Goosing the system — Behind the scenes at the first ATmosphereConf

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Gustopher, the mascot for ATmosphereConf 2025

As user 87 on Bluesky, I have been around the AT Protocol ecosystem — the ATmosphere — for a while. My comrade Boris Mann (@bmann.ca) started https://atprotocol.dev to serve as a place to do tech talks with developers, just like we used to do for Fission before (and Causal Islands before that and TFTRocks before that… and… 😊). When Boris was thinking of starting the first community conference for atproto devs back in early December 2024, he asked if I was in… of course! But with the sudden trip to Japan and moving house, my March was very busy and I told him I couldn’t help out much with organizing this time around. So the day after the house move, when I picked him up and we drove down to Seattle, I was in for a shock.

ATmosphereConf took place over two days at the lovely University of Washington Campus in Seattle, WA. Originally envisioned as an unconference (I dunno like 40 people in a basement with some pizzas 🤷‍♂️) I soon found out that there were about 170 in person attendees and about the same online! We ended up with 354 attendees in total.

Boris had recruited a great team of organizers and volunteers including Ted Han (@knowtheory.net) who helped MC the conference. Peter Singletary (@psingletary.com) managed the online experience and we streamed the whole conference on stream.place, basically Twitch on atproto, who were one of the sponsors of ATmoCon.

Isn’t it amazing that we streamed the first atproto conference using the AT protocol!?

Another amazing thing is though we excellent sponsor support, the largest amount of money came in from ticket sales!

AtmosphereConf was set up as a project fiscally hosted by the Raft Foundation, which was started by my friend Nathan Hewitt. It is amazing how quickly ATmoCon got up and running with help of so many good folk willing to pitch in. That set the tone the conference as the energy during the event was amazing.

All the videos from the two days of presentations are on this playlist, but I would like to embed the opening talks for each day which shows how this community is different

(Erin has appeared on this blog previously but I have been following her forever since the A Book Apart days).

Hard choices

Even though there was a powerful lineup of speakers, we hadn’t quite given up on the unconference. Community-led discussions were held in four other rooms. Some were pre-vetted ahead of time on the ATP community Discord, but all were scheduled on site. Starting late Friday night Boris, Ted, and I would stare at a big Excel on the screen of the TV at our AirBnB, desperately needing to go to bed and trying to solve an impossible puzzle. There were too many good topics! Hard choices lead to hard choices, and we tried to schedule discussions alongside talks with minimal disruption to attendees, but it is an impossible job. After a day of conference then dinner and afterparties (see below) we slunk back to the house to schedule the next day’s discussions, taking into account new requests made at the conference. On the final day we ended up triple tracked! 😱 I joked that all the content we were jamming onto the schedule had turned this into a turducken of a conference. There was so much people wanted to talk through!

An undercurrent of lore

Speaking of avians, probably the standout of the show was our mascot Gustopher. Designed by Andy, our friend at Internet Development Studio Company, people really took to the character. So much so that a fandom arose and started shipping Gustopher with the Untitled Goose Game Goose, and some fiction of the two appeared on AO3 which I am not going to link to for obvious reasons 🙈

Amazing.

On the floor at ATmoCon

It wasn’t just atproto devs at ATmoCon. We had Bluesky and open social media enthusiasts, investors, and people building other apps that were curious about using atproto, for example as an identity substrate to their own apps.

Since I knew about half the people there, much of my time was spent connecting different parties. I was able to take in a couple of talks and contribute to a couple of discussions, but mostly I played a concierge/connector role which worked out pretty well. This was a great learning for future events.

What was discussed

Oh boy, a lot was discussed. The videos are all out, and the notes from the discussion sessions will be released soon. But overall I saw a couple of trends.

First of all, this conference was unlike other dev conferences in that it didn’t focus so much on the “how” of the tech, but there was a big emphasis on the “why”, as captured in Sarah Perez’s (@sarahp.bsky.social) article for TechCrunch: A world without Caesars: How the ATProto community is rebuilding the web to return power to the people (Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was there with her Mundus sine caesaribus shirt) and Marcelo Calbucci (@calbucci.com) In Geekwire: The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works.

Another theme was issue discovery. At a regularly occurring tech conference people get together in a high bandwidth mode to solve some specific problems together. Since this was the first time we were meeting there was a lot of discovery happening: this includes both what kinds of problems were people seeing and also trying to get to common terms on the language used in the space. A number of working groups have been stood up post-conference.

Lastly, a large topic was money in the ecosystem. Developers are excited to build new things… but we all need to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. We need to make it rain in the ATmosphere. Peter Wang of Skyseed Fund gave an overly short talk about the changes he is seeing in the internet, and the importance of funding infrastructure.

There were a couple other investors that I spoke to as well. But it all wasn’t about investment money: in-app payment rails was also a big topic. How can we build a sustainable market economy on atproto? There was a discussion about micropayments, and I had a couple of discussions with people about how tightly (or loosely) to bind existing payment providers in the protocol. Just like enabling commerce on the World Wide Web in 1995, this is going to be a big milestone for atproto that I really hope will come soon.

After parties

Our pal Anuj Ahooja (@quillmatiq.com) from A New Social booked a local pub for a pre-conference social. We filled that place with protocol nerds. They asked us to come back… and then again! I think it tells you something about this crowd.

On the final night I spent the evening at a rooftop bar with some fellow “oldheads” who shared stories about the old days of social networking, lore, and how things are different this time. I enjoyed a very fancy hot chocolate and spent some time with Ms Boba (@essentialrandom.bsky.social) learning about how to teach git by personifying HTML as a hot guy and dressing him up as a made. Amazing! See the photos 📸

The next morning we went for an amazing Creole breakfast before parting ways and heading back to NY, SF, and Canada.

The role of community

At present Bluesky the company is the proverbial 800 lb gorilla in the ATproto ecosystem: they built the protocol and the “reference” microblogging app Bluesky. However, since the beginning, Bluesky has been encouraging others to build with them. I know much of the team personally and they are all good people, so I am take them at their intentions. But it will take some time before we have some other companies built on atproto that can balance out Bluesky the Company and turn the ecosystem from unipolar to multi-stakeholder.

So, in the meantime, how can we balance the ecosystem? One way is to pool the people-power of the community. Bluesky the Company really needs a forum not only for needs assessment, but also for co-creating solutions. A decentralized, pluralistic system is something that we all want to work towards.

Bluesky the Company certainly wants this, as demonstrated by how they engage with the community. Yes, for ATmoCon they threw in some sponsor dollars, but they did not have a hand in organizing. As Sarah Perez said in her TechCrunch article: “Don’t call it a Bluesky conference.” The BSky team did give some talks and participated in discussions, but this participation was as a community member. I will give you one small example: after Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee gave his talk, during the next talk he lined up with everyone to ask a question… like a normal community member. The Bluesky team are long-time open source people, so they know how this works, but it was really great to see them model good behaviour.

I think the community can act as a gorilla-counterweight (800 1 lb geese) not only for Bluesky now, but for the other corporate gorillas which are sure to grow up in the ATmosphere.

What’s next?

“Where is the next one going to be?” … “I can’t wait until the next one?” …“I am suffering FOMO, I will definitely go to the next one!”

We had an overwhelming positive reaction to the conference. I remember a moment when I was walking between the discussion rooms and the main stage and thought to myself “I am tired… but this community… I can’t wait to do this again next year!” Will there be a next year? I sure hope so.

In the meantime, there is the upcoming AHoy conference in Hamburg Germany on April 24th. I am very interested in hearing the European perspective on all this. And of course there are calls for a conference in Japan, which I would love to help organize.

Working groups are forming on the AT Protocol Community Wiki. The Community Discord is seeing local meetups form. Boris will be in Toronto in a couple weeks and is hosting ATproTO at 1RG. Soon there will be more talks hosted by Boris on ATProtocol.dev. There are lots of ways to engage, and we also need help onboarding new people into the community.

There are more articles coming out about the ecosystem as people become more aware of the protocol vs the microblogging app, for example from TechCrunch:

Already I have seen a number community blogs being posted like this great piece by speaker Dan Hon. You can find more on the #ATmosphereConf hashtag, many reposted by the AT Protocol Community account @atprotocol.dev.

If you want to get a sense of what the conf was like, @case.bsky.social put some photos up on Flickr as did I and you can see lots of pics using Flashes for Bluesky. And once again, there are the vids of all the talks.

Right now there is a flurry of activity, I am just trying to keep up. In the meantime, see you on the Skyline!

Long form