In the Atmosphere

The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things . I thought about this line often while I was in Vancouver for the event. Everyone was active: writing, managing communities, building side projects or businesses on Bluesky, and building Bluesky itself. The energy was fertile and optimistic. Even deep critiques, like Erin Kissane's beautiful Landslide or Blaine Cook's Software Ecologies , had hope that this community and technology could 'fix' the social internet. The other refrain of the conference was that Meta, Google, TikTok, and other centralized social platforms have failed, and the AT Protocol could be the key to their replacements. From my seat, the need to decentralize social media is obvious enough that I don't write about it, and the only real question is which social, financial, and technology structure is actually capable of succeeding. There have been a lot of attempts to unseat Facebook, and most have run out of cash, gotten acquired, or lost steam. As I mentioned in my last post about the AT Protocol , I've been around long enough to have tried previous attempts to decentralize the web and defeat the giants. I've also lived through a prior wave of open source optimism and seen how it can get weird. [1] Being amongst this relatively new and energetic community gave me renewed hope for the creative and weird parts of the web, but it also made me wonder where this is all going. Who is in this community? The people who attended were more far more diverse across multiple axes than I'd ever seen at a large tech-related event. To many people on the fringes, the "blue" in Bluesky is for liberal, and as far as I could tell it was a thoroughly left-wing culture, defined by inclusivity and respect. It was also extremely dense with accomplished thinkers and programmers, like Schuyler Erle , who invented a lot of web mapping technology, Paul Syverson , who invented Onion Routing, Mike McCue , who worked on Netscape Navigator, and Dan Abramov , who co-created Redux and worked on React. Smart people like this thing. It also had a lot of people from specific sub-communities and people who seemed like they were from an organizing background. How did everyone justify the trip to Vancouver, though? Some people were operating companies built on or with AT Protocol: Germ , Leaflet , Graze , Fedica , BlackSky , Stream.place , and Surf . (not an exhaustive list) Then there were people working on side projects, many of which they want to devote full-time energy to, like Tiny Town , Sill , and Cartridge . Then others were affiliated with academia or non-profits, like A New Social or New Public . And some folks were just in Vancouver so it was a pretty easy trip. Echoes of an earlier wave Everything about the AT Protocol community is so new , small, personal, and altruistic. Individual people are running essential infrastructure in their free time: for instance, this talk by fig , how how they're building incredible services on a shoestring budget, largely as a solo effort. There are a bunch of people like this in the community, maintaining high-quality SDKs, services, and more that everyone else builds on. The companies are also nascent. There are a few companies that pivoted into working with Bluesky, like Fedica , and have a business plan figured out. But out of the companies built on AT Protocol from the start, most of them are at the seed stage or earlier, and some of the talks at the conference probably shared material with investor pitch decks. One of the few companies that had raised money, Graze, had this to say in a fantastic talk : The first, and most important, is that fundraising is exceptionaly difficult in the current environment in general, and profoundly difficult with social media [...] AT Proto is not growing exponentially which means functionally it is a non-starter for VC investment [...] The AI hype cycle has all but consumed available oxygen that would otherwise remain. On top of that, there's a common misconception that social is 'solved' [...] honestly do not mention AT Proto, at least until it goes exponential again. I also noticed that there's a very strong movement from the community to avoid traditional corporate formats and funding mechanisms. A lot of projects are following Bluesky's lead in forming as benefit corporations . The PBC structure is interesting - a few companies with that structure have gone public, like Planet labs and Allbirds. As far as I can tell though, the actual power of the designation has never been tested in court - the idea is that companies with the PBC format have a specific purpose which is part of their charter and if they don't stick to it and if 2% of shareholders want to sue, they can be sued for it. The purpose of Planet Labs is "to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world, by illuminating environmental and social change" and the purpose of Bluesky is "to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation" so I'm not sure that there's much legal teeth to this idea. It is a very nice gesture though. Germ and Graze are both PBCs. There are also a lot of projects trying to avoid the profit-driven company format entirely. Bridgy Fed , a service that I happily use to syndicate my Mastodon posts to Bluesky, is backed by a non-profit funded by its community and creators (one of whom co-created Google App Engine ). Roundabout , another AT Protocol-based product, is under the non-profit New Public. Even the Knight Foundation backed Bluesky itself. Because I have an irrepressible need to know these things, here's a quick primer in where this money comes from: New Public is funded by The Knight Foundation, Omidyar, Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros , and the Hopewell Fund ( source ). A New Social is self- and crowd-funded . Cosmik is funded by Coefficient Giving , which is in turn funded by Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook cofounder, his wife and a bunch of billionaires and Astera , which is funded by Jed McCaleb, crypto billionaire . The Knight Foundation was initially funded by a local newspaper fortune (those were the days). There aren't any huge surprises in there: big amounts of money tend to come from people who have a lot of money, and these are mostly innocuous funders. But what about AI? What about AI. Everything is about AI now. Most of the sessions that I attended didn't mention AI. Nevertheless, I think that AI is one of the ingredients for how this community is building so fast: during a panel of designers, dame said that they heavily use LLMs to build Anisota , their moth-themed social media interface, and many of the demos had a bit of LLM odor to them. There a few moments of full AI-optimism, like Cameron's talk about void , his chatbot 'with a memory', and Alex Komoroske talking about the Resonant Computing Manifesto and saying that AI could be 'bigger than the printing press.' I loved that it wasn't a conference about AI. I'm not an AI-hater or an AI-doomer. I'm bored to tears by the discourse. I don't want to hear another Stanford CS grad talk about the big thoughts they had the first time in their lives that they thought about the theory of mind. I don't care about which historical technology you want to compare it to or whether junior programmers or senior programmers or designers or managers are going to come out on top or on bottom. I don't care about the new way someone found to run 8 agents at the same time bossing each other around. When products add a magic chatbox as the new way to do everything, I don't find it exciting. It's all just so boring, monotonous, derivative, uncreative, and hype-driven. Yes, it's important and it'll change the world. But vanishingly few people have anything to say about it. That said, Bluesky announced Attie during the conference, and AI vibecoding interface / chatbot which allows people to build custom interfaces and feeds for…