Building energy in Vancouver

The founders of Semble, one of the most interesting apps on the Atmosphere, are flying me to Vancouver this week for ATmosphereConf 2026. 

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They and the founders of three other apps will speak in my workshop, along with representatives of a couple of European Universities. But it's not what I'm bringing to Vancouver which excites me the most.

Your research institute on the Atmosphere

As its title indicates, my workshop is part of the ATProto.science day preceding the main conference. It will explore how Universities and other research organisations can bridge the:

"structural gap between institutional knowledge (formal, slow, siloed) and the personal knowledge networks (informal, fast, distributed) of their faculty and students. The Atmosphere can bridge this gap because both layers can speak the same protocol" - Your research institution in the Atmosphere

It's one of the event's last sessions, so I'm hoping to draw together ideas explored throughout the day to develop shared visions of how these institutions can create win-wins for themselves and the researchers working within them. So I'm very fortunate to have contributions from the founders of:

• Leaflet: one of the top long-form Atmosphere publishing apps and co-creators of the standard.site technology 
• Semble: a social curation app oriented towards the needs of researchers but usable by everybody 
• Sill: which shows you the top stories your social graph is sharing and discussing on the Atmosphere, and has long ago replaced the Medium Daily Digest as the first thing I open in my inbox 
• Skysquare: a new app, to be unveiled earlier that day, for commenting on websites.

As you might imagine I'm suffering from a major case of impostor syndrome, as I must be the only person coming to Vancouver who doesn't have an app either on or about to launch on the Atmosphere!

Simple sites, powerful communities

But the thesis I'm presenting in Vancouver - briefly: your website as scaffolding for your team's Atmosphere presence - is built on a year's work: my workshop in Hamburg at the Ahoy Conference last March, my presentation in Berlin at the Eurosky launch, and - since my last newsletter - two new posts:

• Event co-creation on the Atmosphere: a deep dive into combining Atmosphere apps like Bluesky and Leaflet to implement event co-creation, an extremely powerful way to use your physical conference to boost your online community, and use your community to create a better conference
• Simple sites, powerful communities: summarises and generalises the lessons learned in the five-part deep dive to explain how integrating ATProtocol with your website "lets you build powerful, interactive online communities with very simple code, while giving you in-built reach to 40+m users across the Atmosphere, and allowing your members to own and manage their own data".

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Communities at AtmosphereConf

Inevitably, the weeks before the annual conference of this entire ecosystem have seen a flurry of major announcements, which will be further developed and discussed in Vancouver. I'm most interested in:

• Permissioned data, which is a fancy way of saying "private data", which is another way of saying "allowing community". Bluesky have been working on this and sharing their thinking via a "permissioned data diary", the first entry of which (To Encrypt or Not to Encrypt) introduces what permission data actually is, and what it's not. See also What does permissioned data feel like? and everything tagged "permission data"
• Composable Trust: first of a four-part series looking at how communities could evolve on the Atmosphere. It's quite in-depth because it not only explains why permission data is not enough for resilient communities on the Atmosphere, it proposes an architecture for solving it. 
• Business models, following the recently unveiled news that Bluesky raised $100 million last year, with their existing investor joined by the journalism nonprofit Knight Foundation. I highly recommend their explanation of why they joined venture capitalists to invest in a social media app as one of the better explanations of the potential of the ATProtocol.

Three good explainers

Talking of explainers - if you're still getting up to speed, you might enjoy:

• Share Where? Laurens Hof uses Mastodon's new Share button to explore protocol ownership, showing how "The fediverse built its federation layer on an open standard, but left the client layer to be captured by its dominant provider". That dominant provider is Mastodon, and "The more tools and integrations that get built on top ... the deeper the lock-in becomes."
• Practical Decentralization, where Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee clears up confusion surrounding Atproto, ActivityPub and Nostr. I particularly like how he introduces Information Civics, the practice of balancing ideological aims with the need to produce usable software: "Good protocol design requires balancing the tensions of ideology and practicality."
• A Eurosky Account is just the start: Eurosky sets out their vision, and not before time.

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Revision Notes

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