Conference Takeaways

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.