OAuth Masterclass

Hospicing social media: Personal archival practices for transition

Attendees will play a game to navigate collapse of big tech and hospice existing social media, using practices of role play and DIY archiving to prepare for the transition to something new, drawing on de Oliveira Andreotti (2021). 90-minute session geared for people who have existing accounts on a platform or service they want to leave, especially Meta (Facebook, Instagram) or X. Attendees will have a richer experience if they have a device for some archiving activities but it is not required to attend the session. No technical experience required and open to all. Note: this activity is open to Vancouver attendees who are not attending the whole conference, in partnership with Our Networks https://ournetworks.ca/

Unconf: Build and share personal apps, using an open source tool to help get started

Unconference Session - 2311 Classroom As we, the end users of the Web, begin to exert greater control over our own experiences and data, we empower ourselves and others by creating value, not hoarding it. This is the promise of decentralization. Using an ATProto PDS to hold your data, you can build apps for personal use or to share with others, replacing apps you use, and building others that you've imagined. In this workshop, we'll use an open source tool that I've been working on to scaffold an ATProto app from scratch. @jon2600.bsky.social https://github.com/YetAnotherJonWilson/atproto-app-builder

Abstracting the Appview Workshop

Chad's workshop dives into AppViews, what they are, how they work, and the different ways to implement them. He'll explore how tools like quickslice can abstract away the complexity so you can stay focused on your Lexicons and UI/UX. We'll also look at additional tools, including Tap, AIP, Constellation, and more, covering approaches from getting started all the way to production. Bring your questions. Many answers are 'it depends', shaped by your specific product and Lexicon design.

What futures can we build together?

In this workshop, we will ask: what are new social modalities that we can build with the affordances of ATProtocol? This is a cross-disciplinary workshop with people from all tracks to ideate and co-design together possibilities for new social and communal modes on the protocol (not focusing on implementation of ideas). Attendees will walk away with an expansion of future possibilities of what it looks like to be online.

Verified Human Users, game changer in the atmosphere

Bots are swarming on most social media, and dominating in some. Social media has become asocial. How can we bring sanity and social exchange back again? W Social makes a strong bet on verified human users, meaning passport scanning in order to get a W Social account. But do we always want to know who is behind every account? We propose a model with a user information firewall. One side knows exactly who each user is, but not which social media account belongs to her. The other knows everything about the user's friends, likes and followers, but not her true identity.

Dive into user research with fellow ATProto builders and users

Get feedback on your project and see what's growing! Recent talks about onboarding in the Atmosphere have drawn calls for more user research. This workshop from Germ's CEO Tessa Brown and founding engineer Anna Mistele is an opportunity for builders in the ecosystem to gain immediate insights by conducting research for their products, and for attendees to see new products in action. We're not experts, but rather fellow builders making space for us to learn from each other as a community! Supported by Tynan.

Founders & Funders

A special invite-only event for atproto teams building products, services, and companies that they intend to fund through investment, grants, or other mechanisms. Accepted and Declined teams have been notified.

Opening Remarks

Opening remarks from the ATScience conference organizing team

Keynote: Towards Modular Open Science

The traditional scientific record ? anchored in static, monolithic PDFs and siloed journals ? is increasingly ill-equipped to handle the speed and complexity of modern discovery. This keynote explores a transition toward Modular Open Science: a future where research is a continuous, federated, and computable graph of knowledge.

Consuming the ATmosphere

This will be an introductory workshop for developers who may have some JS/TS experience but almost no AT experience, who want to learn how to read posts and other data from the Atmosphere.

Semble: A social knowledge network for research on ATProto

We'll present Semble, a kind of "Spotify for research" enabling researchers to curate shareable collections, create knowledge trails that others can explore and extend, and discover relevant work shared with the network. Built on ATProto, Semble offers researchers data portability and an open API designed for extension. We'll discuss how Semble enables new kinds of research tooling, from living semantic citation graphs to collaborative review and annotation. We'll also share how Semble connects to Cosmik's broader work on collective intelligence, and opportunities for collaboration across the ATProto science ecosystem.

Lea: A Social App for Researchers

We will present Lea, a social app for researchers built on ATProto. Lea has many custom features for researchers, including 1. paper tracking, discovery, and discussion pages, 2. customized and verifiable profiles for researchers, 3. extensive safety and moderation features to keep discussions calm and productive. We'll discuss our goals, challenges, and open questions for Lea.

Chive: Decentralized preprints with ATProto

Chive is a decentralized preprint service featuring threaded review, formal endorsements, and a community-curated field taxonomy ? all as portable ATProto records users own. Chive provides a rich plugin interface, making it imminently extensible as the ATmosphere grows. It currently provides builtin plugins for integration with existing ATProto services, such as Semble, Leaflet, and WhiteWind.

Can decentralists cooperate? Rethinking commons and collective action in the age of platforms and AI

With increasing commodification of research come challenges to connection, communication, and research integrity. ATProto's open protocol, extensibility, and large uptake by researchers provides a unique moment of opportunity to reassert community control in the commons, and specifically in processes of science publishing and communication. But is merely building new technology on open protocols enough? This panel will explore how challenges facing the broader atproto ecosystem are mirrored in its open science applications.

Automated science coordination with ATProto

ATProto is a core component of the coordination.network stack. We will share lessons learned from initiatives including: - direct nano-publishing from the lab bench, - hypothesis generation, - replicability prediction, - and automated progress reporting. The talk will hope to highlight pragmatic solutions we have found and to identify shared challenges we would love to address with the community.

atdata: Distributed datasets over atproto

Fragmentation is an endemic problem for scientific data, and it hinders our collective ability to both work with traditional methodologies, and to realize outside of the big labs the potential of AI-driven methods for science. In this talk, we'll see how atproto enables a step-change for the use of large-scale, distributed, open, interoperable scientific datasets.

Reproducible, citation-aware automated paper reviews

BioKEA will demo a proof-of-concept automated reviewer for scientific papers. Provided with an arXiv ID or PDF, it extracts structured text, pulls context from Semantic Scholar and PubMed, and outputs a critical review flagging errors, missing context, and citation gaps. We'll run it live, preview some features, and discuss publishing review artifacts on ATProto.

Skysquare is context as a service

Skysquare exists to make sense of the digital public square via Bluesky. Launching this summer as a Chrome extension, Skysquare overlays social media conversation onto the webpages people are discussing, allowing readers to experience our online conversation in richer context. When a page has been shared or talked about on Bluesky, Skysquare associates that discourse with the page itself and reveals the surrounding conversation directly in the browser. Instead of chasing links through feeds, readers and writers can immediately see who is talking about what in relation to the material they are reading, turning the web into a socially annotated layer of context. This talk will demonstrate the extension in action and explore how tools like Skysquare can help researchers, scientists, and educators connect conversations directly to the sources being discussed.

Building collective intelligence to reduce division at ViewSift

One of the biggest problems in society today is division driven by social / societal ills, information overload, and platforms that amplify echo chambers. In this talk we'll discuss how we're addressing all these problems at ViewSift through our new atproto social-research platform and teaching practical techniques to have healthy discussions around controversial topics that heal division.

Making wisdom together

Seams.so demo and live workshop

Meet & Greet the Team from New_ Public

New_ Public https://newpublic.org/, the non-profit product studio reimagining community, connection, and conversation online, has announced its partnership with Waag Futurelab and PublicSpaces to present the program track, THE NEXT SOCIALS, at the PublicSpaces 2026 Conference https://conference.publicspaces.net/en New_ Public has also launched a call for submissions to the first OPEN SOCIAL AWARDS to be announced at PublicSpaces in Amsterdam, June 4-6 Meet the New_ Public team — Deepti Doshi, Blaine Cook, Catherine Tait and Angelica Quicksey — to learn more about their work, including Roundabout https://joinroundabout.com/, their new local community app built on ATProtocol, and to find out more about the awards, eligibility criteria and submission guidelines. Jantien Borsboom, Director of PublicSpaces, will also be present to answer questions.

Sensemaking Systems + AI for Science

Sensemaking systems demos from Seams, ViewSift, Skysquare and AI for science demos from Agentis and Coordination Network

The Astrosky Ecosystem: An independent online home for astronomy

What's the point of doing science if you can't tell anyone about it? I'll present The Astrosky Ecosystem, a community project by astronomers to democratize social media access for the space science & space fan communities. I'll talk about our 30 months of running custom feeds, as well as our future plans to start PDS hosting and even venture towards an astrophotography appview.

Creating the ATmosphere

This will be an intermediate workshop on designing AT Lexicons to support new apps, with an emphasis on reusing the social graph data that already exists in the network.

Computational Education Commons on the Atmosphere

We will discuss new advances in computing education. We will highlight projects that teach computing and data science at scale using Pyodide. We propose a new infrastructure model that builds on these advances and incorporates the ATmosphere as an identity model and content storage. Using ATmosphere services like Tangled and Blacksky, we can truly democratize computing education.

Reigniting the Party: Lessons from a Stalled Migration to Bluesky

AMIA's vibrant Twitter backchannel fragmented post-X. This talk details our stalled effort to migrate the community to Bluesky. Despite a guide and conference launch, the "cold start" problem hindered adoption. I�ll share lessons learned, discuss migration barriers, and outline revised strategies to rebuild our clinical research network.

Future of Science Social Media

In this panel we will explore why, despite early momentum, the migration of researchers to Bluesky has waned. We will discuss better ways to onboard, retain, and attract researchers by highlighting the flexibility and extensibility of the AT Protocol. Panelists will share what's worked, what hasn't, and what a coordinated push to build a science ecosystem on Bluesky might look like.

Your Research Institution in the Atmosphere

We'll explore how to create win-wins for both research organisations and their researchers by using the Atmosphere to bridge the institution's knowledge (formal, slow, siloed) and the personal knowledge networks (informal, fast, distributed) of their faculty and students. The central idea is to use each team's standard.site-enabled website as scaffolding to add value to the team members' Atmosphere activity (publishing, microblogging, discovering and curating knowledge, etc.) and to support cross-protocol community.

Crowdsourced Research Synthesis on ATProto: Envisioning an Inclusive Future

Research synthesis, a desirable culmination of primary research, is notoriously slow, error-prone, and disconnected from the network of potential contributors. Now, ATProto offers a digital foundation upon which to recruit collaborators (Bluesky feeds), assign micro-tasks (discourse graphs), author reports (Leaflet) , and acknowledge contributions.

Studying social media through the Atmosphere

The ATProto ecosystem empowers novel social media research. Our research showcases three promising directions in this space: 1. Experiments on self-hosted feeds (Paper Skygest, findings and customization interface) 2. Experiments on existing feeds via collaboration with feed designers (collaboration with Graze Social and Aendra), 3. Observational analyses of social media (SAEs on AT Proto posts)

Narrative strands & memetic lineages in community social data using Community Archive

The Community Archive is a community-owned dataset of contributed Twitter data used to study how ideas spread in online communities. We developed methods to extract "narrative strands" ? coherent lines of discourse where ideas evolve and build on each other over time. These techniques generalize directly to atproto datasets and could help Bluesky communities understand their own emerging canons.

How (de)centralized is Bluesky, really?

Presenting a working paper on the functional (de)centralization of Bluesky. This includes the extent to which AT Protocol infrastructure is owned by entities other than Bluesky Social (through mapping ownership of PDS endpoints) and the implications of this (de)centralization on Bluesky Social's goals. Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A and discussion!

New Directions

New Directions

at://advent, an atproto adventure

at://advent is an atproto adventure, teaching new explorers the ropes through a series of protocol challenges! Participants will dive in to play-test the initial set of challenges, with guidance. This will be a preview ahead of the public online release of at://advent, and will provide us with insight into what aspects are working well and what we need to improve. at://advent is about growing the atproto developer audience: we strive to make it enticing and accessible to beginner and non-devs.

Atmospheric Publishing Discussion

Join Brendan, the Leaflet team, and publisher and platform friends to map out the emergent ecosystem of social publishing on AT Protocol and sketch where it's headed next. As the atmosphere meets the blogosphere, atproto offers potential for stronger audience relationships and richer social interactions, and standard.site https://standard.site makes it easier to coordinate across both publishing platforms and individual sites anywhere on the web. We'll cover a micro-history of publishing in the atmosphere, the emergence of standard.site, and what it means for readers, writers and publishers. And we'll get into what we need to build next: new lexicons? New interfaces? Discovery tools? Monetization? Collaborative publishing primitives? For those interested, we'll have a few slots for lightning demos — reach out to Brendan @schlage.town if you'd like to share something you're working on!

Landslide

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

Groundings with my Siblings: Lessons Learned Building for Community

I had the privilege of discussing Blacksky and AT Protocol at several different college campuses, conference venues and other settings along with webinars and doing user research. I plan to share those learnings to help others build better products and how we particularly plan to incorporate those learnings from both a product and operations standpoint.

The Aggregation Era burned journalism institutions to the ground. The federated era is emerging from those embers

Journalists are the sleeper agents to catalyze the protocol-based publishing revolution. They're already operating in federated ways -- they just don't use those words. Whether it’s a creator spackling together a media company from web pages and discords -- like so many Twitch streamers. Or journalists using newsletter products to build direct relationships with (and monetize) the massive massive scale audiences they reach through vertical video platforms and don't monetize ....They are federating in DIY ways just as more and more media companies get smaller and more and more journalists go independent. How do we harness this natural momentum towards an organized movement? How can technologists and content creators work together to work as a federated army of Pied Pipers to port audiences into the ATmosphere.

Feature / Product / Business: A Framework for Sustainable ATProto Projects

The ATProto community built a ton of great features and products over the past year! For our next trick, let's mature them into products and businesses. In this talk, you'll get a practical framework for understanding whether what you're building should be a feature, product, or business, plus concrete funding models at each layer to keep your work going and growing. (More in this thread: https://bsky.app/profile/mosh.bsky.social/post/3mckiat2ne22q)

Who owns the group chat? Building collaborative spaces on ATProto

Traditional social platforms centralize control of community spaces—the platform owns your group, your members, and your data. On ATProto, ownership, governance, and moderation become explicit design decisions. This talk explores building shared resources on a decentralized protocol—from data synchronization to governance models—drawing from real experience building community features and examples from other ATProto apps.

The Economics of Sovereign Media: A Roadmap for AT Protocol

The talk will focus on (1) the structural shifts reshaping the media landscape & creator economy and provide a roadmap / suggestions for how the AT Protocol ecosystem & community can be best positioning to serve the needs of creators of all kinds (emphasis / focus here on independent creators) through this evolutio, while preserving their rights to sovereignty & ownership. The talk ideally touches on both cultural, economic and technical / infrastructural topics. Will be speaking in my capacity both as an artist and as an investor / student of media markets.

Did Lexicon just accidentally solve the enterprise data problem?

One of the core ideas behind the Data Mesh architecture is that data products should be decentralized and domain-oriented. The main barrier to successfully implementing Data Mesh is that decades of data tooling have assumed that data governance and engineering teams are centralized. ATProto’s Lexicon data definition language, however, deftly balances both the “nouns” and “verbs” of data modeling, making it a promising candidate for implementing a decentrally-managed data architecture.

This isn't over until we all listen to kpop

Protocol architectures are governance structures. Their design choices allocate power, and what they leave unsaid gets filled by economics. This talk traces what happens when an open protocol's reach layer goes ungoverned, from SMTP to algorithmic convergence to why kpop fandoms are structurally destined to dominate engagement-driven systems.

AI is Growing up in the Atmosphere

AI agents are no longer just private tools or chat interfaces. On AT Protocol, they can develop persistent public identities, accumulate reputation, receive feedback, and participate in open social life. My talk uses Void as a concrete example of that shift and argues that public social protocols are becoming an important part of how we govern, align, and coexist with intelligent systems.

Creators First: Video & Media as the Foundation of a Thriving Creator Economy on ATProto

This panel spotlights creators on AT Protocol and the infrastructure that lets them own their audience and income. We will explore how video, music, reviews, and other media can interoperate across apps, helping artists reach fans anywhere without being tied to a single platform. Panelists will share emerging ways creators can earn, from direct fan support to premium content. Attendees will leave with a clear view of how ATProto can become the home for the next generation of creators.

Understanding the Landscape of Custom Feeds on Bluesky

Bluesky’s custom feeds allow users to create, govern, and share their own algorithmic feeds, shifting curation away from platform control. To understand how this ecosystem works in practice, we interviewed 26 Bluesky feed creators and third-party tool developers and analyzed 97,719 existing custom feeds. We find that hobbyist labor is central to sustaining the ecosystem, but creators face recurring challenges around maintenance, visibility, and long-term viability. Based on these findings, we lay out design implications for designing usable decentralized social media.

A discussion with news creators

Publishing changes as the internet has changed. We'll discuss the work of being news creators in this moment.

Beyond Bluesky: Community infrastructure

Bluesky, a VC-backed company, runs public infrastructure that's widely depended upon by ATProto builders. Microcosm, a set of community-funded open-source infra, supports dozens of ATProto projects and growing. I'll dive into AT-protocol-specific economics of operating and scaling public infrastructure, and look ahead at how we get to a sustainable and diverse infra future. All grounded in the day-to-day reality of actually running big indexes, caches, relays, jetstreams, a PLC mirror, ...

Building Cirrus: a single-user, serverless PDS

The reference PDS implementation is a powerful Node.js monolith designed for scale, but it's overkill for a single user who just wants to own their data. This talk introduces Cirrus, an alternative PDS built on Cloudflare Workers that scales to zero and costs pennies to run. We'll explore the technical challenges of implementing the AT Protocol in a serverless environment – you'll learn how to handle long-lived firehose connections using Durable Objects with WebSocket hibernation, and maintain repository consistency with embedded SQLite.

Advocating for Digital Sovereignty: European Experiences and Global Lessons

The concept of digital sovereignty has rapidly gained momentum in both Canada and Europe, reflecting growing concerns about who controls our digital infrastructure, data, and public discourse. Nowhere is this debate more dynamic than in the European Union, where lawmakers and advocacy organizations are actively shaping the future of the social web and the digital public sphere. As the founder of the Alliance of Open Networks and Democratic Public Spheres and a recent participant in the EU Summit on Digital Sovereignty, I will examine the communication strategies advocacy groups use to shape public discourse, build alliances, and engage with policymakers and the media. Attendees will understand how digital sovereignty is being debated in the EU, learn about the specific demands and advocacy tactics of European digital rights organizations, with a focus on open protocols, decentralized networks, and democratic governance. The goal of this talk is to identify opportunities for cross-border collaboration and knowledge exchange. In a year when digital policy is at the forefront of public debate, this talk offers timely, in-depth insights from the European experience, providing both inspiration and practical guidance for building a more open, decentralized, and democratic digital future.

Unconf: Social Media Tools

Hosted by @bmann.ca, joined by @samir.fedica.com, founder of @fedica.com https://fedica.com What types of tools support atproto? What others are needed? What gaps do you see? Share your tips, ask questions. Cross posting, scheduling, multiple accounts, multiple platforms.

Sattestations

ATProtocol Identities and HTTP Signatures in conjunction with Onion Routing

Feeds Are The New Websites

How can we bring the open social web to millions more people? In 2 minutes, we'll show you how to curate content and create community that others can engage with from anywhere. Let's decentralize custom feeds and make them as easy to find and engage with as a website.

Open social tech and geopolitical risk

The AT Protocol was developed as a decentralized alternative to big tech; it wasn’t envisioned as a response to authoritarian state power. Now, however, ATProto’s openness is also potentially a source of vulnerability. What are the potential threats, and how can they be countered? We’ll explore a brief history of networked authoritarianism, and consider options and strategies to manage ATProto in adversarial political environments.

Rethinking the Client: Why User Choice is the Key to Growth for ATProto

To grow the ATProto user base, the developer community needs to offer client experiences that surpass the Web 2.0 experience. Tyler Fisher, the creator of Sill and [Tyler's Currently Untitled Sports Client], will present the challenges and opportunities around building better clients that entice users to leave existing social platforms. Attendees will learn about strategies for building new clients on top of existing lexicons and opportunities for shared infrastructure.

Consent Before Cryptography

In this talk, Germ Network co-founder Tessa Brown asks us to center consent in our ongoing conversations about privacy, agency, and self-determination. She describes how Germ is built for consenting connections and shares the team’s learnings from integrating atproto handles into their end-to-end encrypted messenger. As we all onboard users familiar with centralized social media paradigms into the Atmosphere, Tessa reflects on the UX design choices Germ made to help users understand what they consent to when they bring their atproto identities into Germ.

Building Public-Interest Infrastructure on ATProto

Eurosky is a European initiative building shared ATProto infrastructure operated under EU law: PDS, relays, AppView capacity, and protocol-level moderation services. This talk explains why social media must be treated as critical infrastructure, how self-certifying data enables real separation of powers, and how a shared-cost moderation model lets independent developers comply with diverse legal regimes without central platform control.

Account logic in ATProto using Trusted Execution Environments

ATProto is fundamentally verifiable - identities have cryptographic keys attached to them, posts are signed and integrity is upheld by authenticated data structure. This is the core of what enables the trustless decentralized nature of ATProto. What if we could go beyond signatures and add verifiable end-to-end logic attached to accounts? We present a recent project, exploring the use of Trusted Execution Environments to manage cryptographic keys that only sign records under specific rules. We show a couple of examples of possible rules for Bluesky accounts: 1. One that requires 2-out-of-3 signatures, allowing company and group accounts 2. Another that uses an LLM to analyze each post before posting We further discuss how end-to-end verifiability is achieved with TEEs, through reproducible builds and remote attestation. This project was done with Nick Gerakines, a prominent ATProto contributor, utilizing Nick Gerakines’s recent work on adding attestations to ATProto records. # Cryptography in the service of ATProto The ATProto ecosystem is maturing has the desire to add functionalities in a way that preserves its ethos of decentralization and user protection. With an ecosystem having tens of millions of users, these solutions have to be both scalable and secure. We review work on mutual contact discovery (and discovery in general), identity, anonymous credentials and payments, and different ways to achieve them using advanced cryptography and trusted execution environments. We discuss the assumptions and trust models the community needs to keep in mind and what is possible to do, and gradual deployment methods to be able to experiment with different ideas. We hope it can be a call to action to explore these ideas in ATProto more deeply.

From protocol to product: How Expo powers the next wave of AT Proto applications

What does it actually take to build and ship an AT Proto app? This panel features developers who have done exactly that using Expo. We'll cover the full journey: authentication and OAuth, working with decentralized identity, deploying to app stores, and scaling to real users. Whether you're exploring AT Proto for the first time or ready to start building, you'll walk away with practical insights from people who've shipped.

2026 Atmosphere Report

Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, gives a report on the Atmosphere from Bluesky's point of view. New standards efforts, new protocol features, new developer tools and APIs - this year has it all. Paul will share what's going on, what Bluesky is working on, and why 2026 is going to be a great year for the Atmosphere. Paul will also be joined on stage by Chief Innovation Officer Jay Graber to talk about the future of building on atproto

Semble: Rediscovering the Magic of Trails

The early web was full of trails: open paths that led to serendipitous discovery. Web2 platforms paved them over with superhighways built to extract your attention. Semble is bringing the trails back, turning everyday browsing into collective mapping, where every connection you make becomes a trail-marker that helps others navigate the open web. Built on atproto, because open trails belong on open, interoperable and collectively stewarded infrastructure.

Why Gander Social?

A lightening talk showcasing Gander Social. Why we exist and how we interoperate.

Stop Hallucinating the Protocol: Grounding your AI Agents with the Official ATproto Docs

Unleash the full power of the AT Protocol documentation for your AI agents. In this lightning talk, Jessie will show you how to feed your agent the exact documentation it needs when it needs it. You will learn how to query the current official documentation through a remote MCP server, making it quicker and easier to build ATproto apps.

How (de)centralized is Bluesky, really?

In this presentation, I will discuss a working paper on the functional (de)centralization of Bluesky. This includes the extent to which AT Protocol infrastructure is owned and operated by entities other than Bluesky Social (through a computational mapping of ownership of PDS endpoints), the implications this (de)centralization has for Bluesky Social's goals, and what might be done. Following the presentation of quantitative results and associated theory, there will be time for a Q&A and discussion. Looking forward to hearing from attendees about efforts to further decentralize AT Protocol infrastructure!

What 350,000 users taught me about growing on Open Social

In nine months, we grew Skylight Social from zero to over 350,000 downloads. This lightning talk distills the most important lessons from that journey; how to message open social to a broader audience, how to read user behavior over user requests, and which tools and collaborations actually scaled. It’s a practical look at what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do again if I were starting today.

Who, Where, Why, What about W Social

We explain why this newest of AT-federation members has been created, how we believe social media can be made social again and what that means for the users and the business model. There will also be some hints about future plans.

E2EE DMs for Solidarity Social

Demonstrate E2EE DMs in the Solidar App (https://solidar.app), which enables Solidarity Social (https://solidarity.social), a Bluesky community and a hub for coordination across communities. Explain the benefits of integrating Matrix into Bluesky, to aid progress on social justice, human rights, human dignity and democracy.

Bridging Social Graphs: How Sky Follower Bridge helps people move to Bluesky

Moving to a new social network is easy. Finding your people again is the hard part. This lightning talk introduces Sky Follower Bridge, a tool that helps users reconnect with their social graph on Bluesky. It also explores two technical challenges behind the project: extracting follow lists from browser pages and improving account matching across platforms.

The Future of Open Source is Social

open source changed the world, but now it’s stuck in the age of pull requests and gatekeepers. what happens when you build it on a social protocol instead? (and complimentary to tangled) jeremie miller — creator of XMPP (the protocol behind whatsapp, zoom, and billions of daily messages) and bluesky board member — will demo something new built entirely on AT Protocol that reimagines how open source software gets discovered, shared, and trusted. this one’s going to break some brains.

Oaklog: Building a community calendar in the Oakland Bay Area

Our working group (oaklog.org) is collaborating with local media publications, civic organizations, community leaders, and local venues to build a digital commons for event listings in the Oakland Bay Area. We'll share findings from our work co-designing with local information stewards and how we're exploring AT Protocol as a municipal utility that makes local data reliable, accessible, and reusable across organizations and tools.

Pollen: Prototyping a toolkit for journalists and researchers to restore source transparency in an AI-saturated feed

Pollen is a technical prototype by Hypha that enables journalists and researchers to anchor authenticated claims, such as photographer attribution and trusted timestamps, directly to their Personal Data Server. By attending this session, media professionals will learn how authenticated claims can protect the integrity of their reporting against generative AI "slop" and how a shared provenance layer empowers the community to collectively maintain digital facticity.

Burning down data walls in the US Fire Service and Beyond

My team at FSRI recently overhauled how all firefighters in the US report data with NERIS (https://neris.fsri.org/faqs). I want to share insights I gained into how centralization and the resulting enshittification has played out in fire software and how NERIS hasn’t fully solved the problem. I’d like to encourage more people to build fire (and other niche) software and create an open ecosystem of interoperable tools where fire department data ownership is at its heart and outline some opportunities and resources. If time permits I may very quickly reference similar initiatives like FHIR and open banking.

How Streamplace Works: VODs

Here's a hard-won lesson from a video engineer: if you're gonna do both livestreaming and VOD, do livestreaming first, it's harder. And hey, livestreaming is working pretty good. Here's how we're going to do VOD, and here's why the architecture looks pretty much like building a globally-distributed fleet of atproto PDS and Relays. And here's how you can join!

The Phoenix Architecture

Phoenix Architecture is a way of thinking about software in a world where implementations can be rewritten faster than they can be understood. As AI shifts the economics from maintenance to regeneration, the real architectural questions move upstream: what must remain stable, what can safely change, and what breaks humans when it breaks at all. This talk offers a set of lenses (not answers) for reasoning about durability, trust, and coherence in long-lived systems. Attendees should leave with new instincts, sharper questions, and a sense that some of our deepest assumptions about software may need to be revisited.

A Free Press needs Free Protocols

Proprietary social media platforms intermediate the two main things journalism needs to survive: attention and revenue. Drawing from our combined experience building tech for newsrooms from the Chicago Tribune to ProPublica, we'll explore how building on protocols, not platforms could create a media environment where both publishers and audiences control their own destiny. Two veteran news/open social web nerds have ideas about what this could look like in practice (and want to hear yours!)

This Title Left Intentionally Blank

From Software Engineering to Software Ecologies

Journalism must create its own algorithms

There is now an abundance of evidence that corporate social media owners are putting their thumb on the algorithmic scale. Between increasing the visibility of far-right viewpoints, shadowbanning content with external links, and the disintermediation of media orgs through AI-based summary results, it is an incredibly challenging time to be in the news business. There is one bright spot, however: ATProto. Join Aendra Rininsland, creator of the News and Trending News feeds, as she discusses why it's not just possible for the media industry to create its own algorithms for news content, but also profoundly necessary for the future of quality journalism.

Hypercerts on ATProto: Collective Funding, Evaluation, and Ownership as Social Data

This talk introduces hypercerts as a primitive for collective funding. It shows how activities, evidence, and plural evaluations can be published as durable records without relying on centralized platforms or single metrics. Attendees will learn how ATProto’s identity, record, and graph model enables new allocation mechanisms in which information production is endogenous and reusable across applications. The session connects protocol architecture with real-world funding workflows, offering concrete patterns others can adapt for funding public goods and collective action.

npmx: a modern browser for the npm registry

We're building npmx in the open as a community project. Join us as we explore how we work together, how atproto has helped as connect, and how we have been adding social features to our website.

tangled: The Lewis end

Building a company on an open protocol is a different ballgame. In this talk I aim to cover why we decided to make Tangled a company, how we're financed, why we went this route, the challenges we faced and our plans for the future.

How and Why News Organizations Should Build on the ATProtocol

For decades, news organizations have chased audiences on proprietary social platforms where they have no control over how their content is delivered. The ATProtocol offers a chance for news organizations to start fresh and participate as first-class citizens in the open social web. In this panel, we will discuss strategies for getting started on ATProto as a news organization and the potential benefits of moving early.

Roomy and community organizing for system change

Roomy is a group messaging app that gives online communities tools for autonomous collaboration — designable spaces not just for chat, but for cultivating a web of shared understanding together. We show how cheap, user-controlled, interoperable data on ATProto can enable online communities to channel impassioned mobilizing into sustained organizing in the shadow of Big Tech's empire.

Bringing Self Sovereign Identities to the Masses via ATproto (and how to maximize coherence between upcoming DID:PLC forks)

I will make the case that DID:PLC forks will inevitably emerge as the wider atproto ecosystem keeps gaining global relevance: pressure on the governance model of the identity system will increase to a point where conflicts (e.g. over which DID suspension requests should be honored and which should be ignored) cannot be easilly resolved within a ‘permissioned consortium’ (as proposed in https://atproto.com/guides/identity) anymore. It seems evident that we can only argue about WHEN this will happen, not IF it will happen. In order to be able to maintain coherent UI experiences (without threads looking more and more broken due to different forks being used in different appviews) it seems necessary to extend the adversarial design patterns at the heart of the bluesky project (‘the company is the future adversary’) to the governance model of the underlying DID:PLC identity system: ‘the consortium will become target of future adversaries’. Can permissionless observatory networks help? Can we avoid using cryptoeconomics? What other options seem useful? During this presentation, I will present the results of my ongoing PhD research project on these questions. --- About me: I'm part of a small team (including Marcus Sabadello, co-author and editor of the DID specification) that started to advocate for the adoption of DIDs within ActivityPub networks back in 2018 (predating Jay Graber’s ecosystem review and the birth of the bluesky project). https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot9-prague/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/fediverse-did-integration.md https://chaos.social/@cypherhippie/102270069807129706 Link to a (somewhat cringe) video for a grant application in 2018: https://youtu.be/UJn7cLNh_q8?t=85 Recent talk at fediday berlin: Protocol Convergence within Open Science Communication Networks https://fair.tube/w/p/2PEFZ5cdptsVASU4HTUakA Upcoming presentation at fosdem: Increasing Long Term Stability of Relations Between Fediverse Identities using SSI https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/RZRZ9P-increasing_long_term_stability_of_relations_between_fediverse_identities_using_s/

One Year of Graze - lessons learned funding, building, and growing in the atmosphere

I'll be sharing an abbreviated history of building Graze, our own product's theory of action and how it slots into our more broad theory of how the AT Protocol disrupts the existing social layer of the web. We'll move into successes and challenges with fundraising, what we learned during that process and what others should know. We'll wrap with our own theories on development in 2026, how we fully move beyond the "skeuomorph" era of ATProto.

How to have more non-english speaking users

This panel will reveal some common mistakes that make it harder for your app to be used by non-English speakers around the world. Following a few tips and guidelines can help new apps avoid falling into the same problems. Expect to see some real examples from across the Atmosphere. English speakers are welcome to bring any questions, and non-English speakers are welcome to join the discussion and bring additional points of view.

Blousques: Case Study on the Challenges in Translating Bluesky's UI

Translating Bluesky's user interface into French was the easy part. Making it feel ‘native’ to users is something else entirely! I18n is common in software, yet Bluesky has specific challenges: should we translate it using gender-neutral terms? How to translate names embedded on-protocol? How to translate features not yet released, as an external, voluntary contributor? Translating the UI is also a good way to spot what is really missing in the daily lives of non-English users of the platform.

Waiting for the Future to Load

The Future is not what you think. People trained on self driving cars or notions from the 1950s are ill-prepared to see what's actually growing behind the scenes, out of public view. It's not like anything on social media right now. It's in the cracks, almost imperceptible. Often it's the opposite of what's been said for years. We've stayed in this timeline for a long time. What will it take to get out of the 2010s?

Bluenotes: Community Notes for ATProto

I'll briefly demonstrate Bluenotes, a fork of the Bluesky with Community Notes. Then I'll discuss a proposed "Open Community Notes" standard and lexicon for Community Notes on ATProto, and discuss challenges such as preserving contributor anonymity and defending against manipulation.

Community privacy in a decentralized network

How we can build a community that is on ATproto with content that can be contained to users within their community boundary, a form of privacy without forcing us completely off the protocol. Rather than focusing on how to handle private data with the dimensions of access we will implement a design that functions at the appview allowing any client to see it.

A Fireside Chat on Resonant Computing: Why we wrote the manifesto and where we go from here

Resonant Computing manifesto co-authors Mike Masnick (Bluesky board member, Techdirt) and Alex Komoroske (Common Tools) discuss why they felt compelled to articulate an alternative vision for computing—one that's private, plural, and prosocial. They'll explore what resonance actually means in practice, why the ATProto community is uniquely positioned to build this future, and talk about the infrastructure work to make it real.

Content Moderation Futures

Contemporary social media platforms wield extraordinary influence over public discourse—yet their governance practices are frequently characterized as opaque, unfair, and ineffective. While experts agree that successful content moderation is principled, consistent, contextual, proactive, transparent, and accountable, technology companies repeatedly fail to achieve these goals at scale. Drawing on participatory research with various content moderation professionals, this talk identifies structural barriers to effective platform governance and explores potential solutions. Attendees will gain a more intimate understanding of the values, challenges, and contradictions that ultimately determine how platforms are governed, including practical strategies for promoting more equitable social media futures.

Compete or kill Cooperate and Succeed!

What does the future of startups look like in a world of open data? Products no longer need to steal another killer feature that's on another app, they can just share it! New products can instantly get the users and content that massive products have. This presentation will envision a future of monetisation and growth on Atproto, with a focus on how user choice and migration must be separated from chasing growth.

Social Components

What if social products were remixable?Imagine you could take a social product and break it its user interface into pieces. Then imagine that you, or anyone else, could recombine those pieces in different ways, swap things out, composing and remixing experiences made and hosted by different people.We already know a way to compose UI: Components. However, we didn't have a way to compose components across products. Atmosphere gives us that way: lexicons define component contracts, records point at the endpoints, everyone uses the same data.So let's put components on the protocol! In this talk, Dan will present Inlay—an experimental browser for remixable cross-product server-driven user interfaces on the Atmosphere. You can think of it as "React for atproto" or like "HyperCard for social".Whether it's a terrible idea or a glimpse of a post-app future remains to be seen.---(Demo teaser: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7ttr2ktxdo/post/3mdjhy2bofk2h)

Creating a Safer Web: Blacksky's Moderation Tool

In this presentation, I will discuss our moderation service, how we use Polis to bring the community in to make decisions on creating new labels, and some of the best practices among our volunteer moderators and Trust and Safety team. The goal is to give others (communities and developers) on the protocol some ideas to think about when spinning up their own moderation tools.

Building decentralized AI on atproto

With a renewed push in the AI field toward smaller, distilled models, the community outside the Big Labs™️ has greater and greater power to shape AI's future. @maxine.science will share a story of how Forecast Bio is building tools on atproto for (1) distributed, structured, streamable AI training data, and (2) a full phylogeny of model weights and evals across different training paths. Attendees will see how open infra built on atproto can put the frontier of AI back in the community's hands.

Two Years of Skywatch: Lessons Learned for Community Moderation

What has it been like to run a large community labeler over the course of two years? I'll focus heavily on lessons learned, including reflections on what and who it serves, the missteps and pitfalls made along the way, and what I would do differently if I were to start all over again. I'll reflect on how I've come to view community labeling is distinct from Trust & Safety or moderation and the role it can still play in the ecosystem, along with thoughts on what directions the labeler ecosystem might explore in the future.

Designing for the social web

A panel with prominent designers/builders from the community to talk about design.

Data Sovereignty for Games (and Everything Else): Building Decentralized Industry Infrastructure on ATProto

Game developers publish data across dozens of platforms they don't control... until payment processors or platform policies change the rules overnight. I'm building The Pentaract: both the lexicons and the management platform that let developers control their game data on ATProto, enabling true data sovereignty, player-owned achievements and saves, and decentralized modding systems. This talk breaks down how I'm using ATProto's distributed infrastructure to solve real industry problems, from scattered metadata to platform lock-in, and provides a blueprint for developers in any industry facing similar centralization challenges.

furryli.st — Building Communities Without Landlords From the Protocol Up

The AT Protocol guarantees sovereignty to the user. But it does not yet do the same for communities. Community stewards, like platforms, become landlords by necessity. Can we address this from the protocol up? In this presentation, I’ll use furryli.st, which defines and serves a community of 60,000+ furries on the AT Protocol, as a case study to deconstruct the "community" into distinct roles and relationships, identify existing protocol-native analogues, and propose what needs to be built next to create resilient, protocol-native communities defined by *people*, rather than infrastructure.

Coop: Open source Trust & Safety infrastructure for all

As protocols and platforms grow, so do the demands of trust and safety dashboards, human review queues, and automated policy enforcement—yet most trust and safety solutions remain closed, proprietary, reinvented in isolation, and too often out of reach for smaller and decentralized platforms. Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is building a different future: one where the trust and safety tools that form this critical layer of Internet infrastructure are open, transparent, community-governed, and usable by platforms and organizations of all sizes. Attendees will get a quick refresher on what “trust and safety” means, hear how ROOST is succeeding with a non-profit and open source approach; see a demo of the open source Coop review tool in action; and finally, learn how to adopt and contribute to Coop and other open source trust and safety tools with ROOST.

Protocol Governance & Hard Decentralization

AT is entering a critical phase of maturation and becoming truly multi-stakeholder infrastructure. This talk covers the concrete steps both Bluesky and the AT ecosystem are taking to achieve "hard decentralization": forming an IETF working group to standardize the protocol, establishing independent governance for PLC, and implementing the technical foundations that make decentralization real - more and larger PDSes, seamless account portability, full network sync, and more.

From Toilets to Moths: The Future of Social Media is Weird and Not For Everyone

Over the course of 12 months, I created a dozen ATmosphere based projects, apps, and experiences ranging from a decentralized toilet to a client interface named after a moth. Collectively these projects amassed 100,000 unique visitors and over half a million page views. Each project took me deeper and deeper into the world of the AT Protocol and showed me what the future of social media might look like... and what it could take to get there. Over the course of this presentation I will share the lessons I learned and what I think it means for the future of social media.

WebTiles Showcase

WebTiles Showcase

ATProto design philosophy behind BookHive

This talk will go into depth on the design philosophy that underpins my project BookHive, a book tracking application comparable to Goodreads. The main point is a call to action that we should give users' agency over their data, by aiming to make the data that we store in their PDS as interoperable as possible. This means more than just recording IDs in their PDS, actually giving them the data that you use to construct your application. https://nick-the-sick.pckt.blog/the-design-philosophy-of-bookhive-s23cz85

Building Bridgy, Not Walls

A breakdown of improvements in multi-protocol services, including Bridgy Fed and Bounce, and where those services are going in 2026. Some things include: 1. Direct integrations with platforms + client tools 2. Moderation improvements 3. Working with other multi-protocol services 4. Major updates coming to Bridgy Fed

Keywords vs Embeddings

Insights from building discovery feeds: from naive keyword extraction to naive embedder usage to better insights into how both work and might be combined to understand and match Bluesky posts(-ers). Based on your feedback I can make this more or less ATproto specific (e.g. scraping pitfalls), also more or less technical, leaning towards less technical. A light intro to TF-IDF (sparse) vs EmbeddingGemma (dense) vectors.

Abstracting the AppView

Quick dive into AppViews. Talk about what an AppView is/does, explore different implementations/setups, and show how tools like quickslice can abstract that all away allowing you to focus on your lexicons and UI/UX.

Affordances of the Atmosphere

The AT Protocol introduces several affordances to social products which are unfamiliar to both product creators and users of social products. This presents a challenge in both imagining the new features and experiences made possible by the protocol and how to share those capabilities with users. I'll walk through a few of the unique powers of ATproto, what implications those have for how we build social products, and some thoughts on how to make it all make sense, and be compelling, for users.

Scaling the Atmosphere

Lessons learned from building and scaling atproto and bsky.app. How do you move beyond an appview powered by a single sqlite? How are we at Bluesky PBC building scalable and reliable infrastructure that can A) be provided as a service and B) be run by self-hosters. What's next for us and the ecosystem scaling-wise?

Skylimit: A curating web client with fine-grained controls to mimic the newspaper experience

The goal of many social media platforms is to maximize your screen time. Skylimit is a curation algorithm designed to optimize your limited screen time. It attempts to answer the following question: If I decide to limit myself to viewing, say, 500 posts per day (on average), what is the best way to manage my Following Feed? As a Bluesky user who follows many people, I would like to view the most relevant and interesting posts in my feed. This is similar to the decisions editors make when populating a fixed number of pages in a printed newspaper—they must choose from news items on numerous topics, regular pieces by columnists, and more. Skylimit aims to mimic aspects of the print news reading experience in the digital world by creating a curated version of the Following Feed with statistical settings for each followee that go beyond just muting. The talk will discuss the various trade-offs involved in achieving this goal and demonstrate a prototype Bluesky web client (skylimit.dev) that implements the curation algorithm. Issues to be discussed include: how to (statistically) select and display “important” posts, handling “quiet posters,” and presenting periodic digest editions.

How to use Bluesky to easily and securely preview a software product to users.

ATProto is a great way to manage identity! One of my favorite things about it is that it's vendor-neutral. I'll describe how I used ATProto to build self-service licensing and analytics for a software beta with no third-party dependencies.

Using GraphQL to build with ATProto

When developing applications, there are a lot of client technologies that can talk to server backends. ATProto is extensible, federated, and works with backend data stores; GraphQL is often fixed for a specific application, precompiled, and yet performs a somewhat similar function. Because GraphQL tooling is common for application development (e.g. Relay, Apollo) it would make sense to bridge these two technologies so developers can bootstrap ATProto applications with widely available tools. My talk would explain my deep dive into this (starting with an Expo App) and some thoughts about how this would scale to introduce more developers into the ATmosphere.

Jacquard Magic: how to make atproto actually easy with Rust

A talk about spite-driven development and the process of using a language with a reputation for difficulty to make atproto development approachable. How do we encode the constraints (and freedoms) of the protocol in a way that makes sense and doesn't impose undue friction? What are good things to have in the defaults? There is not one right answer, and the answer, as well as the points of freedom to choose a different answer for yourself, matters. What can that ethos and its result allow you to do which you might not expect is possible?

Wherever You Get Your Podcasts: Interoperability in the Atmosphere

Connecting the "Wherever You Get Your Podcasts" blog I posted a ~month ago (https://knotbin.leaflet.pub/3lx3uqveyj22f) to interoperability in atproto.m using the podcast metaphor for feature adoption & how they're just one type of RSS feed, just like lexicons with records. In theory, apps can implement any lexicon. I'd then go into the actual experience of implementing this at the huge scale of Bluesky's lexicon and why Spark decided to take a different approach to lexicon interop in the end.

AT Transparency Logs: accountable record collections

atproto lets us delete and modify records, which for social media is definitely good. But there are cases where you'd like to instead ensure everyone is seeing the same append-only set of records, forever: software releases, for example. That's what tlogs are for! tlogs are the technology that makes Certificate Transparency, the Go Checksum Database, Sigstore and Sigsum possible. atproto gives us everything we need to make a tlog: canonically hashed records and a global mechanism to access them. We can even make the tlog configuration in-protocol, letting multiple tlog operators work like any other AppView.

Matadata! Publishing scientific data straight to AT

Project Matadata is a project to publish and read science metadata directly to AT. This makes scientific data accessible in verified ways and widely disseminated.

DID:PLC War Games

- What the current DID:PLC design does and doesn't protect - What could possibly go wrong - How we can strengthen the social layer - Some approaches to making the technology more robust

Rewilding the internet with ATProto

So far, many of the projects in the ATProtocol ecosystem have focused on bringing parity—making projects that replicate our existing tools and platforms, but with the affordances of the protocol instead. That's cool and we need to do that, but I think we can go much farther, and take this opportunity to challenge some of the biggest assumptions of what the modern internet is for, who builds it, and how we interact with it. This talk is in conversation with several of the talks from last year, and in I'll argue that we'll never get away from skeuomorphism until we've fundamentally changed the definition of what "the social internet" means in the first place.

An artist dreaming in the Atmosphere: visions about community, sustainability and creativity

Sharing visions about how artists could thrive in the ATProto ecosystem: 1. building community and inspiration in different paces, with an artist curated app, from microvisuals, microblogging to book clubs and music shows. 2. financial sustainability: a proposal for artist owned music distribution and licensing from the PDS 3. creativity: redefining composition techniques with ATProto technology

Build and share personal apps, using an open source tool to help get started

Is this even legal?