Who verifies the atproto developer community, and why can't it be the community itself?

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:

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.

Some themes I'm watching for 2026: censorship resistance, the politics of interoperable spaces, and who gets to shape how atproto talks about itself.

Bluesky grants, on Eurosky conference, and how Gander is thinking about cultural sovereignty

on protocol architecture and power

The launch of knowledge sharing platform Semble, some thoughts on the evolving dynamics around moderation, and a whole lot of links

The Canadian atproto-powered platform Gander raises of 1.3M in fundraising, atproto at the IETF and Bluesky is the baseball app

The space for blogging and long-form writing on atproto is rapidly developing, and it gives some interesting insight in what decentralisation on atproto looks like

Comparing the Dutch election results with how active politicians are on Bluesky

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.

When a government joins a platform for the purpose of trolling

For You Feeds, music tracking with teal.fm, and fandom communities on atproto

(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)

another way to explain atproto

The atproto tech news of the last week or so

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.

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.

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.

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:

Here's a sentence for you:

regulation of the open social web is accelerating

sure lets write about this