ATmosphere Report - #144

Eurosky Live

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 grants

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 collaboration with StopNCII

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.

Cultural Sovereignty

New_Public spok e 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.

Finance

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!