Atmospheric Weather Report #1

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, @laurenshof.online'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 @semble.so collections into @leaflet.pub 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 @byarielm.fyi, @captaincalliope.blue, @wesleyfinck.org, @jauntywk.bsky.social, and @tynanpurdy.com for contributing links to this week's weather report.

Cloud Formations

@tangled.org announced they raised $4.5 million in a seed round.

An open source alternative for npm, called npmx, released their alpha. Stewarded by @patak.cat and @danielroe.dev, it includes social features built on top of atproto and even host their own PDSes.

@blaine.bsky.social announced alf, shared infrastructure to save drafts and schedule publication for any atproto record.

Somewhat adjacent, @flo-bit.dev announced timelocked secrets, "encrypt messages that can only be decrypted after a specific time... stored on the PDS".

@eurosky.social has migrated over 4700 people to their hosted infrastructure after announcing their migration tool, EU-HAUL. @mackuba.eu reports that 1.5% of weekly active accounts (including the fedi-bridge) are on independent (non-bluesky) PDSes.

@graze.social released a open source personalization engine for custom feeds.

@blackskyweb.xyz released changes to their web app that uses their own API to load posts, timelines and profiles.

@cisco.com 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".

@rmendes.net explored how to self-host a dual-protocol server that federates over both ActivityPub and AT Protocol.

@erlend.sh and @tompscanlan.bsky.social share how @roomy.space supports event organizing thorugh integration with @openmeet.net.

@saewitz.com created a terminal UI for setting up rotation keys. @why.bsky.team showed a POC of storing rotation keys in Apple's Secure Encalve.

An eprint service for AT Science, @chive.pub, announces their alpha release.

@atproto.com is looking for feedback on "some inconsistencies in how OAuth permissions, PDS proxy headers, and JWTs all represent the "audience" of these tokens".

@chadfowler.com announced freexq.at, atproto integrated into IRC.

@xptracker.app announced an app for career data.

@edouard.paris gave a sneak peak into atproto + matrix integration.

@aka.dad released unthread, aka TwitLonger for Bluesky.

@samuel.fm gave a heads up about changes to Bluesky's image CDN.

Flocks

Reports indicate goose emojis flocking to the Bluesky app.

AtmosphereConf 2026 in taking place in Vancouver from March 26th-29th. The speakers were announced last week.

It was announced that @opensource.google is sponsoring the conference.

The agenda for ATScience 2026, taking place on March 27th, was also announced.

@ecosystemaction.com put out a call for participation in their efforts to do ecosystem research around branding, UX, etc.

On March 5th, @burrito.space organized a atproto meetup in Amsterdam in addition to @letta.com hosted a atproto meetup in SF.

@chaosgreml.in and @alex.bsky.team announced an atproto meetup in LA taking place on March 23rd.

@tompscanlan.bsky.social is hosting a atproto meetup in Cincinnati on April 13.

@eclecticcapital.bsky.social interviewed @rude1.blacksky.team on their new series Eclecticisms Conversations.

@jakesimonds.com interviewed @zzstoatzz.io and @chaosgreml.in on AT Friends

Whispers in the Wind

@ronentk.me seeded a conversation about why people build on atproto.

@pfrazee.com wrote an essay about the practical decentralization of atproto.

Mastodon launched a share button and @laurenshof.online responded with a piece discussing the power dynamics of fediverse. @chrisshank.com brought up similar musings about power dynamics of interfaces and the separation between the apps and data on atproto. @quillmatiq.com 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 @moderation.bsky.app 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. @alex.bsky.team wrote a postmortem about this edge case and the Bluesky team's response to it.

@captaincalliope.blue voiced some concerns around the lack of ecosystem funding.

@matlfb.com shared some thoughts about @wsocial.eu.

A breezed formed around cross-app profile lexicon this week. @byarielm.fyi put together a thread of past discussions on the topic. @trezy.codes published an blog post on their thoughts. @skydeval.nearhorizon.app shared a lexicon they made for representing a plurality of identities. Check out previous discourse on the atproto forum.

@chronotope.aramzs.xyz is looking for feedback on a markdown lexicon.

@orta.io shared that aproto has been integrated into their puzzle game @puzzmo.com and talked about the difficulties around forcing users to migrate to atproto logins.

@baldemo.to wrote up a 3 part essay on composable trust (I, II, III).

Signing off for this week,

Chris