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. 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.
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 the AT Protocol. You ask it to create a feed about sports, and it writes some filtering code and queries the lexicons and builds it for you.
This is at the intersection of two things I don't really care about: 'vibecoding' and 'custom feeds for discovery.' It's a product for someone else - probably a lot of people, because algorithmic discovery is a hard expectation of people raised on TikTok who expect perfectly curated content.
This launch generated a lot of controversy for roughly two reasons.
The first is obvious: it's AI, and a lot of people strongly dislike AI. Many, many people blocked the Attie account in protest, and there's a flare-up of fears around AI training on Bluesky data again. Cleverly, I think, Attie is intentionally not something that would ever train on Bluesky data and it also never generates content for users, so it isn't a slop machine.
The other is that this feature definitely stomps on or near much smaller efforts from people and companies in the community. That means Graze, Surf, Skyfeed, Cosmik's Hyperfeed, and I'm sure many others. Custom feeds quickly became the most crowded and competitive space in the Atmosphere.
I think that Trezy's blog post about this is a great, critical explanation of what's going on and what the risks are:
Then there's the question of collateral damage. Leaflet just announced a pro subscription. The standard.site coalition has been building something genuinely collaborative across multiple teams. Watching that presentation, it felt like any of us could be next.
I think he has a strong point: Bluesky PBC is in a tough position, both fighting for relevance as a social media company and trying to foster a community of open source projects and small companies. A lot of the next features that Bluesky might introduce are already things being worked on by small companies. What should they do - acquire them, compete with them, defer to them? Trezy is right that they should at least coordinate with them.
The money thing. The growth thing.
What the community has right now is a tremendous amount of energy, creativity, and good vibes, but pretty dim prospects for business. This can turn around in an instant - venture capitalists are trend-followers above all, and one good success story becomes everyone else's pitch. But right now, the amounts raised by companies in the ecosystem are tiny. Rudy quoted $6.2k MRR for BlackSky, which is a huge achievement, but to bring the full team of six on full-time would need to quadruple at least. Graze's $1M funding round is pretty small by most definitions.
But underneath that is the usage problem. None of the charts of Bluesky adoption look good. It's a niche community that loves to use new applications from the community. Bluesky has, by one measure, around 5 million active users in comparison to Threads claiming 400 million active users. Nothing of importance has ever been posted to Threads, the gas-leak social network, but nevertheless.
My guess is that algorithmic feeds, which segue into communities on Bluesky, could tilt the curve up and make Bluesky palatable for users who don't expect to curate their social media, but also don't want a firehose of all content. Or maybe the next big thing is live events on Bluesky, taking some inspiration from the success of streaming and making the platform more useful for sports and stuff.
Maybe solving the user-growth problem solves the venture capital problem, which solves the funding problem for startups, and that's good for the community in the end.
Is it really that bad for a social network to have five million devoted users instead of four hundred million? It's definitely not enough for Bluesky-the-company to succeed, and Bluesky accounts being a niche thing makes the pitch for AT Protocol apps a lot harder. "Sign in with your internet handle" isn't as compelling if most people don't have one. Compare to just signing in with a Google, Apple, or GitHub account, and the AT Protocol option is just worse for most people.
That said, Bluesky at its current size - and the AT Protocol community at its current size - is perfectly fine? For all of the worries about the network 'dying,' just having linear user growth during a period in which the app changes and experiments with new features isn't the end of the world. Popularity isn't everything.
Being there
In between all of the big thoughts, the rest of it was lovely. Everyone was incredibly friendly and welcoming, the venue had actual good vegan food, and on the mornings I ran the Salish Trail, through second-growth forests of hemlock and douglas firs. I skipped the parties in Vancouver to conserve my social batteries, which might've been a double-good idea because a lot of people got COVID, and small contained spaces probably didn't help.
The experience filled me with optimism and excitement. This is an early stage for this community, and it could turn out a whole bunch of ways. I hope that we look back on these years as the the time when a new, better internet was being born. It could work out.