Introduction
The atmosphere is growing quite quickly and staying update to date with everything that's happening in the community has become near impossible. It's unclear how much custom Bluesky feeds, digest bots, and agentic summaries have helped with our collective sense-making as a community. There is no weekly newsletter for atproto, and while the individual efforts like, for example, 's curated links and reports are greatly appreciated, it is simply unsustainable for any single person to bear the daily labor and responsibility.
at://news is a project exploring how the atmosphere can be used to collectively-source and publish weekly newsletters. Currently it's an open Semble collection that anyone is able to contribute links too, and (soon) a pipeline to assemble collections into documents. This kind of curation is not something that can be automated away by algorithmic feeds or LLMs, let's show how the small, collective actions of folks throughout the community can make something better. This curation can become the foundation for all types of ways to learn what's happening – follow the Semble collection, turn it into a custom feed, or create your own LLM summaries from the collection – this publication doesn't have to be the only way stay up to date!
In that regard, huge thanks to , , , , and for contributing links to this week's weather report.
Cloud Formations
announced they raised $4.5 million in a seed round.
An open source alternative for npm, called npmx, released their alpha. Stewarded by and , it includes social features built on top of atproto and even host their own PDSes.
announced alf, shared infrastructure to save drafts and schedule publication for any atproto record.
Somewhat adjacent, announced timelocked secrets, "encrypt messages that can only be decrypted after a specific time... stored on the PDS".
has migrated over 4700 people to their hosted infrastructure after announcing their migration tool, EU-HAUL. reports that 1.5% of weekly active accounts (including the fedi-bridge) are on independent (non-bluesky) PDSes.
released a open source personalization engine for custom feeds.
released changes to their web app that uses their own API to load posts, timelines and profiles.
drafted a specification for "how the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol can leverage Media over QUIC Transport (MOQT) for efficient data synchronization across decentralized social networks".
explored how to self-host a dual-protocol server that federates over both ActivityPub and AT Protocol.
and share how supports event organizing thorugh integration with .
created a terminal UI for setting up rotation keys. showed a POC of storing rotation keys in Apple's Secure Encalve.
An eprint service for AT Science, , announces their alpha release.
is looking for feedback on "some inconsistencies in how OAuth permissions, PDS proxy headers, and JWTs all represent the "audience" of these tokens".
announced freexq.at, atproto integrated into IRC.
announced an app for career data.
gave a sneak peak into atproto + matrix integration.
released unthread, aka TwitLonger for Bluesky.
gave a heads up about changes to Bluesky's image CDN.
Flocks
Reports indicate goose emojis flocking to the Bluesky app.
put out a call for participation in their efforts to do ecosystem research around branding, UX, etc.
On March 5th, organized a atproto meetup in Amsterdam in addition to hosted a atproto meetup in SF.
and announced an atproto meetup in LA taking place on March 23rd.
is hosting a atproto meetup in Cincinnati on April 13.
interviewed on their new series Eclecticisms Conversations.
interviewed and on AT Friends
Whispers in the Wind
seeded a conversation about why people build on atproto.
wrote an essay about the practical decentralization of atproto.
Mastodon launched a share button and responded with a piece discussing the power dynamics of fediverse. brought up similar musings about power dynamics of interfaces and the separation between the apps and data on atproto. mentioned how Bluesky brings up similar worries and also asks how would we got about adding a share button to atproto.
Decentralized moderation was topic that arose when it came up that blocking could result in the suspension of your account, notably since this happened to a Blacksky user, who had to agree the the T&S of Bluesky. wrote a postmortem about this edge case and the Bluesky team's response to it.
voiced some concerns around the lack of ecosystem funding.
shared some thoughts about .
A breezed formed around cross-app profile lexicon this week. put together a thread of past discussions on the topic. published an blog post on their thoughts. shared a lexicon they made for representing a plurality of identities. Check out previous discourse on the atproto forum.
is looking for feedback on a markdown lexicon.
shared that aproto has been integrated into their puzzle game and talked about the difficulties around forcing users to migrate to atproto logins.
Signing off for this week,
Chris
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