account
• hosting your own Smoke Signal
• badges showcase and signed records with gnosco
• webhooks that work with ATProto's XRPC

And many more things, some of which Nick is still hacking on right now!

Register to join us on Smoke Signal

We're going to be experimenting with going to Smoke Signal directly for events, so lots of new things going on.

We're still going to be using Zoom, which we'll be sending out via email rather than sharing the link publicly, so make sure to share your email when you RSVP.

And yes, this is the new HTML Event Widget, although even since that widget was created, Nick also has a new search widget that is powering the Calendar page here.

If you're interested in using or extending Smoke Signal, have bugs, feature requests, or just jam with other organizers, users, and devs, head over to the new Smoke Signal Discourse forum:

Smoke Signal

A place for smoke signal users and developers.

Smoke Signal

Nick and Smoke Signal were one of the first recipients of a Bluesky Microgrant last year. As part of the AT Community Fund Open Collective, you can help support & sponsor basic costs for the core instance, appview, and related infrastructure.

Thank you to all of the current contributors supporting Smoke Signal on Open Collective!

Video & Resources

Presentation slides:

• Follow Smoke Signal @smokesignal.events and Nick @ngerakines.me
• Source code on Tangled https://tangled.sh/@smokesignal.events

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We're pleased to announce the kick off of the IndieSky working group, including an initial donation by the Free Our Feeds team to support coordinating the working group and fund initial R&D on infrastructure software, setup, and tooling.

IndieSky is short for independent, exploring what it means to run different parts of the composable AT Protocol architecture, both individually for small deploys, as well as commons infrastructure, where we share costs, code, and maintenance together.

Organizations like NorthSky are looking at data sovereignty for their community through PDS hosting, Blacksky continues to implement the ATProto spec prioritizing community safety & self governance, and devs are building everything from RPi-powered whole network indexes to forks of Bluesky software with experimental features.

The next step is to host, operate, and moderate these services at scale, sharing commons infrastructure where we can, and supporting each other by pooling knowledge and funding.

IndieSky supported by Free Our Feeds

The Free Our Feeds organization has launched their campaign to raise funds for independent governance and infrastructure at scale, participating in the wider AT Protocol ecosystem.

We’re raising funds to launch a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire (including Bluesky itself).

The Free Our Feeds team have generously stepped forward to be the first funders of the IndieSky Working Group, with an initial donation of $50K USD.

The AT Protocol has a wickedly cool and wildly inventive community, and the ATProto Community Fund has done outstanding work to support them with their first initiatives: ATmosphereConf and the Location Data project.

For Free Our Feeds to partner with ATProto Community Fund was a very easy decision to make and we're fantastically excited to be able to support them in continuing their work.

— Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com, Free Our Feeds custodian, IPFS Foundation, and DASL project lead

The first thing that this enables is that Boris Mann and Ted Han, who have been volunteering their time, can get compensated with a small monthly retainer to help organize and scale the working group and other ATProto ecosystem initiatives.

Secondly, the ATProto Community Fund can support developers and commons infrastructure projects with small donations and funding infrastructure, and support them in further fundraising, entity creation, and other best practices.

This is a very small amount of funding compared to what is needed to develop software that is used by millions, or operate moderation at scale, but it means we can unblock experiments and make it so that devs aren't paying for server costs out of their own pocket.

Commons Infrastructure

Many ATProto infrastructure components have become easier to run and deploy in the past several months, but there is more to do to go from developer R&D and early code to running systems.

Some of the needs include:

• running PDS hosting not as small personal projects, but as part of smooth sign on for apps, data sovereignty at scale, or other organizational tooling – including shared jurisdiction specific moderation
• relays are relatively cheap and easy to run with the full network firehose of 35M+ being available for 24 - 72 hours depending on storage, but they do need to be setup and maintained and connected to by apps and PDS's, plus ban bad actors and network level attacks
• historical data availability, as well as large scale API availability for certain features like search that might contain months or years of data
• shared CDN layers, especially for higher resolution photos, PDFs for academic papers, and of course the big challenge: video

All of these topics and more were discussed at the IndieSky day following Ahoy conference in Hamburg Germany last week. Read our post with notes from the event.

Notes from Ahoy IndieSky Europe

A summary of the IndieSky Ahoy event, running a EuroStack, and joining the IndieSky working group for independent ATProto infrastructure.

ATProtocol DevBoris Mann

We have an IndieSky Europe group forming, and have planned a working group kick off in early May for everyone to join, details below.

Free Our Future (Apps)

There is value in running Bluesky "clones", like the Deer Social project which is a fork of the same open source code that Bluesky runs in production (and that we recently supported with an honorarium to also start producing mobile releases), but we also want to become independent of the single Bluesky microblog content, social graph, etc.

Flashes is re-using the Bluesky microblog data format, but shown in a more Instagram like way. Flashes is built by Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang, who wants to do more, but as a single developer needs support for European moderation compliance and other commons infra.

Spark, which is one of a number of new video-focused apps, is unique in developing its own independent Lexicon data types for videos, posts, and more. Longer video support, running their own PDS, a relay in Brazil, and support for embedding many different Lexicon types are some of the features shared at the recent Ahoy conference.

With ATProto's support for user owned, portable data + shared logins, we can enable building many more apps. With commons infrastructure in place, everyone from civil society to entrepreneurs can build new apps that are user-centric by default, and data sovereign to their jurisdiction.

Working with Free Our Feeds

Free Our Feeds are aiming big, and none of the team involved have had this as their day job so far.

Free Our Feeds have now raised part of their goal, are hiring for an interim executive director, and reached out to us at the ATProto Community Fund to start providing real impact and support for independent infrastructure by donating to the IndieSky initiative that is very much aligned with their goals.

Free Our Feeds is talking to large scale institutions and government level funding initiatives. What does it mean to run digital infrastructure like roads or power plants, and how can we work with governments worldwide to have them support this? The Free Our Feeds team will also take the lead in helping to solve policy and regulatory issues that we come across.

We'll be supporting the Free our Feeds team by keeping up with the latest in the fast moving ATProto developer community, actively supporting communities, teams, and startups that are running independent infrastructure, and highlighting areas for further research.

Support IndieSky

We've added the IndieSky project to the list of the ATProto Community Fund OpenCollective.

IndieSky - Open Collective

Independent multi-polar AT Protocol infrastructure

Open Collective

As an individual, you're welcome to start supporting us with monthly donations to the IndieSky Commons Fund which will be allocated across projects, or give directly to our first grantee Deer Social.

Larger sponsors are also welcome, please get in touch to discuss what you're interested in supporting.

Join the Working Group

If you are interested in operating independent ATProto infrastructure, are developing tools to make this easier, please join the IndieSky Working Group.

The first Working Group kick off meeting is planned for Thursday, May 8th, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 1800 CEST.

IndieSky WG 001 · Zoom · Luma

Initial kick off of the IndieSky Working Group. This group is being formed to share learnings and resources around independent ATProto…

Boris Mann

After a high energy day at the first Ahoy conference in Hamburg, Germany, we hosted a day of discussions about IndieSky: running independent ATProtocol infrastructure.

The morning was spent on introductions and and an overview of the different parts of the composable ATProto architecture.

For the afternoon, we dug into what it would take to run an entire stack hosted in Europe, and what people in the room needed from it.

You can read the full notes from the day on the ATProto Wiki »

IndieSky PDS Hosting

Laurens @laurenshof.online captured a list of questions for PDS Hosting to be reviewed as part of IndieSky.

There were various other ideas here about how to grow PDS hosting. Right now there are around 2000 independent servers (Kuba's list, not realtime – Spark has already hit the 200 account soft limit), with most being individual / small group servers. PDS hosting already delivers data sovereignty today, so the question becomes what types of reasons and organizations would grow independent accounts.

Community PDS Hosting: NorthSky's immediate concern is "user safety for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities", with PDS hosting in Canadian jurisdiction as a first step. They will also soon be releasing a graphical PDS migration tool which is exactly the sort of thing needed to give people the peace of mind to move.

App linked PDS onboarding: Sebastian @seabass.bsky.social from Skeets/Bluescreen/Flashes would like to offer PDS hosting, but as a single dev is concerned about moderation needs to comply with German / EU regulations – especially for non-bsky Lexicons. Spark is running a PDS plus relay plus video CDN and will be one of the first to have large numbers of accounts.

Academic Institution hosting: There were a number of participants from European universities, who were concerned about the preservation of global science communication. Should they host a relay? What would they tell their IT team? Was a relay needed?

What if we challenged every university in the world to host a PDS to support data sovereign, open social scientific discussion?

There is also rising interest in other Lexicons supporting uploads of academic papers, Digital Object Identifier support (DOI), and other academic / science focused features, but all that can come after data sovereignty. See Cosmik Network for one in-progress app in this space.

A Full EuroStack

We talked through all of the components of a full stack, that could be run in Europe as commons infrastructure.

The goal is not necessarily to "clone the Bluesky stack", but rather determine which parts are useful to share and power European services, as well as developing new services, apps, and clients by European entrepreneurs.

Relay: cheap and easy to run with a 24-72 hour window of content available. What needs to be scanned or removed at this layer? Indigo and/or Ozone involved. Coordinate with Bsky PBC and other operators on bad actor / spam removal aka PDS Ban List.

Archive / Headless Appview: for longer than the 72 hour window, running a system that provides a number of different services. Historical search, distributed backup (copy of user repos), API endpoints for aggregated queries. Free access to information, aggregated in Europe.

@redsolver.dev who runs SkyFeed hosted a talk on Thursday about an approach to very low cost archiving and queries. Running a Constellation instance as well would fit in this category.

Moderation: small scale personal PDS or private relays may be able to be run with no, or minimal moderation tooling, but the intent is to run independent commons infrastructure at scale. Hosting an Ozone instance, and then perhaps an entity that runs "European Moderation" that can be shared amongst the relay and many PDS hosts? Configuring automod rules, talking to Roost Tools for what they're working on. Big question was about moderation for custom lexicons.

Open Questions and Next Steps

We were at the end of two full days of all ATProto talk all the time and felt like we got through a lot. Laurens' very direct list of PDS questions feel manageable, and we had multiple people in the room (like Redsolver) who already had major infrastructure that could be hosted in Europe.

Here are some of the open questions and tasks:

• Clearer communication on how to request an increase of PDS accounts per host from the Bluesky team
• Reach out to Roost Tools for moderation support
• What are the details for using an Ozone instance to manage multiple PDS instances? And, does Ozone hook into Relay for PDS banning / bad actor?
• Make a list of friendly Euro cloud host
• Who can we go to with jurisdiction-level policy questions about what this stack would require?
• Gather information about non-bluesky lexicon moderation / what it will take to modify Ozone to support this
• What kind of entity do we need and when? e.g. maybe we can start with OpenCollective Europe to begin with to pool funds for infrastructure costs?

The next steps are to go through the info we've gathered and start answering more questions, and gather together people who actively want to work on it.

We have a first online working group meeting planned for Thursday, May 8th to recap this event, gather others that want to work together, and further plan working group coordination.

IndieSky WG 001 · Zoom · Luma

Initial kick off of the IndieSky Working Group. This group is being formed to share learnings and resources around independent ATProto…

Boris Mann

Full raw notes are available on the ATProto Wiki, and we can jointly flesh out other areas like a list of all of the PDS implementations.

We're almost two weeks post ATmosphereConf Seattle and it's been so great to see the continued momentum and energy of the community that gathered.

We had 179 people registered for in-person full conference tickets, and 186 people registered for the livestream. A week before the conference, we had ~120 people registered, so excitement and FOMO definitely kicked in right at the end (including some who jumped on a plane Friday to come join us!)

We couldn't have pulled this off without the support of our sponsors – but as we said at the conference: the single largest financial supporter was all of you that paid for in person and livestream tickets!

Feedback Wanted

Here's the core of this post: we want your feedback! We've put together a short form that invites you to tell us about the venue, food, speakers, talks, group discussions, or anything else!

We're continuing to see great stuff rolling in on posts tagged with #ATmosphereConf – keep them coming! And feel free to add links to personal or press articles, some are on the wiki already.

Follow Ups

We've got a new ATProto Community Wiki up where notes and talk information is being filled out, and where you can find lots of key links from the conference, like the playlist of all recorded sessions:

There are a few links to emerging working groups, the community has helped by filling out sub pages for talks, and we'll get speaker slides and transcripts up over time.

The Community Developer Discord is a great place to start and ask questions, with a remember that none of this is run by Bluesky, and is the community volunteering to support each other.

More Events and Social Chat

Ahoy is happening in Europe on April 24th in Hamburg, Germany. Here are some of the speakers announced so far:

The Seattle ATProto group is in the lead (next event April 9th), having already met twice since the conference.

Boris happens to be in Toronto and is putting on ATProTO on April 14th, and then is kicking off the first Vancouver meetup.

Join the ATProto Social Events Discord (where the conference backchannel also was) to find local groups or plan one of your own! This is still pretty small and quiet, but it's absolutely there as a shared community resource for those that want to organize and meet in their area.

On behalf of the organizers, Boris, Ted, and Erik, thank you for trusting us by coming to this first event. Thank you to Chad, Georgia, Nat and Patrick for all of your volunteer support! Thank you to the speakers and discussion leads that joined us.

We hope you came away as inspired and energized as we all are, and we hope to see you connecting with your local and remote communities, experimenting, building, and doing more with all the projects happening across the ATmosphere!

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Foursquare has recently released OS Places, a no-charge, openly licensed high-quality point of interest (POI) data set. There are over 100M+ global POIs in the data set. This has lead to a series of discussions and investigation into what it would mean to bring location data on to AT Protocol. Today we're announcing that location data on AT Protocol is the second project being stewarded by the AT Protocol Community Fund.

This includes the base latitude + longitude geo coordinates, plus businesses and other public venues that have known addresses and locations. With AT Protocol being completely public today, we've scoped an initial set of R&D that focuses on great uses for public data.

Peter Wang at Skyseed has agreed to get us started with an initial donation of $15K, which will allow us to have dedicated developers to ship the basics quickly. This will be a backend commons infrastructure that we know can scale to support many different applications and let developers build interesting high level applications quickly and easily without having to worry about the complexities of running their own backend.

Nick Gerakines and Boris Mann are volunteering their time to support this open source project. The funding will be used to pay for cloud infrastructure as well as paying contributors to the open source project. Nick's Smoke Signal Events will be adopting the venue lexicon and be the first source of location data on the network.

Commons Infrastructure for Location Data

There are four main deliverables:

1) Default venue and geo lexicons: Nick has already been forging ahead with the Lexicon Community in creating a venue lexicon that links Foursquare OS Places identifiers. We'll also develop a basic geo lat/long lexicon. Any app that uses a either of these lexicons will automatically have posts show up in the infrastructure listed below.

2) Foursquare OS Places integration: this is a huge data set, and publishing this directly onto the protocol, potentially owned by just one account, doesn't make sense. This is the bulk of the R&D work where the exact implementation isn't known yet. We'll need to do the following:

• having an ATproto copy of the data
• be able to lazy load data and create AT URIs for it so it can be used as data in venue lexicon fields
• integrate with updates to the upstream data set

3) A venue lookup end point and widget that apps can use: running a hosted endpoint where venues can be looked up as part of creating new posts. This should make it very easy for any developer to make user facing venue addition as part of apps they build.

4) Backend firehose, feeds, and search support, with a default map visualization: initially, just Smoke Signal event posts will have venue and location data. We'll run infrastructure that applications can subscribe to, to get a firehose of location-tagged posts. That will allow for custom feed creation and search that is geo aware. Finally, we'll have a map view for display results on a map. All of this will be to provide default backend infrastructure and default visualization of map data.

We're aiming to ship this over the next 3 months, but there are many more potential features that can be built on top. We're most excited by what developers and users can build on top of this infrastructure. Here are a couple of ideas to get you going.

• Graze Social feeds with location support, so people can build custom, location aware feeds
• Apps that can post content that is "location restricted" – so only visible to people in the Vancouver area, or targeted to Ohio residents
• Third-party app integration – Flashes and Pinksky as Instagram equivalents may want to allow for venue tagging, or Ouranos may continue experimental feature support like location restriction or venue feeds
• "Claiming" venues and connecting them to ATproto accounts
• Various user tools for curated lists of venues for display on maps, e.g. bourbon distilleries in Kentucky
• Integration into other location data sources, like Open Street Map, Mapbox, Overture Maps, etc.

Project Supporters

We're looking for additional funds to do further development, run commons infrastructure for a year, and generally support the growth of apps that work with location-based data on AT Protocol.

This is a project that we're running under the AT Protocol Community Fund. You can read about last week's Community Fund announcement for more info.

Please reach out if you're interested in getting involved, and support us on Open Collective. We've already had an early contributors (thank you Jim!) who found the project before we published this post!

Location Data on ATProto - Open Collective

Venues, geo, and other location data on AT Protocol

Open Collective

We'll be attending the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle in March, and will be holding a group discussion session about location data on ATproto. Hope to see you there!

As part of organizing the first ATmosphere Conference, we have been accepted by the Raft Foundation as our fiscal host. The project is called the AT Protocol Community Fund, and we intend to use it to support a number of different initiatives.

Community & Event Support

We want to support communities and events in ways that focus on bringing people together and fostering collaboration.

The upcoming ATmosphereConf is a prime example, and we're hard at work planning our ATProto presence at events throughout the upcoming year.

We envision supporting other events, meetups, and special community initiatives over time. Creating fiscal sponsorship entities, building mailing lists, and finding sponsors can be significant hurdles.

The AT Protocol Community Fund can help reduce those burdens to make creating and growing AT Protocol developer communities easier.

AT Protocol Developer Grants

Bluesky has run a micro grants program, but ultimately as with other parts of the protocol, having funding and support happen outside the Bluesky entity is a better long term setup, especially for other Lexicons beyond micro blogging.

There is also commons infrastructure in this category, like supporting decentralizing the operations of the PLC Directory or shared relays. Existing bottoms up community initiatives like the Lexicon Community can be supported with infrastructure or open source code development support.

We will have an intake process for adding projects to our Open Collective, and have a process for supporting them with funds and advice. Each project has its own pool of funds and options for funders and individuals to support each project directly. We envision a kind of builders collective to support all kinds of projects and working groups.

Early project areas and working groups include:

• Location Data: an approach for representing geographic data on atproto across many apps, starting with venue data
• Private Data: learn together about cryptographic primitives, security & usability trade offs, and prototyping approaches
• Protocol Documentation: shared & community-maintained docs, rather than a series of Discords and distributed blog posts

There is a collaborative notes page for discussing topics of interest at ATmosphereConf – please add your own or expand what's there!

Initial Project Committee

Ted, Nick, and Boris are the initial project committee who are responsible for allocating the funds held by our fiscal host.

We're actively going to look for additional people to join the committee, plus advisors with specialist skills, and come up with governance approaches on what kinds of projects we want to take on.

A foundation or other single large entity is an anti-pattern: we should be aiming for multi-polar coordination, with many entities pooling capital and collaboration.

Our goal is not to create an AT Protocol foundation or point of centralization, but rather support and fund important work that needs to get done in and around the protocol to make it successful. There are many individuals, open source projects, and emerging apps & startups already doing great work. Lets support them and share the opportunity cost of investing in commons work and infrastructure.

Please come see us at ATmosphereConf for more discussion on how we can work together.

Support us on Open Collective

Thank you to sponsors who have been stepping up to support ATmosphereConf so far. Our financials are transparently available on Open Collective, and we'll be adding more projects there over time.

AT Protocol Community Fund - Open Collective

Supporting the AT Protocol with infrastructure, open source code development, and community initiatives like events and meetups.

Open Collective

We'll end with some words from the Raft Foundation, our fiscal sponsor, from their values page:

A raft is about survival and adventure, collaboration and flow. Amidst today's torrent of crises, it's easy to feel helpless. But we believe that if we work together, we can stay afloat, and even shape our collective destiny.

We'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at [email protected], follow us at @atprotocol.dev, and sign up for email updates here on the site.

The first ATmosphereConf is quickly approaching and we would love to have some swag to remember it by. The conference is organized by a team of volunteers and is being paid for by ticket sales and the generous support of several sponsors. We are looking to the ATProtocol community to come up with designs for swag that will support the first conference and future community events.

Today we are kicking off the ATProtocol Swag Team! Can we celebrate this first conference by having a handful of community created designs and having people buy the designs & t-shirts they like? Can we come up with a mascot for the conference or the community? Do you want to contribute a design to be featured on the Community Swag Shop? Do you want some awesome drip when you are in Seattle?

Current logos and themes

We are all familiar with the Bluesky Butterfly logo and the blue skies and playful clouds. Bluesky has also created the @ symbol with the cloud background and the "@ AT Protocol" logo. Numerous other projects have embraced the aerial theme with birds, butterflies, flying critters, smoke, wind, clouds, and the "@" symbol. The ecosystem is in the glossary as "atmosphere", which also gives us the name of the conference.

Conference logos and mascots

For ATmosphereConf, we are seeking designs for a logo and a mascot. One on hand, we look to other conferences like GopherCon and Barcamp, and on the other, ecosystems more generally.

We would love something fresh, that aligns with the community, and can be remixed for all sorts of uses. We don't have many constraints, these are the references we're pulling from today.

The Golang Gopher, Ferris the Crab for Rust (note the "unofficial" mascot phrasing), Elephants for Mastodon. These are examples of a single mascot for the ecosystem. On the other hand, ATProtocol will be more diverse and O'Reilly uses a more general animal menagerie. Where should the ATProtocol community and conference fit in?

Mascots and logos are often remixed to fit a context. Barcamp has a whole series of logos for locations, events, and sub-communities (the preview image for this post are all the Barcamp remixes). Can we find a mascot or logo foundation to do similar? How close do we want to align with Bluesky and their themes, or do we want to carve out a new space like ATProtocol is doing itself?

The first ATmosphere Conference is in Seattle, do we reference that by name and / or city skyline with the Needle and Mt Rainier? Or lean into sports and figure out how a Kraken can fly?

We are very excited to see what you come up with, and totally open to feedback on what it means to riff on community swag.

Submit your designs

So what do you say? Do you want to create and submit some designs that we can put up in a store for people to order?

We value the work of artists and designers and you should keep the original copyright. We are a self-funded community conference and ask that you license it as CC-BY or CC-BY-NC. This will allow us to use it for stickers and t-shirts for the conference, with proceeds returning to the Community Fund.

1. Make a design that would be a fit for stickers and/or t-shirts.
2. Post it to Bluesky, tag it #atdesign and/or mention @atprotocol.dev.
3. We'll reshare it and encourage people to like and re-post to show which ones they like
4. We'll get the top designs added to some print-on-demand stores and get some stickers made for the conference.

Designs should be SFW and not contain copyrighted material.

And of course – get your ATmosphereConf tickets! We'll be hosting sessions about design, swag, and community building at the conference, so come participate.

Thank you to Tony @verdverm.com for stepping up to suggest and run with the ideas around getting a swag team going. He's also a conference sponsor with his blebbit.app project.

Yes, of course the Bluesky team is joining us in Seattle! We've got a couple of talks to share and more sponsors to thank with this post.

Bluesky Sponsors Speaker & Community Travel Support

Thank you to the Bluesky team for signing up as a named sponsor, to help us cover costs for supporting organizers, speakers, and other community members in traveling to attend in the conference.

We could still use more support to have people join us in person! Get in touch if you're interested in sponsoring!

Bluesky Talks

We've got several members of the team speaking, attending, and participating in group discussions and hacking on AT Protocol topics.

CTO Paul Frazee @pfrazee.com takes us through Where Did We Come From, Where Do We Go, sharing about Bluesky's future plans and a look at the history which led us here.

Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren @dholms.xyz is going to present on ATproto Ethos: the philosophical principles underlying atproto and the fundamental guarantees that the network gives to developers and participants.

Protocol Engineer Bryan Newbold @bnewbold.net is excited to participate in various working groups and topics like AT Protocol Implementations and
Interoperability, lexicon evolution, relay incentives and many other topics. He wants to host a struggle session - what have developers struggled with implementing at any layer of the system? What have we learned together?

These are all the types of things that will be more like group sessions, discussions, and hacking together to work through these things in person.

Community Sponsor: Blebbit

Tony (aka @verdverm.com as you're more likely to know him as around atproto) has been really leaning into the ATmosphere, being very active in the Developer Discord, Lexicon Community, and by stepping up to support ATmosphereConf with a community sponsorship.

And, he'll be in Seattle and helping out on the ground as a volunteer. We also have some ideas on stickers, mascots, and other design elements around AT Protocol that you'll here more about soon.

Blebbit is "a thoughtful blend of Discord + Reddit + Groups" that Tony is working on launching, and for which you can see some design explorations on the site right now. Thanks Tony for supporting the community!

Community Sponsor: Fedica

The team at Fedica @fedica.com supported Bluesky cross posting and scheduling from very early on, and when we asked, they said yes right away to becoming a Community Sponsor. Samir from their team will be joining us in person in Seattle. Thanks for the support!

Early Bird Tickets Available Now

We released an initial batch of 50 tickets last Thursday, and they sold out pretty quickly, so we opened up another 50. Reduced rates are on until Feb 24th, and are also sliding scale. Pay as low as $99 for two days, the suggested rate of $119, or pay more for your ticket to help support putting on this community conference.

ATmosphereConf Seattle 2025 · Luma

An in-person conference focused on AT Protocol that powers Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. Join us in Seattle, March 22nd & 23rd. The ATmosphere is what we…

ATmosphereConf

Community Support and Talk Submissions

We mentioned community support. We're prioritizing speakers and builders for the small budget we have for this, so please do submit your talk, and mention in the feedback that you need some travel assistance.

Yes, the call for presentations is still open, and we'll be coordinating group discussion topics right up until the conference plus leave room for birds-of-a-feather (BOF) style groups to grab a room and jam on what they want.

Welcome to the end of January in the ATmosphere and Happy Lunar New Year!

The ATProto community's enthusiasm has been fantastic and we've connected with great builders and community leaders who will join us on March 22-23 in Seattle.

Initial Speakers

We're looking forward to hearing from many amazing presenters including:

• Blaine Cook, original lead engineer of Twitter, creator of OAuth, and pioneer of decentralized social systems, Blaine remains inexplicably hopeful about the power of online networks to connect and empower humanity for good.
• Nick Gerakines, has worked at technology and gaming companies including Microsoft GitHub, Datadog, Mattel, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts and Yahoo. Creator of SmokeSignal Events and Lexicon Community
• Rudy Fraser, Founder, Blacksky, creator of the rsky AT Protocol implementation in Rust, ASML Fellow, Berkman Klein Center at Harvard
• Erin Kissane, writer, researcher, editor, and community leader. A cofounder of the COVID Tracking Project, and author of the Elements of Content Strategy, who has spoken and written about the impacts of and structure of social media. Follow her new studio wreck.age.
• And more to come

Call for Presentations

If you'd like to join us and present, we'd also like to hear from you! Just fill out the form below with your pitch.

We have three different types of talks:

• Full length presentation: 30 - 40min talk + QA
• Lightning Talk or Demo: 10min demo or short talk
• Discussion Lead: facilitate a 45min group discussion with yourself + 1 - 2 others as facilitators. Good for everything from broad topics like "Building a Business on ATproto" to technical items like "Lexicon Resolution in Protocol"

As inspiration we'd also like to share some of the topics of interest that the community has shared with us:

• Products built with ATproto
• ATProto Infrastructure & operations
• Shared resources like Lexicon.community, PLC.directory and their governance
• Business models and monetization
• ATProto data & lexicons, and private data
• Ecosystem Authentication

As well as main stage talks that will be recorded and livestreamed, we are focusing on builder and community connections with our discussion groups, so please do bring your community — we're happy to host AT Protocol ecosystem discussions that are important to you.

Additional Sponsors: Streamplace & Graze

We have two more sponsors to announce who are already building in the ATmosphere. We'd like to thank Streamplace and Graze for their support for ATmosphereConf.

Streamplace is a Named Sponsor, and will also be supporting video for the conference, including with their own atproto-linked Livestreaming.

Thanks Graze for supporting as a Community Sponsor! They've just open sourced Grazer, their core feed algorithm engine, and have an article in TechCrunch today.

Check out the main ATmosphereConf page for all the listed sponsors, and get in touch if you'd like to support us!

Drew McArthur is building PMsky, a tool for peer moderation on Bluesky, where users can participate in voting on labels that have been applied to posts and users.

Moderation usually is done by privileged moderators, and in most cases this is handled entirely by the platform itself.

PMsky offers a new option, where moderation can happen based on consensus rather than consolidated opinions.

About PMsky

Why Peer Moderation?

Bluesky introduced composable moderation to augment their moderation capabilities and allow third parties to participate in the moderation process. This has flourished, with community-specific labelers like Blacksky, automated models like Xblock, and self-labeling like the Pronouns labeling system.

Whether moderation is done by the platform itself or third-party labelers, in both cases these decisions are made behind closed doors, by small groups of people.

How does it work?

PMsky is a platform where users vote on labels that have been applied to users and posts, publishing those votes as ATproto records.

Labelers can then be built independently, using those votes to determine which labels to publish on Bluesky.

It also would allow for "bidirectional" labels where, for example, if pmsky users are voting on whether an account is authentic or not, a labeler could be defined to publish "Impersonation", "Contested Authenticity", and "Authentic" labels, all derived from the same set of votes.

Who is building this?

Drew McArthur (@drewmca.dev) is doing the initial work for the project, as part of his thesis for a degree in Media and Public Engagement at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

A goal of my studies has been to explore how groups make decisions in the absence of leadership making decisions for them. In this context, the question is how moderation can work in the absence of a privileged group of moderators.

Resources

Read more about the project on the docs site:

Welcome | PMsky

PMsky

• Homepage: pmsky.social
• Bsky: @pmsky.social
• Github: @AfternoonSky
• Lexicon Documentation: https://docs.pmsky.social/tech/lexicon

Request early access via email [email protected] (please include your Bluesky handle), or by DM'ing @pmsky.social.

Video

Recorded during a live tech talk on January 27th, 2025. Check out the entire Tech Talks video playlist »

We're about 2 months away from ATmosphereConf, so it's time to provide some updates!

We're confirming two important things:

• We're going to be holding the event in Seattle, Washington
• The dates will be over the weekend of March 22nd and 23rd, 2025

The rest of this post are some high level introductions and planning we've done so far.

Volunteer Organizers

We are a small group of volunteer organizers.

• Ted Han @knowtheory.net is based in Oakland. Ted is a product leader focused on social software and data privacy, has previously led products at Mozilla, and advises IFTAS's decentralized trust & safety efforts.
• Erik Marks @rekmarks.com is based in Seattle, and is our on the ground person for the conference. He has a history of software security and protocol standardization.
• Josh Shaked @jshaked.com based in NYC and is an associate with Sentinel Global, a global venture firm that supports and invests in projects building on the open social web.
• Boris Mann @bmann.ca is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has been hosting AT Protocol Tech Talks. He has a long history of community building and protocol collaboration.

We will be making a call for additional volunteers, especially for day of support in Seattle. We're happy to accept support and in-kind sponsor offers as well. Anyone want to make us a logo / some designs???

Cheap and Cheerful Unconference

We had a lot of people fill out the call for interest, including over 30 out of 90 people saying they were interested in speaking.

At the same time, we are an all volunteer crew putting this together out of sponsorships and ticket sales, want to support people in attending, get great video of what is covered...and we've only got a couple of months!

So, you should prep yourself for a "cheap and cheerful" unconference. That means we'll have some invited / curated speakers (we'll announce early commitments next week), but we'll reserve the bulk of the time and space to connect, discuss, debate, and share ideas around the topics that attendees care about. We'll be working on an agenda that combines high quality presentations with unconference-style choose your topic, as well as time and space to hack on everything from collaboration to code.

We'd like to capture your great ideas and projects in the form of short lightning talks, and reserve budget for high quality video recordings to share with many more people around the world to see than will be attending in person.

This is the first ATmosphereConf: connecting across the worldwide blue skies to meet each other in person, many of us for the first time after multiple of years getting to know each other online. We'll meet, make plans, and form connections that will create strong ties to carry us through the rest of the year

Raft Foundation

We're signing up with the Raft Foundation as fiscal hosts for the conference. Raft is a new US-based 501c3 fiscal sponsor:

A raft is about survival and adventure, collaboration and flow. Amidst today's torrent of crises, it's easy to feel helpless. But we believe that if we work together, we can stay afloat, and even shape our collective destiny.We are guided by our founding principles:

Resilience: 'we will endure together and emerge stronger'
Autonomy: 'each by our own choice'
Fullness: 'toward dreams of abundance'
Transparency: 'with nothing to hide'

These founding principles and longer list of secondary values really spoke to us, and we thank Raft for supporting us. We look forward to collaborating with them and with other projects that host with them over time.

Behind the scenes, we've got a small ATmosphere Builders Collective looking at pooling funds and grants through this setup as well, with an initial proposal around geographic data + venues Lexicon and infrastructure.

First Sponsor: Peter Wang's Skyseed

Thank you to Peter Wang of Skyseed Fund for stepping up as the first sponsor for ATmosphereConf. Find out more about Skyseed in the TechCrunch launch announcement »

Our major projected expenses for conference operations are venue, food, and video. We need to support speakers with travel expenses, and would like to have bursaries for others to attend.

We're going to make the ticket prices as accessible as we can. If you've got a day job that can support your attendance, we'll have ways for you to pay a little more for your ticket, to supporting tickets and travel for others.

Please get in touch if you're interested in sponsoring. You'll get glory, follows, and thanks from AT Protocol developers, community, & builders.

Stay tuned!

OK! We're all excited to keep things moving and will have more announcements next week about speakers, get early bird tickets available.

Follow @atprotocol.dev for updates, subscribe to email updates on this site, and RSVP on Smoke Signal »