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Bluesky gave me a verification checkmark last week. The blue badge now sits next to my name, confirming that I am, in fact, me. It is also nice to know that I have the same amount of checkmarks as Jerry, which is also important.

Bluesky has been steadily verifying people within the atproto developer community. The official framing is about authenticity and preventing impersonation, but in a community of this size, verification is less about confirming identity than about signalling who the ecosystem considers notable. Right now, the primary signal of "this person is a trusted member of the developer community" is issued by the venture-funded company at the center of the network rather than by the community itself.

The protocol actually has infrastructure for this. Bluesky's Trusted Verifier system lets independent organizations issue their own verification badges. The New York Times can verify its journalists, a university its researchers. In principle, some entity representing the atproto developer community could verify its own members, but in practice, no such entity exists.

I've been saying for a while that the atproto ecosystem functions as a subculture. As I wrote after the Atmosphere conference, everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows that everyone knows everyone, in the way you find in scenes rather than industries. But what distinguishes this subculture from most others is the structural position of Bluesky at its center. Subcultures normally either lack an institutional core or define themselves against one. The atmosphere community has a hundred-million-dollar company at its heart that it broadly likes and trusts, and that genuinely participates in the community around it.

For the dev community to verify its own members, it would need three things simultaneously: an entity to operate the verifier, criteria for who qualifies, and enough legitimacy that the verification actually means something. The problem is that each of these depends on the other two. You can't define criteria without some authority to set them. You can't claim authority without community buy-in. And you can't get buy-in without first demonstrating that the criteria and operation are credible. This is a bootstrapping problem that communities have a hard time solving.

Bluesky bypasses it entirely because its legitimacy as the protocol's developer is already established. And it matters what's actually being verified. When the New York Times confirms one of its reporters, it is describing straightforward fact about employment status. "This person is a notable atproto developer" involves judgment about what counts as notable and what counts as a developer, and those judgments become political the moment you have to make them explicit. Bluesky can make these calls quietly, case by case. A community verifier would need to formalize what is currently informal, and formalization has costs.

The conditions that make the community good are the same conditions that keep it dependent. If the dev community were in conflict with Bluesky, there would be a clear motivation to build independent institutions. The alignment and warmth actually suppress the urgency that would otherwise drive institutional formation. Nobody needs to solve the bootstrapping problem right now, because Bluesky is handling it fine, which is exactly the situation that makes future independence harder to achieve, one small comfortable dependency at a time.

I don't think this is a crisis or even necessarily a problem that needs solving today. One of the most valuable things Bluesky provides to the atproto ecosystem is something harder to replicate than code or infrastructure: coordination authority, the ability to make decisions that stick because people trust the entity making them. For the ecosystem to mature into genuine independence, the community would eventually need to develop its own sources of coordination authority. That's a social challenge, not a technical one, and the kind that open protocol communities have historically found much harder than writing software.

I wrote an article this week about where community actually gets built on open social protocols, taking a closer look at what community shapes have actually been build on activitypub and atproto:

I got some great feedback and comments by @blaine.bsky.social and @bnewbold.net, and figured I'd respond via a short blog, as it deserves more attention than just a microblogging comment

Ive been going back and forth on how much protocols constrain social shapes versus how much current shapes are incidental choices by the people building on them. I think protocol code constrains less than people assume, but there are two other layers that matter more. One is protocol design vision, such as the reference implementations and community norms. That's cultural rather than technical, but it's sticky. What Bsky PBC is building does also meaningfully constrain other options by channeling a specific vision of what atproto should look like. The other is user mental models, which I think is the most interesting and most openended for me.

Like how Newsmast has to explain to publishers when they give them their own app that their content ends up on 30k servers they've got no control over. I think that kind of mental model friction ends up being the strongest driver of what community shapes actually get built, more than protocol code itself. Which is why I'm curious about people will perceive Roundabout, like how do you form a coherent mental model of community while also being connected to a global network?

Good point on the labelers, should've included that in the list. That said, governance for how labelers operate can probably deserve and article all on its own. My vibe answer for labelers is that they probably need to be separated out into like four different things:

• Mechanical badging (the post 50+ times per day label)

• Mechanical moderation (spam detection stuff)

• Opinionated curation (this is a good post, this post needs a community label with addtional context)

• Moderation (this post broke the rules with harmful behaviour)

Probably all needed for good community formation, but lack of polish as well as the labeling system doing so many different things make it hard to properly talk about.

Bryan's recent article on Community Spaces on this is also excellent:

I think it is important for community spaces not to fall in to the "implicit feudalism" pattern. Governance and control of group accounts should be rich and flexible.

This gets at the core for me, and why I think atproto is super powerful, but also why community formation "hasn't been explored (yet) in the bsky app experience". The implicit feudalism is super important to avoid, and the 'deconstruction' that atproto does (separating data storage and identity and app) is super important step for that. But building it back up into a system that does manage to avoid it is just a hard and novel problem that we haven't really solved yet.

I think there's a lot to be said about how to design this from first principles (the blog post by Bryan is very much worth reading), but also worth pointing out that Ostrom suggests that this sort of community formation usually grows organically. Interesting parallels here with Blacksky, first there was a community, then the technology grew around it as they needed it.

Discord has announced plans to age-verify all users globally next month, as age verification laws around the globe are taking root. As many people understand the open social web in a form of contrast with Big Tech platforms, seeing it as a refuge from enshittification, this led to another round of conversations on what alternatives there actually are for Discord.

The closest option as a Discord alternative is Matrix, who posted a blog ‘Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification‘. In it, Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson describes plainly how Matrix is beneficial as an open standard, but that this does not fully prevent people from avoiding age verification laws: “The biggest difference between Matrix and Discord is that Matrix is an open standard, like email or the Web. There’s a wide range of both clients and servers, and anyone can run their own server on their own terms while participating in the global Matrix network. However, it’s important to note that server admins are still subject to the law in the jurisdiction where they operate. Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it.”

Another part that stands out to me is how Hodgson is open about how the client ecosystem for Matrix is limited: “Meanwhile no other organisation stepped up to focus on the “communication tool for communities” use case and provide a production ready Discord alternative, but clients like Cinny or Commet may feel much closer to Discord.”

PieFed is also trying to get a piece of the Discord user base Pie, and also wrote a blog post explicitly positioning itself as a Discord alternative. At this point, people making posts on microblogging sites complaining that Discord should not be used for documentation is practically a meme, but does get at a real frustration that all sorts of features that should not be chat-based are being used by a chat platform. PieFed makes this case explicitly, describing itself as having ‘all the advantages that traditional forums have over Discord’, and additionally having “community building features”, such as wikis, events, private groups, and StackOverflow-like questions-and-answers.

This gets at a familiar problem across the open social web: people active in the ecosystem can clearly see how these open protocols can be used to replace Big Tech platforms, but the gap between that potential and a polished, complete alternative remains wide. Matrix can handle real-time chat, PieFed can handle forums, but neither on its own offers the full bundle of features that makes Discord sticky.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for. Several developments this week illustrate what this composable model looks like in practice.

Germ, an E2EE messaging app for iOS that uses atproto’s identity system, has been in beta with atproto integration since August. But this week, both Blacksky and Bluesky shipped native Germ buttons directly on user profiles, meaning users can now launch into encrypted conversations straight from the apps they already use. Germ uses MLS for its encryption and atproto handles as its account system, so users can message each other without needing a separate account or phone number. The significant part is less the feature and more the product decision behind it, as rather than building end-to-end encrypted messaging into their own apps, both Bluesky and Blacksky are now using a third-party service that shares the same identity layer. Germ has also published implementation guidelines for any atproto developer to integrate the same functionality.

Standard.site is a set of atproto lexicons for long-form writing, designed collaboratively by three independent blogging platforms to ensure their posts are interoperable with each other and with any future platform that adopts the same schema. This kind of cross-project coordination on shared data formats is exactly what the composable model requires to function: not just different apps built on the same protocol, but active collaboration to make sure the building blocks actually fit together. This is also directly relevant to one of the most persistent complaints about Discord: that communities use it for documentation and knowledge that should be persistent and searchable rather than buried in chat history. With a shared lexicon for long-form writing, that content can live across multiple platforms while remaining portable and discoverable through atproto’s identity infrastructure.

A New Social’s most recent Bridgy Fed update is about making the bridge between atproto and ActivityPub more functional at the interaction level. Previously, if someone on Mastodon replied to your bridged Bluesky post (or vice versa), you’d get a notification but couldn’t respond without logging into the other platform. Now you can like, repost, reply, or block directly through Bridgy Fed without needing an account on the other side. This kind of interoperability plumbing is easy to overlook, but it’s essential if the multi-protocol ecosystem is going to feel like a coherent experience rather than a collection of disconnected tools.

Taken together, pieces of a composable alternative are starting to appear. BlackSky provides feeds for their community on atproto, Germ adds encrypted messaging as a modular service any atproto app can plug into, Standard.site enables long-form publishing and documentation, PieFed offers forums, wikis, and Q&A through ActivityPub federation, and Matrix handles real-time group chat. None of these apps individually replaces Discord entirely, but collectively they can cover the entire feature set and even go beyond it.

There is an obvious counterargument here: Discord succeeded precisely because having everything in one place is convenient. Asking people to use four different apps instead of one is a real user experience cost, and for many communities the friction of that setup will outweigh the benefits. But the point is less that everyone should adopt this composable model today and more that the building blocks are now being laid. As interoperability between these services improves, the multi-app experience may become seamless enough that it stops feeling like a compromise.

The reason decentralisation matters for something like age verification isn’t just “run your own server,” as Hodgson acknowledges that server admins are still subject to local law. It’s that when your social life isn’t bundled into one platform, no single company’s policy change can disrupt all of your communication, community, and content at once.

What we’re finding is that for decentralisation to really make an impact, it needs to happen on multiple axes at the same time. There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set.

There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.

And there is a third axis that is now starting to become visible: the decentralisation of features. Rather than a single app that bundles everything together, like Discord, multiple different apps each specialise in a few things and are interoperable with each other. This is the axis that the developments this week are starting to illustrate, and it may be the one that ultimately matters most for resilience against the kind of platform-wide policy changes that sparked this conversation in the first place.

Telling my readers that open protocols matter feels like preaching to the choir, so I mostly don't focus too much on it. However, I think this story is worth flagging because it is such a clear signal of what's to come for 2026:

The CBS News show 60 minutes was going to air a story about the men who have been deported from the US to the El Salvadoran concentration camp CECOT. This story was killed last minute by the new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss for blatant political reasons.

The story was however broadcast in Canada, which lead to it being recorded and distributed online.

The episode of around 12 minutes (confusing show branding tbh) is now available to be seen on Bluesky:

CBS and its owner Paramount are trying to take the story down, filing takedown requests on copyright ground.

People on Bluesky were commenting (1, 2, 3) about how this relates to fascism, that news unfavorable to the government have now to be smuggled into the country and distributed in manner that is resistant to censorship, drawing historical parallels.

I think these comparisons are broadly correct, and also set up for what's to come for open social protocols. This will not be the last news story that the US government will try to take down, in collaboration with legacy media organisations.

This puts open protocols like atproto in a new front line: it can be used to distribute news and reports that are unfavourable to governments that are trying to prevent the news from getting out.

The technical implementation of atproto is fairly capable of resisting takedown pressures. The practical reality of virtually everyone using Bluesky to access the atproto network creates a massive singular focal point for governments to apply pressure to take down certain content however.

I'm expecting that we'll see more of these dynamics in 2026. Atproto provides a place for sharing news stories that are taken down on the Big Tech platforms. This usage will likely increase pressure on the Bluesky company by governments to take down unfavorable political content.

Bluesky is not the only microblogging atproto platform anymore however, with at least four projects that are setting up their own atproto infrastructure to build an interoperable microblogging network. Blacksky is currently the furthest along with this, but other projects are looking to create their own spaces as well:

Gander just passed their crowdfunding target, raising over 1.7M CAD from over 2100 investors, to build a Canadian social platform on atproto.

Eurosky just announced that in January they will offer Eurosky PDS hosting, their first step for European infrastructure on atproto.Northsky is starting host the first group of people on their own PDS as well.

Having multiple platforms that are interoperable with each other on the same network leads to two challenges that I'm watching in 2026:

The geopolitical aspect of handling political content. Above I suggested that Bluesky might get pressured by the US government to remove political speech from their app. How will the dynamic on the network evolve if these posts can still be viewed on the other platforms, whether that's Blacksky or Gander?

Bluesky currently has a reputation for highly aggressive comments and replies around certain contested topics such as AI or the economy. I think this is a signal that people experience platforms like Bluesky as a digital place, and that they care that the prevailing opinion in this place aligns with their own personal viewpoints. For topics like AI, where opinions diverge massively and are highly contested, this leads to very aggressive posting and reactions, not only because people disagree with each other, but also because they are contesting the 'Bluesky' space on what will be the prevailing opinion regarding these topics.

My current thinking is that the introduction of multiple interoperable spaces on atproto will lead to even more conflict and aggressive posting on the network, especially for subjects around AI. Now it becomes important for people that the dominant opinion on Bluesky aligns with their own opinion, but that this happens on Northsky and Eurosky as well.

Because posts from a Northsky PDS are visible to Blacksky users, and vice versa, it means that the "place" being contested isnt a single app, but the shared network layer instead. Because all projects make the entire network layer visible, it means that a conflict over whether Bluesky is pro-AI or anti-AI also automatically is a conflict over whether Gander is pro-AI or anti-AI. The stakes become higher, as people can more strongly identify with a specific app/platform. But because that app or platform contains the access to the entire network, and only provide different windows to the same underlying conversations, there's no actual retreat. You can identify as a Gander user or a Eurosky user, but you can't escape into a separate discourse. This results in the emotional stakes of platform identity get combined with the inescapability of a shared network layer.

So what happens when the identity of an atproto platform and wider network culture move in opposite directions?

Last week saw a lot of discourse in the community of atproto devs about how to handle (heh) the login screen for atproto-enabled apps, and how to communicate the login flow as clearly as possible to a wide audience. There are challenges regarding how to communicate to a wide audience what their domain/handle/username/internet handle is that they can put in the box, as well as how to communicate clearly that this is all based on an open network that's more than just Bluesky.

For an overview of the conversation itself, I think this article by Chris Shank is great:

He concludes:

Ultimately I'm not sure what we should call handles or what the best branding for atproto's login flow is. So let's make sure the right people are researching this and to include accessibility and non-english speakers in this process. It is clear to me, however, that a unspoken politics and potential symbol is emerging out of this conversation.

Chris gets to the core here: what is on one hand a fairly obscure discourse about UX design, also displays much of the underlying questions about politics and power that go with building new social platforms on open protocols.

I'm curious how the following will develop in 2026:

• How will the developers of various atproto apps collaborate, compete and communicate on aspects of atproto and interoperability? So far this mainly happens via posting on Bluesky with largely in-crowd people, how will that dynamic evolve? Here it's also worth looking at the fediverse and ActivityPub for some lessons, where involvement with protocol development was highly structured and formally open to everyone, but in practice dependent on a tiny group of self-selecting people. What will become the infrastructure for atproto to have these conversations?

• What will actually be a good way to communicate important information about atproto to regular people? There's quite a few aspects on accessibility to incorporate here, as well on language more broadly. On one hand, there is a universality in the claims and suggestions for login screens. This is especially noticeable with 'internet handle', suggesting your atproto identity for the entire internet. But at the same time, many of the suggestions are build around the @ symbol, and the wordplay in English with AT. This works well enough in English, but for a universal suggestion it needs to be able to be used a a global majority of people who don't speak English.

Finally some musings about my own work: you might have noticed I've been experimenting new ways to share information about the ecosystem. I've been building my own website to share links that are on-protocol:

For early next year I'll be continuing with the experimentation. For most of the year I've been focused on being complete, giving people a full overview of the ecosystem. But as developer activity around atproto is picking up, this becomes both less practical and less useful.

For 2026 I'll be focused more on the curation aspect, and experimenting with new ways you can use the affordances of atproto to curate and share information about the network.

Besides that, I'll continue to write regular longform analysis, as thats what I enjoy doing.

Thanks for reading this year, and for all your support, it is greatly appreciated!

All the sessions of last week's Eurosky Live conference in Berlin are now available online, here.

One main takeaway I've heard repeatedly: the event effectively demonstrated that atproto is more than Bluesky. From conversations with policy professionals working to reduce Big Tech's power over social networking, a key hesitation has been whether atproto is too closely tied to a single US VC-funded startup. The conference combined both policy-focused discussions, as well as more tech and product demos. This combination was effective at showing the policy community that atproto is more than just Bluesky and microblogging, and that people are working on the ecosystem from multiple angles: building sovereign platforms (Gander, Northsky), combining multiple protocols (Sill, the reader client which combines both Bluesky and Mastodon was effective for this) as well as expanding drastically what open protocols can do (social coding with Tangled). This made Eurosky an effective trust-building exercise for alleviating some of the concerns that the ATmosphere is more than just Bluesky.

For another writeups, see this by Mathew Lowry, and this coverage by the German news outlet RND.

Bluesky has handed out grants to various people building atproto projects. Bluesky has not formally announced all the grant receivers, but at least the following people have said they received a grant:

• phil for building microcosm, a collection of independent atproto infrastructure projects

• mary for atcute, a collection of typescript atproto packages

• Bailey Townsend for PDS MOOver, a set of tools to help with PDS migration.

• Whey for Red Dwarf, a Bluesky client that skips an AppView entirely and connects directly to the PDS layer of the network.

• Chad Miller for Slices, a set of developer tools that makes it easier to build and backfill AppViews.

• Kuba Suder for various atproto projects, such as sdk.blue, which Suder talks about in a recent blog post.

Bluesky has announced that they are working together with stopNCII.org (NCII = non-consensual intimate imagery). StopNCII works by letting people create hashes of images on their local device, and upload the hash (not image itself) to the StopNCII dataset. If the Bluesky app detects images with the same hash, their moderators can decide to prevent the images from being posted on the app.

People are asking some critical questions in response to the announcement, with the main concern being that this might be weaponised to censor other images. People want to know how StopNCII guarantees that the hashes submitted to their database actually correspond to images owned by the submitter, and not by other sex workers, for example.I think these are good questions to ask, and I could not find a clear answer to this directly on the StopNCII website. Hash-based systems inherently require trusting submitters, since the hash itself cannot reveal whether someone actually owns the content they're reporting, but StopNCII's site doesn't clearly explain what verification steps, if any, exist to prevent abuse.

It also shows that Bluesky is in a fairly unusual position: Major Big Tech platforms use the StopNCII dataset, including Meta's platforms, Reddit, TikTok, OnlyFans and Pornhub. As far is I can find, none of these platforms announced the collaboration directly to their users, and it only seemed to have been limited to corporate channels. Bluesky in contrast has a much more direct relationship with its user base. Every newly announced policy can become a public discourse, which is both a feature and a challenge, and it means Bluesky must publicly justify safety measures that competitors adopted years ago without explanation.

New_Public spoke with Gander CEO Ben Waldman about how they are building a Canadian social platform, using atproto. The entire interview is worth reading, with one part I want to highlight. The sovereign Canadian part is deeply integrated into Gander's identity, and while it started as a result of Trump's threats to annex Canada, there is more to it. Waldman:

"Beyond the tech, there’s our cultural sovereignty. Canada, population-wise, is one-tenth the size of our neighbor. Our feeds are yours pretty much.Canadian creators are largely being drowned out by their US counterparts on the platforms. We sort of feel like we’re at the whims of whatever an algorithm feeds to us. Sure, there’s some Canadian arts, culture, sports, and politics, but more often than not, it’s from the US."

Gander is explicitly working on reclaiming their own cultural voice outside of the US. So far, while I'm seeing similar voices in Europe for the digital sovereignty part when it comes to matter of ownership and control over infrastructure, the cultural influence part is getting less attention. At the Eurosky Live conference, why it matters that Europe has control over their social networking infrastructure is framed as opposition to Big Tech's control and negative impact that it has. And this is all true, but Europe also does have the same issue that Waldman refers to above: social media culture is heavily influenced by the US. Its not all that unusual to meet people here in the Netherlands who have a more detailed understanding of the latest outrage in US politics than they do have about the latest outrage in Dutch politics. Gander is expanding the framing of sovereignty to explicitly also include culture. Europe's push for digital sovereignty could take a page from that playbook, since the issue is just as relevant over here.

Bluesky has been pushing the adoption of the platform with the sports community, and it has become successful enough that it is now apparently the Baseball app during the World Series. The next community that Bluesky is working on onboarding is finance, and the team is collaboration with Graze to build custom feeds for Yahoo Finance for earnings reports.

There has been a lot more news (mostly tech-focused) that I'll write about in another update either tomorrow or Friday. Thanks for reading!

I'm writing this update on the train back from the Berlin Eurosky Live event, and it was amazing to see so many people in person, had a great time with all the sessions and meeting so many great people! Shoutout to the organisers (Sebastian, Sherif and many. more) for a great event, and for bringing both policy people and the developers building a new social networking ecosystems together into a single coherent conference.

A recurring theme at Eurosky Live, especially from the policy side, was on how Europe can take back control from Big Tech platforms over the social networking infrastructure. This created a dynamic where open social protocols are framed as a tool to be used in a conflict with the Big Tech platforms over control of the current social networking ecosystem. But these open protocols create their own power structures in their own right, that are not reducible to just conflicts with Big Tech platforms.

Robin Berjon's opening keynote session had a interest perspective on this, and he referenced social scientist and Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom, with a slide saying:

The properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same

That quote stuck with me, so instead of a news report about the event I'm giving in to the brain worms that tell me to write about how this thinking (protocol architecture and institutional governance are the same thing) relates to Bluesky making some changes to their reporting system.

Bluesky has updated their reporting system, with more reporting options:

The update expands the reporting system, going from 6 reporting options to 39. When a person files a report, they are first asked to select a category (like 'violence', 'adult content'), and then within that category a variety of new options show up.

Bluesky says that "this granularity helps our moderation systems and teams act faster and with greater precision. It also allows for more accurate tracking of trends and harms across the network."

One example of the newly added option to flag human trafficking content, where Bluesky says that this new option is "reflecting requirements under laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act". This option is implemented globally, not just in the UK.

This creates a new dynamic on social networking, and illustrates the thinking of Ostrom that Berjon referenced his Eurosky Live presentation, on how the architecture of a protocol and the institutional rules are the same thing.

The modular nature of atproto makes content moderation is one of the many components of the network, that can be individually implemented and operated by any service. This gives jurisdictional flexibility, as the protocol does not enforce specific categories of moderation, it is determined by the jurisdictions a service operates. This architecture enables different services to make different choices about the different categories for reports, creating technical conditions for a wide variety of implementations.

But these same affordances for flexibility also give Bluesky the discretionary choice to apply the UK regulatory requirement network-wide. This is an active choice, Bluesky and atproto have an entire system for geo-specific moderation (see my deep dive on that system here), but Bluesky judged (correctly, imho!) this harm matters globally and should be an individually reportable category everywhere.

This choice matters, as Bluesky's dominant role in the ecosystem means that their choices shapes the choices that other moderation services in the ecosystem make as well. Other moderation services building on atproto will likely adopt similar structures, and user expectations about what "should" be a reportable category get shaped by Bluesky's choices.

This is where the thinking by Ostrom that Berjon referenced in his presentation at Eurosky live comes back in, where "the properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same". From a user's perspective, the reporting UI is the moderation architecture they experience. There's no meaningful distinction between "the protocol" and "the governance" from their standpoint.

I don't think this is a technological determinism, atproto does not determine governance outcomes. But from a user perspective, they are effective the same thing however, as how the protocol is implemented is the governance they experience. You cannot meaningfully separate the protocol architecture from how it is institutionally implemented.

So when Bluesky implements regional laws on a global scale, and when new moderation services on atproto are incentivised to follow Bluesky in implementing the same reporting categories, regional laws can shape global networking norms. This happens via an intermediary step: regional laws shape the dominant service's choices, which in turn shape ecosystem norms. This is an emergent property of open protocols, and the reason why protocol architecture becomes equivalent to institutional governance.

This matters for how we think about the political project of building alternatives to Big Tech platforms. We do need to constrain Big Tech platform power. But by doing so we create new systems where the decentralised protocols don't eliminate power dynamics, instead they get reconfigured in confusing, fun, illegible, and exciting new ways.

This is the second part of this week's news, you can find yesterday's report here, with news of Ganders fundraiser and how atproto governance is in the process of being housed at the IETF.

Semble.so is a new knowledge sharing platform on atproto, build by the Cosmik Network team. It allows people to create collections of links, organise them into 'collections', and see what other people having been gathering. Semble takes clear inspiration from platforms like are.na or Sublime.

The platform is launched in alpha, and in the Lab Notes the team give an overview of other planned features, including further integrations with other atproto platforms such as Bluesky and Leaflet, which they discuss in more detail here:

I've been using Semble quite a bit over the last few days, and I'm really enjoying it. Sharing interesting links and seeing what other people are sharing is a style of social networking that fits with my style more than microblogging, so its nice to have a place for that now.

I'm especially interested in how this space of interoperability between different platforms like Semble and Leaflet will evolve. There is a large amount of potential here, and the openness of atproto allows for rapid experimentation.

Other people are excited to build on this too, and here are some 3p extensions for Semble

Bluesky suspended the writer Sarah Kendzior for three days, saying that she broke the rules last month by posting a death threat.

I don't hold a strong opinion on the case itself, but I do think two things are worth flagging here:

First is head of T&S Aaron Rodericks stating that Bluesky making a public statement is part of a shift towards being more transparent:

Second is that Gizmodo thought this case to be worthwhile enough to write an entire article about it:

I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether the suspension was justified. What interests me is that this made it into Gizmodo, specifically because Twitter's cultural relevance partly came from its role as an assignment board for journalists. If a writer getting a 3-day suspension on Bluesky can now generate enough feed chatter to prompt a full Gizmodo article, then that signals to me that Bluesky is starting to take over that function from X.

Bluesky COO Rose Wang also commented that they'll be more open and share more information about mod decisions going forward. But I think another part of why this is important is somewhat hinted at in this post by Wang:

One of the goals of atproto is to have multiple providers of moderation that people can choose between. This will inevitably result in provider A making a different decision than provider B. In such a context of plurality staying silent on decisions simply is not an option, especially when it is unclear if the difference in choice is because the TOS is different or the interpretation of the alleged violation is different.

On a related note, Rodericks also wrote about Bluesky's moderation process this week:

Every system we build—from Ozone to stackable moderation—is an attempt to improve one of those three axes: accuracy, speed, or alignment. But we'll never reach perfection on all three simultaneously. That's the trade-off every moderation team in the world faces. 

Wafrn and Red Dwarf are two projects/platforms that are interoperable with Bluesky, while being fully independent, as well as not following the protocol architecture that Bluesky follows. This gives them more flexibility to add their own features.

My main interest here is in seeing platforms develop that are both interoperable with Bluesky and Bluesky's lexicon, while also adding unique features. How interoperability works in such cases is not yet fully defined, and it is just developers experimenting and figuring out what works best.

(another example of interoperability with Red Dwarf)

And an interview with the developers of Wafrn:

And an explanation of how Wafrn's integration with Bluesky works:

Another new atproto platform this week: music streaming with Plyr.fm. It has the basic functionality of a Soundcloud-clone, but executed well on the design and features.

Wisp.place is a new platform that allows you to host a static site on your PDS. Your PDS contains the site, while wisp.place reads the site from your PDS and servers it through a CDN.

I think using the PDS to host the data of a static site is a highly under-explored part of atproto, and I expect to see more experimentation in this field. Personally I hope to have some time in the next few weeks to hack together something similar for my own personal site as well.

A more technical description of wisp.place here:

An excellent long-read interview with Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold:

Lots of good insight in there, and one I'll highlight:

But broadly, I can say that the AT Proto development community is just great vibes, and really smart, thoughtful people. I really like that.

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee has some thoughts on protocol design, and is looking for feedback. It is about a fairly technical part of atproto, but it does have meaningful consequences, as Frazee points out. Recommended for people who have opinions about protocols to take a look at this, there are some interesting tradeoffs involved here.

Alex Benzer, head of product at Bluesky, wants to know if people are interested in a Twitter archive importer:

To get a sense of what the wider culture's perception of Bluesky is:

New features and design for event planning app Smoke Signal:

Gander Social, a Canadian atproto-based social media platform currently in private beta, launched an equity crowdfunding campaign through FrontFundr at the end of October. The campaign positioning itself as an opportunity for Canadians to co-own a social media platform built on values of digital sovereignty and independence from surveillance-based business models. Within hours of launching to their Early Access Program, Gander surpassed $500k CAD in investments, and within a week reached over $1 million with more than 1200 investors. Gander is planning to use the funds for hiring engineering and trust and safety staff, developing creator monetisation tools and moderation systems, and supporting a public launch planned for 2026.

Gander sells common shares starting at $255 CAD, and aims at a target raise of $1.5M CAD, with a valuation of Gander of $15M CAD. With more than a month to go, the campaign has raised over $1.3M, and an additional 400k in investments that are likely to close.

This financial model and valuation means that Gander is already explicitly thinking about sustainable ways to generate revenue, and their pitch is feature subscriptions. The core app and functionality is free, and comes with a single account. A paid version features multiple accounts, and unspecified 'additional features'. Gander also is focused on enterprise and professional users, with features like branded accounts and team collaboration tools, as well as sponsored content.

What strikes me about Gander's crowdfunding is that it has not been a major part of the conversation on the atproto-focused dev communities on the feeds. Gander's first Bluesky post about the campaign came only after 1,500+ Canadians had already invested over $1.2M CAD. Gander's promotional material does not mention Bluesky at all, and sparsely mentions atproto, and the integration of Gander in a wider open public network is hardly mentioned.

It shows that Gander has found significant traction among people who aren't yet active on atproto platforms. They've built momentum outside the existing Bluesky community, which suggests broader interest in atproto-powered social media beyond its current user base.

Gander's crowdfunding shows that digital sovereignty sells to people who might not be already active in the space of open social networking protocols, and indicates that sovereignty framing is a viable funding path for platforms targeting populations with strong regional identity, independent of whether those populations are already bought into open protocol ideals.

Bluesky has set their first official step to get (part of) atproto governed by the IETF. The Internet Engineering Task Force is the place where internet protocols become "official standards" through a formal but open process that requires multiple independent implementations and broad technical consensus, and also manages protocols like HTTP, DNS and OAuth. The first step for atproto is to host a 'Birds of a Feather meeting', to indicate interest from the community and if the IETF is a good fit for atproto.

This meeting, held last week, saw presentations from various organisations that are building on atproto, and an explanation of Bluesky which parts of atproto they want to bring to the IETF

Bluesky plans to start with the core part of atproto, and the components that become IETF standards (like the repository data structure, CBOR encoding, and firehose mechanisms), any changes would require working group approval. This means Bluesky couldn't unilaterally modify these foundational pieces without going through the IETF process. However, IETF has no enforcement power - it's a voluntary standards body. Implementers choose whether to follow the standard.

The crucial part here is that the application layer remains outside of the IETF, and app features (and the schema systems that power them, such as Lexicons), are not part of the IETF. This gives people building on atproto flexibility, which the plumbing of data synchronisation stabilised as commons infrastructure.

This first meeting was not to determine if the IETF would form a Working Group to house atproto. I'm not a professional IETF watcher (or maybe I am now?), but my sense is that the closing comments of the IETF chair person indicated that things went well, and atproto is on a good trajectory to potentially become an IETF standard in the future.

(full video of the meeting for all my protocol sickos here)

Bluesky is a baseball app now:

At least 3% of all posts made on November 1 (Game 7) were about baseball. The final game also resulted in a +30% bump in traffic to Bluesky, with engagement spikes up to +66% from previous days.

Bluesky is also the Zohran Mamdani app now:

During the NYC Mayoral election night, Bluesky partnered with Graze and NYC newspapers Gothamist and WNYC to create a custom feed for the election. This feed had curated content, posts from trusted soruces, pinned posts with the latest results, and more. Graze says that the feed had over 110k unique readers, and a peak traffic of 1,200 posts per second, doubling Graze's previous monthly high.

There is a ton more news this week (the launch of Semble.so, for example), that I'll get to in another edition of ATmosphere Report in the next few days.

When people talk about decentralisation in the atproto ecosystem, the conversation almost always centres on Bluesky. Conversations on decentralisation are messy at the best of times, but the strong focus on Bluesky and microblogging make it even more complicated. Decentralisation describes two different things at once: a technical architecture for how networks are structured, and the actual behaviour of people using those networks. Because Bluesky is so central to atproto, the social dynamics of hosting >99.9% overwhelm any technical dynamics that atproto provides regarding decentralisation.

Blogging platforms like Leaflet and WhiteWind offer another lens for understanding decentralisation and atproto. The blogging and writing platforms built on atproto operate on a much smaller scale, there are multiple distinct players in the space. None of these players dominate the field in the way that Bluesky dominates the microblogging side of atproto. By examining how these different platforms interact with each other, we can see some of the decentralisation dynamics of atproto that are harder to see by looking at Bluesky.

The first player on the scene was WhiteWind, which was also the first major alternative project on atproto besides Bluesky, and launched in early 2024. The platform offers a simple markdown-based editor, a homepage that shows popular and most recent articles published using WhiteWind. There are also some integrations with Bluesky, with Bluesky posts that talk about the article visible below it.

The developer for WhiteWind however has stopped further work on the platform for a while now, leaving the space open for other writing and blogging platforms.

Leaflet is a blogging and publishing platform that started development in the summer of 2024. Only in May 2025 did the platform become really integrated with atproto. In the half year since, Leaflet has quickly become the most popular blogging platform on atproto, and it is actively seeing further development. Leaflet is a block-based editor, that does not use markdown. Leaflet is now also starting to move towards the social side of blogging, with its own comment section (that exists outside of Bluesky), a reader feed that shows all recently published Leaflet posts, and a discovery page for finding other Leaflets.

What I find noteworthy about Leaflet is how quickly it is managing to find a user base of early adopters that is not tech people talking about the tech itself (like yours truly). Of the 20 Leaflets that were published in the last 24 hours, 3 were about atproto itself. Instead there are posts about football, politics, short stories, personal diary blogs, or overviews on how someone is putting a film camera on a boat. That many the blogs talk about things other than tech is a very healthy sign for the future of Leaflet.

PiPup is a recently launched platform for long-form writing on atproto, that focuses creating blogs with Markdown. It supports a wide variety of specialised tools, from creating interactive math charts to sharing music with ABC notation and code syntax highlighting. The platform launched with a tool to convert WhiteWind posts to PiPup posts. It also has a reader feed, but where the Leaflet reader feed only shows posts made on Leaflet, PiPup's feed shows posts made with WhiteWind, Leaflet and PiPup.

Another example of a writing and blogging app that's currently in development and that looks very promising is Offprint. Their current work can be seen here. Offprint also explicitly mentions monetisation as part of their platform, advertising Offprint as "Write, monetize, and own your audience without the middleman." Pckt.blog is blogging platform that is currently working on atproto integration. Weaver is another long-form writing platform for atproto that is currently in development, and has gotten a grant by Graze for the work.

Together, the various long-form writing apps create a new market for blogging on atproto, with a very different dynamic between them. Instead of one company that works on the protocol and also hosts virtually all users, there are multiple competitors all building in the same space. The Apps act more as collaborators than as competitors however. It gives some insight in what decentralisation and interoperability on atproto actually looks like when there are multiple different apps all working towards the same objective, without one company being overwhelmingly dominant. Some observations:

• Due to how atproto works, you can create posts on any of the blogging platforms without actually using the platform. This is as simple as publishing blog post to your PDS, using their lexicon. This makes it that there is a distinction between using the blogging platform (by logging in to Leaflet for example) and using their lexicon (publishing a post to your PDS that uses the same lexicon). The nature of long-form blog posts make this use case much more likely than with microblogging. For example, people have been building personal websites with posts on the website using the WhiteWind lexicon, without interacting with the WhiteWind platform (and thus not agreeing to the WhiteWind ToS). There is not yet clear language to reflect this: do people do who this use WhiteWind or not?

• Interoperability is an active point of concern between the developers of the various platforms, and something they are collaborating on. Because the writing formats of each platform is by definition open, interoperability is always an option, and if the platform developers themselves don't support it, other third-party developers might add it themselves.

• Leaflet is the first blogging platform that allows people to follow a specific publication, creating a 'following' relationship that exists outside of Bluesky. I'm curious how the other apps will respond to this? Create their own form of following writers on their platforms? Will we see a move to a shared lexicon for following blogs? Or another option?

• Because text is fairly simple format to work with, competitive interoperability is also an option. An example of this is how PiPup has created a tool to import all your WhiteWind posts into PiPup as well. Other tools by external developers to import WhiteWind posts into Leaflet also exist. In a well-developed ecosystem for long-form writing on atproto it seems highly likely that there will be easily accessible tools to port posts in every lexicon to every other lexicon.

• Long-form writing and publishing platforms combine multiple different functions: the writing and publishing part, and the social function (commenting on a post on Leaflet), and the discovery and distribution part (the reader feeds on PiPup and Leaflet). This allows for further disaggregation in the future, and I would expect services that are dedicated only to the discovery of blogs to pop up. Such discovery services have an incentive to aggregate from every long-form writing platform. This creates a dynamic where the discovery services want to treat posts by the different platforms as much the same as possible, while each individual platform wants their post features to be different and unique from the other platforms.

• Moderation remains one of the most challenging problems of any social platform, and that is no different in the space of blogging. Both Leaflet and PiPup have fairly lax rules around which content can be published on their platform. It is unclear what, if any, moderation systems they currently have in place. The challenge of moderation becomes even more complicated since the use case of publishing to a platform's lexicon without using the platform itself. The blogging platforms are also moving into the space of discovery and providing 'reader' feeds, and how they will moderate blog posts that they show on their platform remains an open question.

• The existence of multiple different blogging platforms gives an indication of what the incentives for decentralisation actually are on atproto. When a platform like WhiteWind stops development, that does not result in other people setting up their own version of WhiteWind. Instead, people start building their own software for the same market. There is no real reason to run your own version of Leaflet, but there is an incentive to build another publishing platform that is compatible with Leaflet but also has other features. A similar dynamic is visible on Bluesky: there is little incentive to run a direct copy of the platform, but platforms that are interoperable but can also offer something new (Blacksky, Gander) are able to find their place on the network.

I continue to think that the field of blogging and long-form writing on atproto is the place with the most potential for growth of the atproto network, and there is a ton of exciting experimentation and building happening in the space. I'm curious to see how this will further develop.

Building a new social internet on open protocols is by its vary nature a highly political project. That social media has meaningfully shaped our society in the recent decade is such a true-ism that it barely feels worth stating anymore. I'm not saying something particularly shocking either by pointing out that the state of Big Tech platforms has political impacts. But the implication is that politics is a highly important lens to understand the new open social protocols. So politics will continue to play a main role in how I write about the ATmosphere, the fediverse, and everything around it.

The Netherlands had an election yesterday, with a clear win for centrist party D66. Further results of the election can be interpreted with whatever kind of story you want to tell. It's clear that the left lost, but to what extend you want to tell stories on whether the right and far-right lost depends on how you frame individual parties like VVD.

My interest is in which political parties actually use Bluesky, and how that relates to political parties and open social networks in other countries.

I'm not gonna do a very exact analysis, just a high-level overview to give some indication of what some of the political parties are, if and how they are using Bluesky, and what that says on politics and the open social web. My comparisons for parties in other countries are inexact, because real politics is complicated and local. Also, for context, there are 150 seats in Dutch parliament.

• The biggest winner is D66, a centrist party (9=>26 seats). Theres some flavors of US Democrats in here, combined with old-school European hardcore liberalism. All the top 5 members of D66 are active on Bluesky. The account of leader Rob Jetten (most likely the new PM) has 7.5k followers, but it is not a personal account. It's managed by his campaign team, and he does not respond personally.

• The PVV is the main far-right party of the Netherlands, with the singular official party member Geert Wilders the face of the party. The party lost significantly in the election (37=>26 seats), and is now tied with D66 for being the biggest party. None of top 5 members (nor anyone lower, as far as I can tell) have a Bluesky account. Wilders is obviously a highly active X user.

• VVD, the main right-wing party of the Netherlands has some analogies to the UK Tories, and stayed roughly the same (24=>22) The VVD itself has a Bluesky account (4.5k) followers. It has posted a few times per month for the last year but apparently the social media team forgot about it during election season and it has not posted in the last 3 weeks, which is kinda funny. Party leader Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius does not have a Bluesky account. Only the nr 3 on the list, Ruben Brekelmans, has a Bluesky account, who is also currently Minister of Defence and he posts polished PR updates regularly.

• GroenLinks-PVDA is the main large-test left party, and lost, from 25 to 20 seats, and leader Frans Timmermans steps down as leader as a result. The party is highly active on Bluesky. The main account of the party posts multiple times per day, and there are dozens of party accounts for regional departments of the GLPVDA. Furthermore, party members are highly active on Bluesky as well, the top 10 candidates all have a Bluesky account, and many lower on the list as well. Furthermore, many of the members use Bluesky as a personal account, responding and actively engaging with the community. For examples, see the accounts of Laura Bromet, Lisa Westerveld, or (my personal vote) Barbara Kathmann.

• CDA, another centrist party on the more social-conservative side, also saw a big win, from 5 to 18 seats. All top 5 candidates have a Bluesky account, only the top 3 actually use their account. Usage is mainly polished PR, not particularly personal.

• The next three parties (JA21, FVD and BBB) are various flavours of far-right parties, that overall gained significant votes, combined from 10 to 21. None of the party members are active on Bluesky.

• Finally there are 7 small parties, all with 3 seats or less, across a wide range of the spectrum. The left PVDD, the animal party, is highly active on Bluesky, with leader Esther Ouwehand being a prime example. The CU, Christian Union, is fairly active, but leader Mirjam Bikker stopped using Bluesky a few months ago.

• A special mention for Volt, the European-focused party. This party lost, from 2 seats to one. What stands out to me is that Volts highly active on Bluesky, see leader Laurens Dassen and nr 2 Marieke Koekkoek. They are both active users of Bluesky, and get high engagement on Bluesky, especially compared to the election results.

By looking at which Dutch politicians use Bluesky, and who is popular on Bluesky, you can get a sense of the political leanings of the Dutch Bluesky community. The main (not hugely surprising) conclusion is that Dutch Bluesky strongly leans left, with all varieties of left parties active users in Bluesky. Centrist parties do use Bluesky, but it is clearly part of a larger social media strategy. Rightwing parties barely use Bluesky, and far-right parties are not present on Bluesky at all.

The biggest outlier is Volt, which is active on Bluesky and much more popular on Bluesky compared to the wider electorate. Volt is a leftwing party with a strong focus on European integration, and more technocratic in their solutions compared to other Dutch left parties. That combination of being leftwing on social issues while also more focused on federation and technology compared to other leftwing parties makes Volt a fairly good analogue in ideology for Bluesky and atproto. But the Dutch election result also indicate that this vision only resonates with a small part of the wider population.

Worth noting: a lot of the most active adopters of Bluesky regarding Dutch politics are women, see Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema as another example.

Some US politics news that is only indirectly related to Bluesky: Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic congress candidate for Illinois, announced that she has been "charged in a federal indictment sought by the Department of Justice." Why I'm reporting on Abughazaleh here is because she launched her campaign as an explicitly Bluesky-first operation:

A second piece of US news: Graham Platner is a Democratic congress candidate for Maine, and he turned out to have a nazi tattoo. The Platner campaign is also active on Bluesky, and Bluesky posts regarding Platner were largely supportive. This shifted abruptly when the news of his tattoo came out:

What's especially interesting here is that sentiment on Twitter from Democratic voices seem much milder on Platner, compared to how Bluesky is highly critical of him.

I've written before about the perception of Bluesky as a 'left' space (here, here), but the difference in reactions from Democratic pundits on X versus Bluesky is an indication that Bluesky is indeed a 'left' space, and that this differs from the communities on X that are affiliated with the Democratic party.

The larger context of this is that how the Trump administration is relating itself to Bluesky. For further context on that, see this recent article by Erin Kissane.

The main implication here is that an authoritarian regimes are incompatible with spaces with their political opponents can freely gather, organise and communicate. That the DOJ goes after Democrats who have a high profile online (such as Kat Abughazaleh) is an indication that the Trump administration is aware of which politicians pose a relatively large risk for the regime.

That Abughazaleh has publicly declared that the base of her online presence is Bluesky, while the administration has already taken an adversarial position regarding Bluesky (for now limited to 'trolling'), should put Bluesky on alert that the current equilibrium the platform is in regarding the Trump administration is not particularly stable.

Leaflet has added polls! The feature is missing on Bluesky, but its cool another platform has it now. Leaflet says they're hoping other platforms will add polls as well, and that shared systems can emerge from that: "One of the cool things about ATProto is that we can coordinate gradually over time, and all the data is still out there, in a simple format, for us to build on!"

PiPup is a writing and publishing platform on ATProto. The platform also has a reader feed that shows all long-form articles published across the network over a variety of platforms, supporting Leaflet and WhiteWind, next to PiPup itself.

Bluesky is expanding their team, they've hired for Strategy and Operations, as well as DevRel, and have a variety of jobs open. The newest job they're hiring for is Technical Recruiter.

Alex is the new Bluesky DevRel, and he wrote a blog post on why Bluesky loves DNS.

Bluesky also published an introduction to OAuth for developers:

Lycan is a search tool for your Bluesky likes, made by Kuba Suder.

GreenEarth is a new project to build personalised recommendation algorithms for atproto. The project has gotten 300k USD funding from Project Liberty, and was founded by Renee DiResta. The project has 3 goals:

• build a "prosocial" feed, that demonstrates their earlier research that the right algorithms can "make people hate each other less"

• create open recommender infrastructure for others to work with

• support atproto startups, and they are already working with Graze and Skylight

Having freedom over which custom algorithm to use is one of atproto's most powerful features, and it's interesting to see that being reflected in which startups on atproto actually are able to attract funding.

Speaking about algorithms, the For You feed is currently the hot custom algorithm for Bluesky. The latest update from Bluesky makes the 'post seen' status available for all feeds, not just Bluesky's own Discover feed. This is now implemented in For You as well (and this is how I'm finding out that Leaflet supports quotes in quotes in embedded Bluesky posts)

For You also has an interesting problem, in that the algorithm is highly effective in surfacing people's alt account unintentionally. The current solution from the creator is for people to opt-out of the For You feed via a DM, but that hardly seems like a scalable solution.

Parallel to this problem is the longstanding wish of Bluesky users to be able to opt out of the Discover feed as well.

It feels like Bluesky is struggling with transitioning their mindset from building something resembling Twitter to something truly different. Opting your posts out of the main algorithmic recommendation engine does not fit well with the Big Tech approach to algorithms on platforms. But it is clearly the way forward for open social protocols, and its time for Bluesky to catch up to that and let people be able to opt out of having their posts reach the Discover feed.

Tangled talks about the vision behind the project:

plcbundle is a new way to sync the entire PLC directory in a verifyable manner.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe right here on Leaflet to keep up to date, and if you want to read more related to the fediverse and the open social web, you can find more of my writing on connectedplaces.online

And if you want to know more about the challenges with coordination for building better moderation systems, check out yesterday's article:

A short report with some thoughts on two articles about Bluesky and atproto this week, as well as some additional links that stood out to me.

Roomy dev Erlend Sogge Heggen writes about how he would use 200M USD to fund the developments of atproto. He gets the 200M number by comparing it what the municipality of Oslo has spend on a the renovation of a single swimming pool, also 200M USD.

It points to the increasingly strange situation that we're in. It is getting close to mainstream opinion now in Europe to say that the EU needs its own social media infra. This is clearly illustrated by the recent speech by President Macron:

“We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.“

Greens MEP Alexandra Geese:

In the short term, Europe needs home-grown social networks to cement political sovereignty.

The thing is, once you agree that the Europeans have been naive in entrusting our digital spaces to a few American Big Tech companies and TikTok, then there are basically two options:

• you build a European version of Meta

• you work with open protocols

Nobody is even remotely interested in option 1 (for good reason), so that really leaves only the option of working with open protocols. And once you accept that option, you really only have two current realistic options: ActivityPub and atproto. Considering what Geese points out above, this is a short term need, which realistically rules out the option to start from scratch on an open protocol.

Both of these protocols are operating on a shoestring budget, ActivityPub even more so than atproto.

So we end up in the situation where the EU is trending towards a dominant opinion that this is a (supra)nationstate problem, but the most realistic solutions operate on fractions of nationstate budgets.

My main point here is that we're currently far from something that looks like an equilibrium state from social networks.The moment funding for open protocols approaches even a small fraction of what the political rhetoric suggests this problem deserves, the entire ecosystem of the open social web looks completely different.

The second thought regarding nation-state funding for open social protocols is that might trigger some funny and strange competitive dynamics. One major driver of why nations talk about sovereign social media is the loss of control that resulted in depending on foreign tech companies. In the hypothetical situation that Norway decided to fund their own social networking infrastructure (whether that would be a NorSky, something on AP, or something else) I'm not actually sure that other states would look and that and think: "sounds cool lets all join NorSky now".

It seems much more likely to me that politicians would think "oohh shiny new thing that lets me say the sovereignty buzzwords, gimme that too". Case in point: Last week I gave a presentation to a bunch of media execs about bluesky, atproto and eurosky. The first question I got was "does this mean we can instead build a DutchSky?"

I have no idea what such a competitive/collaborative dynamic would look like, except for the obvious point that this would drastically change the open social web ecosystem.

Finally: these musings assume that EU politicians will translate their rhetoric into action, which is historically far from a safe bet to make. I would like this to happen, but I'm far from certain that it will actually happen.

Erin Kissane has written an excellent article on arrival of the White House on Bluesky last week, that is highly worth reading.

The core challenge is that people want and need digital social places that have 'high-context moderation', and that Bluesky is unlikely to going to provide such forms of moderation. Digital places with high-context moderation exist, both on atproto and even more so on ActivityPub. These spaces are great and do deserve all the support they can get, but my worry is that these spaces might not be able to grow at a speed that the descent into various fascist movements around the world necessasitate.

For more on the White House joining Bluesky, see also my post from earlier this week:

And a few links that grabbed my attention this week:

There is a lot of discourse about moderation (which I contribute to I guess), but there is a lot of work also being done on how labeling systems work in practice. The Skywatch labeler update points to how the labeler can facilitate abuse detection in realtime, both with new spam systems abuse as well as for astroturf campaigns.

A recap of Tangled, and its kinda crazy that the git collaboration platform is only 6 months old.

Bluesky is apparently great for sports engagement. It seems to me there are a ton of opportunities to build dedicated apps for sports-based social networking platforms on atproto, but so far I've seen surprisingly few efforts being made in that direction.

atproto-powered streaming software Streamplace is at the forefront of what's possible to build with atproto. It is now possible to self-host Streamplace. Another cool new feature is the embedded metadata, allowing streamers to set how the stream can be distributed, content rights and content warnings.

As video moves more and more in the direction of re-using other videos (whether it is stitches on TikTok, or co-streams for esports or reaction videos on YouTube), having a system that determines distribution and content rights is highly important.

Free Our Feeds with a quick update:

Under the Eurosky brand, Free Our Feeds aims to build European social media infrastructure to power social web applications and services. Our initial work on a Commons for Content Moderation or CoCoMo, is well underway. CoCoMo is intended to provide content moderation support for initiatives building on ATProto that don't have the resources to manage often heavy regulatory obligations. The initial phase of the project comprises development technical infrastructure and a legal analysis for moderation on ATProto under European law.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading!

The Trump administration functionally rules via decrees on social media, and extensively relies on social media for validation of their policies and proposals. The actions of the regime are done to a significant extent precisely because of how it will be perceived on social media. Like other fascist regimes, terror is a core part of how the regime projects power. Violence itself only becomes terror when it can be packaged into a message to distribute to the population. US government agencies heavily rely on X for the distribution of their messages of terror, from creating ASMR videos of deportation to sharing the videos of missile strikes on fishing boats in Venezuela. As X radicalises more and more into a place for regime supporters, the platform starts to lose effectiveness for projecting violence. It becomes more important for the administration to find the (digital) places where their political opponents gather, to spread their message of hate.

In this context, it is little surprise that dozens of US government agencies all joined Bluesky at the same time, including the White House, the Department of State, and more. When over a month ago, pundits like Noah Smith and Nate Silver started writing about Bluesky and 'Blueskyism', they shaped the opinion of what Bluesky is. To them, Bluesky is a place for leftists scolds. I wrote about their articles:

It sets up a permission structure where Bluesky is seen as a left and democratic space. This is what makes both articles relevant. I think their arguments are petty and show that they have not grappled with the subject matter well, but that matters little: it is a major contributor to the idea that Bluesky is a ‘left’ space.

We're now seeing the direct impact of this: Bluesky is seen as 'left' space, a place where the political opponents of the Trump administration gather. And that is the perfect destination for a regime that rules via social media trolling.

By and large, people on Bluesky understands the game that the administration is playing. Their goal for joining Bluesky is to spread the message of terror and fear, as illustrated by the Department of State posting that "this is a great place to research visa revocations 👀". The best way to counter this strategy is to starve the accounts of oxygen, and limit their attention and reach as much as possible. The calls on the network where loud and wide to 'block and move on', to prevent the US regime accounts from getting the attention they crave. The White House is already one of the most blocked accounts on the network after a few days (behind vice president JD Vance, who joined a few months earlier), and blocking and starving trolls from attention works to a certain extent, but there are problems that go beyond that.

By joining Bluesky, the government agencies are actively contributing to the perception that Bluesky is not a 'left' place. The logic is fairly simple, it is harder to be perceived as a 'left' place when a fascist government is actively posting on the platform.

For queer people, the Black community and other communities who shaped Bluesky's culture, the platform's identity isn't abstract concept to write Pundit Thought Pieces about. It's the difference between a space that's for them and their community, and one where they have to share a digital place with a government that wants many of them dead or deported. They joined Bluesky as a place they could joyfully be themselves. Bluesky as a politically neutral place isn't what they're interested in. This goes beyond the direct impact on safety that the presence of various government agencies creates (although that's important too). The core point is not wanting to share the same digital place with this administration. There are clear parallels with how people on Bluesky are upset with the decision not to ban Jesse Singal: the argument is just as much about not wanting to share a digital place as it is about his specific wrongdoings on the platform.

At the same time, Bluesky presenting itself as a "Twitter-alternative" works much better if a wide variety of political governments are present on the platform. Bluesky's current user base is indeed largely people on the left of the political spectrum. The presence of the White House on Bluesky provides a good counter for the company to point to, when potential groups are hesitant to join the platform because they feel that it is a niche platform for a specific political group only. It fits in with the larger viewpoint of Bluesky PBC. In an interview with Wired, interviewer Kate Knibbs asked Jay Graber point-blank: "Would you welcome President Trump?" Graber's answer is clear:

"Yeah—Bluesky’s for everyone, and we think that over time, the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol. That lets people choose their own moderation preferences. We think that it’s flexible enough to serve every use case and everyone."

The presence of the Trump administration on Bluesky creates a precarious situation for Bluesky however: The risk of political action taken against Bluesky is real, and can take various forms. There is the risk of a crackdown on places that are associated with Democrats and the left, a risk that Trump might lash out against anything he decides to get mad about that day, and a head of the FCC that seems excited to be crack down on what he calls the "censorship cartel", where he has made clear his intention to use whatever regulatory tools available to pressure platforms he believes are suppressing conservative viewpoints.

The administration's accounts are clearly daring Bluesky to take action against them, likely hoping to play the victim in whatever drama follows. It feels like only a matter of time before an account breaks the rules, and when that happens, Bluesky faces an impossible choice: take action and risk political retaliation, or do nothing and face the backlash from a user base that already feels insufficiently protected. Bluesky's relationship with its users over past moderation decisions has been tumultuous, to put it mildly. If government accounts get a pass when they break the rules, that tension will only intensify.

Bluesky board member Mike Masnick has written extensively how content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, calling it the Masnick's Impossibility Theorem. Masnick's argument focuses on moderation being an inherently subjective practice, and at social media scale, that subjectivity makes doing it well impossible. The presence of an authoritarian regime on the platform with the purpose of trolling only makes the Impossiblity Theorem all the more impossible.

Programming note: I've barely written about atproto in the last month: some issues with my shoulder severely limited the amount of hours I can spend at a computer each day, and I've had to prioritise some paid work in the limited time. Things are finally going better now, and I'm slowly catching up on the backlog. I have been keeping fairly close track of all the news shared in the last months anyway. So for the next few updates, I'll be going over the backlog and share some of the news and links that stands out to me. See it as a way to find out what news you've missed over the last month or so.

This also means I won't be doing a deep dive analysis on the 'waffles' situation and the factors that lead to this all. This kinda bothers me since I think its probably the most important story about atproto over the last month. However, I'm still restricted in time, and have to prioritise paid work. So for now it'll be some shorter Leaflet notes while I get up to speed again. Deep-dive analysis will definitely be resumed again, I do very much enjoy writing those. For now, let's dive in!

The For You feed is a custom algorithmic feed that has gotten popular recently. The algorithm looks at posts you like, and finds posts that are also liked by people who like the same posts as yours. It is a surprisingly effective algorithm, and I see a lot of people recommend the feed, over Bluesky's Discover feed as well. I can also definitely recommend the feed, one of my favourite ways to scroll Bluesky. The For You feed also shows how powerful and cool it is to have algorithmic feeds that are fully decypherable and open: The creator spacecowboy has an entire For You feed playground website that allows you to tweak with the settings. Another cool aspect: see what other people's algorithmic feed is like.

Seeing A/B tests on this feed and how demoting popular posts also impacts usage is interesting:

Adoption of new social networks often happen on a community-by-community base, and less on an individual basis. (this is why adoption of both fedi and bluesky happens largely happened in waves). In that context I find it interesting to see what fandom communities are up to:

Leaflet wrote about feedback they've gotten how the publishing platform can be more suited for fandom communities

haetae has been building towards a fandom archive project on atproto, with a blog explaining the process here:

Ms Boba is regularly streaming her atproto dev work for building a guestbook on atproto, and she's also written an extensive guide on what an AppView is and what it does:

teal.fm is a music scrobblr (tracks your music listening, similar to last.fm) on atproto that is currently being developed. Developer Matt wrote about the current state of development:

Teal.fm consists of multiple parts:

• the frontend app

• the appview/api

• the music tracker, called Piper

What's interesting about teal.fm is that the music tracker and accompanying lexicon already work. This means you can already use teal.fm, even though it is technically still in development. In fact, I've been doing that since the last week or so, and I'm impressed by how well this all already works. (shoutout to Bailey for letting me use his Piper instance).

So if you want start tracking your music listening habits on atproto already, you can:

install piper, and see your music stats here:

SkyBeMoreBlue is a platform for introducing people to each other on ATProto. The idea is that you give an introduction and description of other accounts in your network. This introduction is then shown to other people in your network as a recommendation to follow. I think it is an interesting contrast with how platforms like Bluesky (and Mastodon) handle Starter Packs, which are focused on getting people to follow large number of accounts at once. SkyBeMoreBlue is has some of the same final goals (help people find more interesting accounts to follow), but with a very different approach to get there. It is made by the same people who build the ATProto audio spaces app Bluecast, and seems to be mainly in use by the Japanese side of the ATProto community. I'm, uhhhh, unsure on the naming, but I do think it's cool to see more experimentation and new ideas for building healthy connections between people on social networks.

(a short bonus post because I need an example of a Leaflet post with an image embedding as a heading, and figured I might as well write something)

Sebastian Vogelsang, whose the developer of Flashes and working on the commons moderation service for Eurosky posted a very interesting question this week which got me thinking.

The idea behind the Eurosky commons moderation service is as follows:

• Developers can register their apps with Eurosky.

• Eurosky acts as the endpoint where participating apps can send content reports.

• Eurosky then provides moderation decisions that can be shared across apps using the same lexicon.

So far, so good. But the problem is that not all apps are the same. Vogelsang makes a distinction between consumer apps and producer apps. The distinction is simple:

• Producer apps are predominantly used to create content.

• Consumer apps are predominantly used to consume content.

For Vogelsang and the Eurosky team the question is: how should the costs of running the commons moderation layer be split across all participating apps, and should there be a distinction between the different types of apps?

I think thats a good question, and I don't yet have a clear answer to that.

But for me, this distinction between producer and consumer apps has been stuck in my mind for the last few days.

The current social networking era of the Big Tech platforms sees everyone use the same app to access a platform. Musk uses the same X app when he posts 150 times per day as any rando who just wants to scroll their feed. Same with TikTok, Insta, etc, the power users who are responsible for creating the content use the same app to access the network as the lurker who follows 3 people and scrolls for 5 minutes a week.

Social media is well known to follow a power law curve regarding how content on the network is created and consumed. As a rule of thumb, most networks follow a 1-9-90 split, with 1% of people creating original content, 9% occasionally contributing and 90% lurking.

It is one of the quirks of how the current Big Tech platforms work that these very different groups of people all use the same app to access the platform. It is clear that their experience, use case and needs are extremely different. For example, notification management is an absolute must if you are a creator with a big account (and even then it's often a mess), but for a lurker this matters much less. A lurker prioritises good feeds that gives them the content they are looking for. Also important for some creators, but other big accounts often don't have the time to read through feeds anyway so they only need the most relevant highlights.

The cool part of open social networks is that we get to move away from the paradigm of building the same app for very different types of people to access a network. Instead we can now build different apps that respect the needs of different groups of people.

However, what interests me about Vogelsang's post is that this also creates new challenges as a result. Should producer apps and consumer apps be treated different, when it comes to shared moderation costs, for example? Currently ATProto lexicon records do not indicate with which app a post was made. Apps could start adding a custom field to posts to indicate the source. Is that desirable? I don't know!

Only thing I do know is that you give people the freedom to build their own tools/apps/software, they might actually do that, and over time a network like atproto ends up much more diverse, stranger and unique as a result.

I was chatting with Sebastian Vogelsang (who's behind Flashes, Skeets and Eurosky), and he mentioned that he had recently given a presentation about atproto for media people. I asked him what his method was for explaining atproto. He said that compared atproto to wire services, and that this was a comparison that landed really well with the audience.

I've never heard of explaining atproto by comparing it to wire services before, and I think its actually a pretty smart way of explaining atproto and its value for media. It's probably an explanation best suited for people who are familiar with media, but I wanted to share this with, since I think more people might use this comparison in the right context (and shoutout to Sebastian for this!)

The idea is pretty simple: wire services, like Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse, work by creating news articles by their own journalists, which they then sell in bulk to other news organisations. A wire services aggregates news reporting, they have reporters around the world so they can cover all the news. These news articles get aggregated by the wire services into a continuous stream of news. Others news organisations usually do not have staff around the globe, but do want to fill their newspaper/tvshow/website/whatever with all global news. As a result, many news organisations buy a subscription from one of the wire services, and they get access to a continuous stream of news articles they can use.

Atproto has some quite similar dynamics, but instead of news articles by Reuters journalists, it is now user generated content (posts/videos/blogs/etc). The aggregation and relay is done by a relay, and anyone can plug into this stream of user generated content to build any social media platform they want. Obvious differences is that connecting to a relay is free, running a relay is cheap, and you cannot stop people from posting even if you wanted to.

One of the challenges with the open social web is in story telling: how do you explain all this complicated technical stuff to people? Often analogues to other internet protocol get made: activitypub is like email, atproto is like websites, etc etc. Comparing atproto to wire services takes the analogy away from the internet, to a world that a specific target audience knows well, in a comparison that holds up reasonably well on a high level.

Bonus advantage is that this analogy explains what the best place for economic value creation is for media people. Most people in media have (understandably) no interest in being a wire service: you want to buy from a wire service, place the article in your own branding, and provide enough value that people will use your news platform over any of the other news platforms.

This is sorta similar with atproto: all the low level infrastructure stuff is just that: infrastructure. There is no real money in running relays (or any other supportive infrastructure). The value is in building the app that people will use to view the content on the entire network. Currently Bluesky PBC has captured virtually everyone. But there is space for a whole lot more competitors to acquire some of this market share as well

An overview of the last week or so of news related to atproto tech. News about specific atproto software and apps are for another update, as well as the larger socio-economic context of the open social networks. This update is focused on developers and other people who are interested in the more technical aspects of atproto. For more news on the open social web you can check out my writing at connectedplaces.online, or check out my Leaflet for shorter updates.

• Bluesky has been taking the first tentative steps to submit atproto to the IETF standards process. The company just published their Internet Draft of atproto. Internet Drafts are documents within the IETF process that do not hold formal standings, and are made for the purpose of reviews and comments. The first formal step is via organising a Birds of a Feather Meeting at the IETF Montreal conference this November.

• Some musings by Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee on the naming of 'AppView', and if this part of the atproto infrastructure should have a different name.

• QuickDID is a new tool that handles handle resolution for atproto. QuickDID is a resolver that focuses on a single function, resolving atproto handles to DIDs. It is available to self host or can be used at https://quickdid.smokesignal.tools/.

• PDS Gatekeeper is a microservice that adds 2FA to self hosted PDSes.

• Previously I wrote about how the different book review platforms on atproto (bookhive.buzz, skylight.my, paperbnd.club) all use different lexicons, which prevents interoperability between then. The developer of Bookhive.buzz wrote a response thread why they chose separate lexicons; the problem is in data standards for books itself. Paperbnd and Skylight use standardised book identifiers (ISBN and OpenLibrary), but as these standards still have ambiguity, Bookhive.buzz stores all the data about the books on the PDS instead.

• A first pass at making fanfic archives on atproto.

• An extensive 2-part implementation guide for building OAuth applications on atproto, for both web and mobile.

• ATPage was a tool to publish HTML website to your atproto PDS. The tool is now sunset, with some reflections by the developer here, and why they are now switching to using Leaflet.

• Bluesky Jetstream Live is a tool to view relay outputs.

• More developers are starting to write weekly reflections on their atproto development work. Bailey Townsend writes about updates to AT Toolbox, PDS Gatekeeper and adding a landing page to their self hosted PDS. @bad-example.com writes about microcosms, some hiccups with relays, and a demo app to store small amounts of arbitrary data privately on a PDS.

Small note beforehand: If you've followed me before, you likely know that I write a weekly ATmosphere Report with all the news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere every week, over at connectedplaces.online. These weeks I'm switching it up a little, by splitting the report up into smaller parts and publishing them separately. The entire ATmosphere Report will still be published (and emailed) regularly as well, and this posts will be made more accessible on my own website soon.

This edition contains the atproto tech news and links of the last two weeks. It focuses on the tech and protocol side of the network, and thus assumes some familiarity with what's going on in the network.

Bluesky PBC is setting the first step in having atproto potentially become an IETF standard. This November in Montreal they will hold a Birds of a Feather meeting at the IETF conference. "The purpose of a BOF is to make sure that a good charter with good milestones can be created, that there are enough people willing to do the work needed in order to create standards, and that any standards would get adoption." This is a first step for atproto towards becoming an official IETF standard:

Bluesky has enabled the 'show more/show less' buttons on their Discover feed to be used by custom feeds as well. The update came from independent developer Grace Kind, and I think her response shows the power of open networks:

• Red Dwarf is a client for Bluesky, that takes a very different approach under the hood. It does not use an AppView, instead it relies solely on Constellation and PDSes to display all data. The code is now available on Tangled, and Red Dwarf demonstrates it is possible to build a Bluesky client with a significantly different architecture under the hood.

• Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold published a guide on "ecommended atproto data limits and lexicon-schema-agnostic validation behaviors".

• A guide to hosting the rsky-relay implementation. rsky-relay is an implementation of the atproto relay in Rust, made by the Blacksky Algorithms team.

• Streamplace explains how their Indexer system works.

• Some previews of an upcoming new project called Slices, which is an "appview for building appviews". Developer Chad Miller has used this to create a search interface for Tangled, as a demonstration of the capabilities of Slices.

• A proposal on how to build encrypted messaging combining atproto with email's SMPT, with a demo of how it works here. Smoke Signal's Nick Gerakines wrote a response blog as well on the project.

• The weekly update for microcosm, with a deep dive into the current ecosystem of relays in the ATmosphere.

• Comparing the different (indie) relays that are active, now with some additional features.

• A one-click deployment of a PDS on Coolify.

• A new tool that displays all your 'bookmarks' (meaning posts you replied to with a 📌).

• Graphtracks is a new custom API that aggregates atproto firehose data into accessible formats for other developers to build upon.

• Tangled-pages allows you to host a website via a Tangled repo.

• A tool that converts Whitewind posts into Leaflet posts.

• A demonstration of email 2FA on a self-hosted PDS, which is now also available on Blacksky.

• A prototype of a browser that can handle atproto handles, DIDs, as well as regular web pages.

• A first version of OAuth Scopes for the atproto Identity Rust Components.

• An extensive article on the technical challenges when building a general-purpose recommendation feed.

• A sneak peak at an If This Than AT system, which came out of the recent ATProto NYC Community Hack Day.

Small note beforehand: If you've followed me before, you likely know that I write a weekly ATmosphere Report with all the news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere every week, over at connectedplaces.online. These weeks I'm switching it up a little, by splitting the report up into smaller parts and publishing them separately. The entire ATmosphere Report will still be published (and emailed) at the end of the week as well.

With that, here is all the atproto software news and updates of the past week or so:

• Paperbnd is a new book review platform on atproto, with all the features you'd expect from a GoodReads alternative. Paperbnd focuses on interoperability with culture review app Popfeed, by using the same lexicons. It is made by the same developer, and it is effective a book-only version of the platform.The main challenge with review platforms on atproto so far has been getting sustained usage by people. Splitting the Popfeed app into a separate place for books might help here with branding, and by using the same lexicon it maintains interoperability and community growth.

• BookHive.buzz is another book review platform on atproto, and they released their own iOS app recently. BookHive.buzzh uses a different lexicon than Paperbnd/Popfeed, making them not interoperable.

• That both platforms (as well as Skylights.my, another culture view platform) use their own lexicons effectively leads to a splitting of the community over the platforms: you cannot see a review someone made on BookHive if you use the Popfeed app. There are roughly three outcomes here: (1) review platforms settle on a single shared lexicon to use, (2) review platforms display data from the other platforms in their apps, (3) the platforms stay separate. I'm curious to see which direction this will develop in.

• Snowpost is a new writing platform on atproto that focuses on simplicity and ease-of-use. Snowpost is a minimalist execution compared to other writing platforms like Whitewind or Leaflet. It uses markdown, which is stored as a blob on your PDS.

• Offprint is another writing platform that has been announced to be currently in development, with the explicit goal of taking on Substack. Offprint is not yet available, only screenshots of the design are shared. The space for writing platforms on atproto that want to take on Substack is definitely heating up however.

• Back in May, Bluesky started testing a new feature for selected accounts to add their YouTube or Twitch livestreams, where Bluesky will show on their profile picture if they are currently livestreaming. This feature has now been expanded to include atproto streaming platform Streamplace.

• Bluesky wants to know how much demand their is for an in-line translation feature.

• Git collaboration platform Tangled allows users to self-host 'knots', which are simple headless servers that store Git repositories. This means your entire codebase is not stored on your PDS, but on this independent server instead. Tangled has made some updates under the hood, which makes hosting a knot easier, and gives the Tangled AppView more independence and new features, such as showing trending repositories.

• Writing and publishing platform Leaflet now supports comments on articles. These are not Bluesky posts, but are their own lexicon. Leaflet now also supports Youtube embeddings in their posts.

• Bluesky client Anisota now gives users more granular control when it comes to muting accounts and keywords.

Small note beforehand: If you've followed me before, you likely know that I write a weekly ATmosphere Report with all the news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere every week, over at connectedplaces.online. These weeks I'm switching it up a little, by splitting the report up into smaller parts and publishing them separately. The entire Bluesky Report will still be published (and emailed) at the end of the week as well.

With that out of the way, here is a collection of interesting links related to Bluesky and the ATmosphere:

• Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser has an extensive article in New_Public that explains in detail how Blacksky works and why it matters: "Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to".

• The Techdirt podcast has a conversation between Bluesky board member Mike Masnick and Rudy Fraser. They talk about Blacksky, growth, content moderation and more.

• Bluesky CEO: I turned a Twitter research project into a rival company—‘we’ve achieved what a lot of people said was impossible’ - CNBC interviews Jay Graber.

• Wherever you get your Podcasts, a blog on Language in a decentralized future.

• Northsky, the cooperative that is building their own social media platform on ATProto for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, explains their cooperative structure and how they are planning to roll out PDS migration in their latest newsletter update.

• Brainstorming an ATProto Notifications Inbox - a blog post by A New Social's Anuj Ahooja on the potential for an app that gives you notifications for all ATProto platforms.

• did:plc Considered Harmful, a blog criticising how did:plc governance is still fully dependent on Bluesky PBC.

• A helpful explainer video on how ATProto works (for varying definitions of 'helpful').

• An exploration on how to measure the 'health' of the ATmopshere, comparing usage of Bluesky versus all other apps on the network.

• what is anisota.net? - some personal reflections on the new bluesky client Anisota by its creator Dame, as well as some future plans. This response by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold is also a good illustration of how Bluesky thinks about decentralisation and building open protocols: allow people to bootstrap their projects by using other product's infrastructure, and let them gradually evolve into their own independent product or platform.

• What happens when you let people on Bluesky control your printer.

• A blog about creating a visual representation of all the post Bluesky. The visualisation itself can be seen here.

Calls for people to get off Substack pop up regularly on the open social web. People argue against writers using Substack predominantly based on three reasons:

• Substack does not do enough to moderate Nazi content.

• Substack creates lock-in for their writers, making it harder and harder to people to migrate to other platforms later.

• Substack is expensive.

Regarding Nazi content, Substack's co-founder Hamish McKenzie told The Verge that it will not remove or demonetise Nazi content, after which more and more people started calling the place a nazi bar. This viewpoint has fairly widespread on networks like Bluesky and the fediverse, even as many writers on these platforms still depend on Substack. This viewpoint got further entrenched when the Substack app recently send out a push alert to promote a Nazi blog.

A new post by the Beehiiv CEO (another newsletter platform) talks about how Substack is creating further lock-in on the platform. There are multiple aspects to this:

• Substack now allows you to 'follow' writers, which is different than subscribing to their email newsletter. This 'follow' social graph is owned by Substack, and will migrate with the writer if they move to a different platform.

• People who have a paid subscription with a Substack writer have a direct payment connection with that writer through Stripe. If that writer would move to a different platform, these paid subscribers would automatically move over as well. Substack is pushing of people now to subscribe via Apple Pay instead. If a writer moves to a different platform, these subscriptions will not move with them. This creates significant lock-in to Substack, as moving to a different platform now means lost revenue for writers.

All these arguments present a 'negative' reason for writers to move away from Substack: Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform because you think the platform is bad. The argument is mainly focused on people perceiving Substack to be bad, whether 'bad' here means ethical, financial or other reasons.

But there is another good reason to be very careful with depending on Substack: it is also hard to leave Substack when you think other platforms are good.

One of the main values that people see for using Substack is a combination of:

• getting started for free

• in-build discovery and promotion mechanisms for growth

• does all the basic things of a newsletter writing platform well

It is especially the second part that makes Substack appealing. Growing a new blogging platform is incredibly hard, and anything that helps with discoverability and marketing is valuable.

The open social web (which I'm defining here as a combination of the fediverse, atmosphere, nostr and farcaster) consists of multiple different attempts to build an open protocol for social networks. The first step that all these networks start with is with microblogging, since that is the easiest modality to bootstrap. However, the second modality that gets widely experimented with on all these networks is with longform writing and publishing.

• the fediverse has WriteFreely, WordPress and Ghost.

• the ATmosphere has Leaflet, WhiteWind (as well as emerging platforms in development such as Offprint).

• Nostr has Yakihonne, Habla and npub.pro.

• Farcaster has Paragraph.

All these writing platforms take a slighly different approach, but they do have one thing in common: the recognition that the social graph is valuable for distribution and promotion of your writing. That is why people try to integrate writing platforms on these open protocol. It gives new affordance to its users, as well as promising to connect to a wider network that can be used for distribution and promotion.

I think that none of these platforms have truly cracked the code yet on how to build a next-generation distribution system for long-form writing. The main barrier here is actually on the microblogging side, where nobody seems to have figured out a good UX yet to combine short microblogs together with longform writing into a single destination that users enjoy.

The open social web is effectively a bet made by people, saying that they can create the infrastructure layer on which a new social web can be build. If this bet pays off, it means that we will see a wide variety of social platforms that are able to replace the current social platforms.

This bet is by no means guaranteed to pay off. The future of the open social web is still uncertain. But if it does, it changes the dynamic around Substack as well.

It is realistic, though far from certain, to imagine a situation where a platform on the open social web has managed to:

• increase their userbase to over a 100 million MAU

• build a UX that integrates long-form writing much more closely with the feeds-based system of most other platforms, with accompanying discovery systems to boot.

In that context, the argument for Substack also changes: instead of people not wanting to be on Substack because they feel the platform is bad (for various ethical/financial reasons), people do not want to be on Substack because they think other platforms are better.

One takeaway from Musk, Twitter and people migrating away to other platforms is that only a limited amount of people will move to different platforms because they think the original platform is bad. Providing a platform that does something new that the previous platform could not do is a much more compelling motivation for people to switch.

I do not think we are at a phase yet where the blogging platforms on the open social web provide a radically better experience than Substack can. However, I do think that enough different people and companies are tackling this challenge in a way that makes it likely that at some point someone will crack the code, and build a publishing platform that does provide a major advantage over Substack.

And that becomes a risk for writers who are dependent on Substack. So far, Substack building their walled garden has had relatively minor impact writers building their business on Substack. But if all the people building alternative writing platforms on the open social web have anything to say about it, there might just become a time where being dependent on Substack has some significant opportunity costs.

Here's a sentence for you:

Bounce is a new cross-protocol social graph migration tool that uses a protocol bridging service to create an mirror account on the sending protocol, which simulates the effect of sending your social graph across protocols.

If you understand everything that's going on here, congratulations on also having open-social-web-brainworms.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that this is not everyone though.

The Bounce service launched in beta today, and I think there are multiple stories going on at the same time:

• What the hell is cross-protocol account migration, and how does it work

• The impact on 'credible exit', and how moving to a different protocol impacts this

• the shaping of language, and building towards a shared understanding of what 'protocol bridging' even is.

For an explanation of what this is, Sarah Perez at TechCrunch as a good article which makes explains it as follows:

To move accounts, Bounce first moves a user’s Bluesky account to a bridged account that straddles the two networks, then to the user’s Mastodon account. 

A New Social explains Bounce in more detail here:

An important feature with accounts on the open social web is that, as long as they're using the same protocol, you can technically "move" your account from one platform to another. For instance, since they both run on ActivityPub, if I have an account on mastodon.social, I can "move" my social graph from there to flipboard.social, if that's where I want to post from now on. That move maintains all of my relationships and allows me to continue posting without having to re-find my friends. You can do the same thing between ATProtocol-based platforms, such as Bluesky.

We're using that same functionality to "move" your accounts over Bridgy Fed. We take your Bluesky account and "move" it to your Mastodon profile's bridged account, and take your Bluesky profile's bridged account and "move" it into your Mastodon profile.

Bluesky advertises itself with the idea of 'credible exit', the idea that you can meaningfully leave the service and take your social graph and data with you. Bluesky has mainly meant that in the context of ATProto:

• you can transfer your account to another data storage provider

• you can use other client/app on ATProto that is not the Bluesky app, if you disagree with Bluesky's ToS for example.

Bounce adds an additional layer to this all:

• you can now transfer your account to another protocol altogether.

In this way, the ability to use Bounce to migrate your social graph from Bluesky to Mastodon actually is a benefit to Bluesky: it further cements their claim of providing a credible exit. This lowers the barriers for people who are unsure about trying out Bluesky, there is now a way back.

One challenge for Bounce, as well as Bridgy Fed, is the lack of shared references to help explain what this all actually is. Understanding why bridging software like Bridgy Fed matters, requires knowledge of how the open social web protocols work.

It creates new kinds of artefacts, such as 'mirrored' accounts on the bridge, which are a new concept that people are largely not familiar with. Furthermore, this type of account does not even have a good name to define what it actually is.

• When you have an account on either the fediverse or atproto, and want to interact with people from the other network, you can do this with a bridging service like Bridgy Fed. When you do this, people often describe this as having a bridged account.

• Services like Bridgy Fed (and Bounce) work by creating an additional account on the Bridgy Fed platform, that passes messages between the networks. When people on the other network want to follow your account, they do not actually follow your account natively: they follow this additional account on the Bridgy Fed service.

• It is unclear what this additional account is actually called. TechCrunch also calls this 'a bridged account', but there is no clearly defined term for it. The A New Social Team prefers not to use 'bridged account' here (due to that term already used for the other meaning), but there is no clear alternative. Mirror account maybe?

• Without clear definitions and names, it becomes even harder to explain a process that is already hard enough to explain what it is. I'm not sure if people who would be interested in using a tool like Bounce understand that this means that this depends on another 'mirror' account that is operated by another organisation. Clearer naming might help here.

Recently I wrote about how decentralised networks lead to fragmentation and decentralisation in the underlying protocols that power them. People might see bridging as a temporary solution to a problem caused by developers with a Not Invented Here Syndrome. Instead, I see this fragmentation and protocols that are only partially compatible with each other as a logical result of giving people freedom to build and hack whatever they want. Sure, it leads to interoperability issues and it can be annoying, but it is also an unavoidable result from the social dynamics that are part of truly open networks.

That means that bridging services and other software that focuses on making incompatible software compatible with each other will be part of the open social web for a while longer. And that means that there is also a lot of work to be done regarding language and explanations of what these tools actually do, and how they impact regular users.

Bluesky is banning access to its app for people from Mississippi following a new drastic age verification law:

Some thoughts:

• Bluesky PBC is fully onboard now with viewing clients as access points to the network, and as the point where regulation happens. See also their new ToS, which also makes it clear that this is only for their client

• The messaging from PBC is quite different on this case versus how they handled OSA. Their communication on OSA did not mention at all at their gating system could be bypassed. For Mississippi regulation they explicitly explain it however:"This decision applies only to the Bluesky app, which is one service built on the AT Protocol. Other apps and services may choose to respond differently. We believe this flexibility is one of the strengths of decentralized systems—different providers can make decisions that align with their values and capabilities, especially during periods of regulatory uncertainty. We remain committed to building a protocol that enables openness and choice."

• Having alternate clients that can access the network only matters when people actually use other clients. So far, PBC has given users very little reason to use other clients, as the main client is very well developed by professionals, making it hard for single volunteer devs to keep up. Unclear if or how that dynamic will change moving forward.

• The fediverse keeps willfully misunderstanding how atproto works, nor does it show any curiosity or interest in learning about it.

• Mastodon is particularly vulnerable, with a ceo who is not interested in complying with regulation. There is this assumption that the fediverse is so decentralised that regulators will somehow ignore fediverse servers.

• My main concern is for mastodon. ceo eugen rochko is pretty explicit that he does not care, but he seems not to realise he is actually vulnerable on two points:

  • he operates a subsidiary organisation within the US (for fundraising), making his org within easy reach of us law enforcement

  • he maintains the most popular apps for the entire fediverse network, the 'official' mastodon apps. these are distributed on ios and android. The app stores mainly dont follow state-by-state law, instead conservatively applying laws to the entire country. the easiest way for mississippi to force mastodon.social to comply with their regulation is simply to tell apple and google to get the mastodon apps of the app store.

The new Substack for "centerleft" (lol) writers decided to open their launch with a passionate argument of why its totally fine to stay on Twitter.

There is a fuck-ton wrong with that article, but its always pretty nice when people are willing to write down in detail that they don't know how social media works in 2025.

The obvious issue is that surrounding yourself with hatred changes yourself, something that gets zero attention in the article. The second issue is that social media functions as sense-making tools, and it thus also impacts your perception of how you think other people view the world. Doing that in a nazi environment thus makes you think that nazi thoughts are more acceptable and mainstream than they are IRL.

But what really stands out to me is the total lack of a theory of power. It says:

But leaving Twitter in 2025 is not deplatforming Nazis, it is deplatforming yourself. The Nazis have already taken over the bar. The question is who will come to take it back"

It is a good question: how do you actually take power back from nazis? Which makes it very funny that the article does not even attempt to answer their own question they raise. Like seriously, its really weird how the article has nothing to say about this. It continues to talk about the possibility of persuading the normies that are still on X. Which might or might not happen, but thats an answer to a different question altogether.

It says: "We do not control the bar, we are not the proprietor or the landlord. We have no power to deplatform anybody. We are a small group of patrons, hoping we don’t get kicked out of the bar before we get the chance to grab the aux cord again."

Which is a pretty good observation! It also answers the question raised earlier by in the same article, namely that you cannot really take back power from a nazi owner of X. Which is kind of a big problem!

So to summarise, the article is both morally wrong, completely misunderstands how social media works, and does not even bother to make an attempt at answering the core question of the article. Its the final thing that really grinds my gears: I can deal with intellectual or moral disagreements. Its the lazy writing of not answering the core question of your article that really bothers me.

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