ATmosphere Report #139 Link bag - politics, atproto, and some more links

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.

Saving democracy for the price of a swimming pool — Open Indie

Ten walking-minutes from where I live in Oslo, Norway, there's a large pool that opened at the start of this year. I love this pool; I wa...

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.

The White House and Bluesky

Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks | TechPolicy.Press

The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.

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:

The White House joins Bluesky - Connected Places

When a government joins a platform for the purpose of trolling

And some more links

And a few links that grabbed my attention this week:

Skywatch Automod 2.0.0 - Skywatch Weather Report

Release Notes

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.

6 months of Tangled

a quick recap, and notes on the future

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.

How Streamplace Works: Syndication - How Streamplace Works

It's like everyone is their own little TV station!

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 - Update #4, October 2025

After a brief slowdown for the endless holidays of northern summer, we at Free Our Feeds have been preparing for the next stage of our initiative: writing, speaking, scheming, and planning. Top of line: we're confident enough that we'll hit our fundraising target to support a new independent public interest

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!