Blog

I’m back from ATmosphereConf in Vancouver, and I’m processing what I saw and heard. The atproto developer community could not have been nicer and more welcoming. Here are some takeaways. 

The Atmosphere is bigger than social media

I’ve been to a lot of developer conferences over the years, and what struck me most about this one was the wide range of projects. Yes, there were lots of people building social apps on the AT Protocol. But there were also people working on wildfire coordination tools for the US fire service, decentralized AI and biomedical knowledge networks, and creating shared infrastructure to connect astronomy observatories and research data across the globe (and so much more).

One of the conference highlights was youandme.at, a fun way to connect to other attendees via Atmosphere profiles and QR codes. You & Me was built right before the event and spread quickly throughout the conference. Even more exciting, other devs built add-on apps for You & Me. One graphed all the connections in the network and made a global leaderboard – mutating the social experience and kicking off a competition for the most connections. Another replicated connections between both repos so that if the other person deleted the connection, you could still maintain it. Both of these were built at the conference in between sessions and required no coordination with the original developer. 

What these projects have in common is that they’re all using atproto to build and coordinate in the open. Teams working across organizational boundaries, sharing structured data, and building on each other’s work with ease. None of them would be possible if they were building on a closed platform where one company controlled the data.

Attie has launched!

We also previewed a new product at the conference called Attie, our first experiment with agentic social. It delivers socially intelligent features across the enormous amount of data in the Atmosphere (20 billion records and counting). We built it as a separate product from the Bluesky app for a few reasons. Attie’s purpose goes beyond microblogging. And building it within a separate space will allow us to rapidly experiment without impacting the core Bluesky user experience.

Attie’s initial feature focuses on AI assisted custom feed building. Just tell Attie what you are looking for and it assembles a personalized content feed for you. It’s an algorithm, but one that you control. 

Attie got lots of attention. Early beta user feedback has been encouraging and media covered it widely (I like how this Forbes article describes it). AI tools are quite polarizing these days. We believe the technology that powers Attie can empower people to take control of their information environment and are excited about the thousands of people who signed up on the waiting list. Plenty of Bluesky users let us know they’re not interested in Attie, and that’s ok, that choice is part of what makes the atproto ecosystem so unique. Using Attie is completely optional.  

The conference audience was genuinely interested and started diving right into the beta. I wish we had structured our introduction a little differently though. This one is on me. I asked the team to show off a demo of what we had ready to launch. The resulting presentation felt more like a consumer product demo rather than the start of a conversation about how the technology fits into the atproto developer community and its projects. (Hat tip to Trezy and others who pointed this out.) We’re hard at work on the next set of features, including developer access. 

Next up

At this point, I consider myself fully on-boarded into Bluesky and the Atmosphere. This community and ecosystem is brimming with optimistic energy and possibilities. I think our ranks will grow and the Atmosphere will start getting mainstream attention this year. 

Next, I’m diving into Q2 planning and roadmaps with the Bluesky team. More on that as it develops.

PS: There’s one more exciting Atmosphere project that I’ve been wanting to mention: npmx. It’s a modern npm browser with atproto powered social features. The story of how it was built is a great example of community based software development in the age of open social. We were happy to support it with a grant and that it all started with a Bluesky post.

I’m writing this from the beautiful UBC campus in Vancouver where ATmosphereConf 2026 is taking place. It’s a gathering of developers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are passionate about keeping the web and our online conversations free and open. The mood here is excited and very collaborative, and I’ve been meeting many of the people who are building products in the Atmosphere. But what exactly is this Atmosphere that I’ve been mentioning in my posts?

It’s the thriving ecosystem of over a thousand interoperable social apps and services that run on the AT Protocol (atproto). Bluesky is one of the apps in the Atmosphere. You can use Bluesky on its own as a vibrant, well-run social network that’s free of ads and lets you control your own algorithms. But because it’s built on an open protocol, your Bluesky login is actually an Atmosphere login and the key to many other apps and tools. There are far too many to list but here’s a sampling to give you an idea.

Use your login on Flashes, a photo app, and your Bluesky social graph travels with you. Use it on Skylight, and the same thing again. Every Atmosphere app you sign into already knows who you know. That’s not magic. It’s what happens when your identity belongs to you instead of to the platform. 

And that’s just the start. As more apps integrate with each other, new experiences are emerging.

Say you write a long post on any Atmosphere-compatible publishing platform— Leaflet, Pckt, or Offprint are emerging native ones. If you’re committed to WordPress, you can plug-in via standard.site. Posts written on any of these platforms are interoperable with each other. And if you cross-post to Bluesky, engagement can flow back. For example, if someone likes your post in Bluesky, that activity shows up on Leaflet, too. You don’t have to manage multiple accounts. You just post, and your community finds it wherever they already are.

When you look at your Bluesky feed today, you might already be seeing posts that originated on several different apps without realizing it. Feeds themselves are an open layer. Graze lets anyone build a custom feed by topic, community, or curation style, and those feeds work across Bluesky and other Atmosphere clients. Surf, from the Flipboard team, takes this further, letting you blend Atmosphere content with the broader open web. The idea of “the algorithm” as something a platform imposes on you starts to dissolve when the feed layer is open and composable.

The social layer is becoming community-specific too. Blacksky built curated feeds and moderation tools specifically for Black social media users and runs its own independent infrastructure on the same protocol. Gander Social did something similar for Canada. Eurosky, a European non-profit, built an independent Atmosphere home server so European users can have their social data hosted in Europe, under European law. None of these projects required permission from Bluesky, the company. They just built.

Even the developer community itself is moving onto the Atmosphere. Developers are using Tangled to collaborate on code and build the very tools that make the rest of the ecosystem possible. And Germ brought end-to-end encrypted messaging to the Atmosphere, integrated directly into Bluesky and picked up by Blacksky too.

What strikes me being here in Vancouver is how much of this is happening simultaneously, in parallel, by independent teams who mostly know each other through the network they’re building on. The protocol and the underlying infrastructure are here, individuals are doing the rest. It doesn’t feel like a product roadmap. It feels more like a city filling in. Someone opens a coffee shop, someone else opens a bookstore across the street, and suddenly there’s a neighborhood.

Happy to report that week 2 has been just as energizing as week 1. I’m still meeting lots of new people and learning the ropes. In addition to spending time with the Bluesky team, I met with several Atmosphere folks: Boris who is working on organizing the ATmosphereConf (more on that below), Jared from Leaflet, Devin from Graze, and Mike from Surf. Each is building cool products that demonstrate the power of apps that connect to each other across open social. 

We also made a bit of news this week, shipping an app update with bot labels, as well as belatedly announcing a $100m fundraise. This money provides several years of runway for Bluesky which allows us to continue to build the long term value we see in this platform. There was some confusion about why we waited so long to announce the fundraise, because it actually happened last year, and I want to address this directly. 

It’s not unusual for a startup to wait for the right moment to announce a raise. In this case, an obvious moment never presented itself, the team got busy with lots of other priorities, and time went by quickly. We did want the world to know though, so we finally released the news. We could have omitted the exact timing of the raise (most startups do that), but I wanted to be transparent that it was raised under Jay’s leadership, not mine. In retrospect, there might have been a less confusing way of doing it :).

There’s lots of prep work going on for next weekend’s ATmosphereConf, a gathering of the people building new products for the Atmosphere. I very much look forward to meeting community members, as well as many of the Bluesky team members in person for the first time. (The team is remote, so I’ve interacted with almost everyone online only.)

Regarding these blog posts: I agree with feedback from some of you that it’s weird that these posts are separate from Bluesky. Fixed! Thanks to the beauty of open systems, and help from Matthias, my blog now publishes posts directly to the Atmosphere (both Bluesky and standard.site) via this WordPress plugin. This is my first post to try this, I hope it works 🙂

Looking forward to seeing folks in Vancouver!

It’s deeply fun and energizing to be back in an operating role. The team has been very welcoming and impressive. I spent my first week meeting lots of people and soaking up information, both from the Bluesky team and the Bluesky user base (while I don’t post a lot, I do read a ton every day). I’ve been learning about several internal projects that I can’t wait for us to ship. Lots of good stuff ahead for both Bluesky app users and AT Proto developers.

Some observations:

Lots of people seem curious about the size of the Bluesky team. It’s 42 people, and that’s up significantly from just a few months ago. Those numbers surprise many. Yes, this is a small team that has accomplished a lot.

People ask if Bluesky is mostly about liberal politics. It’s not. There’s a strong, active cohort of people who love to talk about politics, but political posts are less than 10% of the network. People talk about every conceivable topic. Other than politics, top topics are music, entertainment, sports, and science.

I’ve been working with Jay for the last couple of years, and I’ve never seen her as happy as in her first week as CIO. She’s diving into some big new ideas, and I can’t wait for you all to see what’s next.

Many messages I’ve gotten from the Bluesky community were along the lines of, “Welcome, this is a great place, please don’t mess it up.” The subtext is that I was brought in to turn things around in some dramatic way. I was not. I like our strategy, and we will continue to deliver on it.

Quite a few people wondered if my arrival means that we will start putting ads on the network. We’re not. We are very actively thinking about how we will make money, but ads are near the bottom of the idea list.

In diving into the makings of Bluesky, I noticed that the AT Protocol that underpins Bluesky feels related to the GPL license that underpins WordPress. Both are “commitment devices”, one technical, the other legal, to ensure that ecosystem participation remains open.

When people tell me, “I love Bluesky, and I’m glad you’re involved,” I sometimes answer, “I love it too—and did you know that Bluesky is one app of many in a network called the Atmosphere?” This has gotten me 100% blank stares. But yes, it’s true. There are lots of other apps in the Atmosphere. Expect me to talk a lot more about that in the coming weeks and months.

I’m excited to tell you that I will serve as interim CEO at Bluesky, a company whose mission I believe in deeply.

I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years, and one of the great privileges of that job is getting a front-row seat to companies that are trying to do something genuinely hard. Bluesky is one of those companies, and when the moment came to contribute in a more hands-on fashion, the timing felt right. 

How I Got Here

I’ve spent most of my career working on open platforms, from WordPress and Automattic to the Yahoo Developer Network and to open marketplace businesses like Bandcamp that we backed at True. What I’ve learned is that openness is not just a technical choice, it’s a philosophical one. Decisions about who controls the network, who owns the data, and who captures the value  shape what the internet becomes.

I first met Jay Graber and Rose Wang (Bluesky’s CEO and COO) about two years ago, while I was back at Automattic, serving as their interim CEO. Automattic was a seed investor in Bluesky, so an introduction made sense. What I didn’t expect was how quickly that first conversation would turn into conviction.

I’ll be honest: I was skeptical about decentralized social. The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships, where anyone can build on top of the protocol. But I’d seen enough promising decentralized projects fade or fragment that I had stopped expecting one to get to scale.

Bluesky changed that. Hearing their vision and, more importantly, learning about the architecture they’d built (the AT Protocol) I became a believer. This was a real, scalable foundation for a different kind of internet.

Over the last two years I’ve been an investor and an advisor to Bluesky, a fan cheering the team on as they pulled off something many said was impossible.

What Bluesky Has Built

Bluesky has cracked a case that stumped the industry for years: How to create a social network that has the best of both worlds. The personal freedom and ownership that comes from being part of an open network and the immediacy and ease of use that people expect from modern social services.

That’s not a small thing. A lot of people said you had to choose one or the other.

At Bluesky, a small and extraordinarily talented team has signed up over 40 million people, nurtured an open developer ecosystem with over 500 active apps, and scaled all the systems that make that experience smooth and possible: A consumer app, servers, on-boarding, moderation, safety, the list goes on. And they’ve done it while staying true to the open protocol underneath. Now it’s time to build on that foundation and deliver more open goodness to the world.

Thank You, Jay

None of this would exist without Jay Graber. She had the vision, recruited the team, and drove the execution that got Bluesky to where it is today. I’m grateful for the trust she is placing in me to step in during this transition, and I’m excited to support her in her next chapter as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer. Her focus on the long-term architecture and vision of the protocol will propel us forward into exciting new territory. 

What I’m Here to Do

For the Bluesky team: My job is to support you, not to change what’s working. You’ve built something genuinely special, and my goal is to make sure you have everything you need to keep doing that.

For users: The commitment to an open, user-controlled social web isn’t going anywhere. You own your identity, your data, your graph. If anything, we’re doubling down.

For developers and atproto app builders: You are a core part of what makes this ecosystem work. Open platforms only thrive when third-party builders can trust them. We will continue to work on earning that trust and moving towards a fully decentralized system. 

For anyone thinking about joining the Bluesky team: This is a rare moment. A platform with real technical foundations for decentralization, a passionate and growing community, and a lot of important and meaningful work still ahead. Come help build it!

PS: My role as interim CEO will be to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth. While doing this work, I will remain active in my role as partner at True Ventures.

PPS: Here is Jay’s post about the transition.