ATmosphereConf 2025 Discussions

ATmosphereConf 2025 group discussions, plus highlights of Video on AT Proto, Darius Kazemi's ATproto and ActivityPub: Frenemies or BFFs?, and Cameron Pfiffer's AI on ATProto

As well as amazing speakers giving talks & lightning talks for ATmosphereConf 2025, we also have a number of group discussions, both pre-planned and unconference style as we meet and connect in person.

You'll find all talks and proposed group discussions available in the conference Discord chat channels, available to all in-person and livestream attendees.

A screenshot of the Discord interface in gallery mode for viewing the "Discussion Topics" section of the Events Discord chat. Artificial Intelligence on AT Protocol, Private Data for AT Protocol, Decentralized Science, and Drew's PMsky lightning talk are those visible. — Screenshot of both talks and group discussions in the Discussion Topics section of the Events Discord.

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All up to date information is on the main conference page atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf

Here are a selection of group discussions that will have pre-scheduled slots in the agenda. We'll have time each day to connect with others and find spaces to meet. The full list is in the table below.

Scheduled Discussions

Saturday

14:00-15:00 Artificial Intelligence on ATProto
15:00-16:30 Private Data
16:30-17:30 Lexicon Community

Sunday

11:30-12:45 Video on ATProto: Streamplace, Sprk, Skylight
14:00-15:00 ATProto and ActivityPub: Frenemies or BFFs?
15:00-16:00 Free Our Feeds
16:00-17:30 Decentralizing the PLC Directory, aka IndieSky & aka Incentivizing Relays & AppViews

Video on ATProto: Streamplace, Sprk, Skylight

This is going to be a special edition of gathering three teams that are working on video. They’ll each give a 15min lightning talk about what they’re working on, and then we’ll move into group discussion about joint needs and potentials for video on

Featuring:

Eli @iame.li from Streamplace https://stream.place/
Joe @joebasser.com from Sprk https://sprk.so/
Tori @buildwithtori.com and Reed @reedharmeyer.bsky.social from Skylight https://skylight.social/

Some of the questions and prompts for group discussion include: What are the challenges with first party Bluesky video? What can be done with third party video on ATproto? Hosting on PDS, who bears the cost? Long videos on Bsky PDS possible? Will third party PDS support large video? Embedding non-YouTube video that plays in place in Bsky? Business models for video.

ATProto and ActivityPub: Frenemies or BFFs?

Darius Kazemi will be facilitating this discussion. He is working on making social media better at Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab.

In this facilitated discussion, we’ll talk about the notion (per Blaine Cook and Christine Lemmer-Webber) that ATProto and ActivityPub “done right” might actually converge to the same thing. Potential topics include:

What would bringing a PDS model to the ActivityPub world look like, and is that compatible with the client-to-server AP spec?

What could bringing DIDs to ActivityPub accomplish for the social web?

Are there ActivityPub-style delivery-based models that ATProto can piggyback on for more “closed-world” sub-networks?

…and of course, much more. Add your own suggested discussion points in the event Discord Chat

Artificial Intelligence on ATProto

Cameron Pfiffer will be the facilitator for this session:

I work on an AI project that’s AT-native, and it’s brought up some interesting ideas about data use and privacy. ATProto is also a promising tool for general AI applications. I’ll do a lightning talk about an interesting application prior to a group discussion, and hopefully it’ll inspire some discussion about where the AT community should place its attention.

We’ll probably discuss the user intent proposal (to opt in / out to different groups wanting to connect with user data), so take a look in advance if you’re planning on participating in the discussion.

List of Suggested Group Discussions

These are the group discussions that were suggested ahead of time. You can continue to suggest topics in the Events Discord chat that all attendees have access to, as well as grab a few people for ad-hoc discussions over two days at the event.

Group Title	Host	Description
Lexicon Community	Nick Gerakines	Connect with others interested in shared lexicons and how to build together in lexicon.community. When to use an app.bsky lexicon? When to make your own? When to fork an existing one? etc.
Private Data	Boris Mann, Georgia Bullen	The bsky team have currently stated that with their current resources and priority, private data is a ways off. There are a number of people that don’t want to wait that long, want to assist in moving private data forward with R&D, and/or want to explore extra-protocol experiments and options. 1) Cover private data vs encrypted messaging definitions 2) Use cases and user prioritiies 3) Private Data Protocol Design, implementation, funding, and interop
ATGeo: Location Data Working Group	Nick Gerakines	We have some community funding to work on this. Overview of what is planned to build and call for geo apps. Share what you want to build with geo, and coordinate next steps to launch ATGeo Working Group
Free our Feeds	Marc Faddoul	Meet with Marc representing Free our Feeds and discuss how to coordinate and work together
Three Video Teams + ATProto Video Needs	Eli from Streamplace, Tori & Reed from Skylight, Joe from Sprk	What are the challenges with first party Bluesky video? What can be done with third party video on ATproto? Hosting on PDS, who bears the cost? Long videos on Bsky PDS possible? Will third party PDS support large video? Embedding non-YouTube video that plays in place in Bsky? Business models for video
Are Lexicon headed for Dependency Management?	Tony verdverm	In typical software development, we have dependencies we rely on, tools to help us manage them, and best practices related to changes and versioning. This discussion will explore how Lexicon and ATProto are similar and different to the dependency management and package managers we use in our daily programming lives.
Organizing on decentralized social networks	John Pincus	With Xitter’s CEO making Nazi salutes and Meta’s techbro CEO kissing the fascist boot, now’s a good time for organizers to look at alternatives! Bluesky’s a good option for all-public Twitter-like activism, and labellers have potential at helping get accurate information to people to route around propaganda and disinformation, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what’s needed. More positively, this is an area where corporate social networks won’t be able to compete. I’m currently gathering requirements gathering and identifying key use cases – see the survey as a starting point. At this session, I’ll briefly kick things off by summarizing findings so far, and then we’ll dig in to whatever topics are most interesting to whoever attends.
ATProto and ActivityPub: Frenemies or BFFs?	Darius Kazemi	In this facilitated discussion, we’ll talk about the notion (per Blaine Cook and Christine Lemmer-Webber) that ATProto and ActivityPub “done right” might actually converge to the same thing. Potential topics include: 1) What would bringing a PDS model to the ActivityPub world look like, and is that compatible with the client-to-server AP spec? 2) What could bringing DIDs to ActivityPub accomplish for the social web? 3) Are there ActivityPub-style delivery-based models that ATProto can piggyback on for more “closed-world” sub-networks? 4) …and of course, much more.
Mutual aid and Organizing in the ATmosphere	John Pincus	Mutual aid. Organizing. Sharing, contextualizing, and making meaning of news and health information to counter propaganda and information overload. The use cases for alternative social networks – not controlled by techbro white supremacist CEO’s working with their cronies in authoritarian governments – practically write themselves in today’s world. 1) What are the possibilties in the ATmosphere today? 2) How can the ATmosphere evolve to better support mutual aid and organizing? 3) If not now when has an overview of the opportunities – and some of the key questions. 4) Notes on organizing in the fediverse, based on a series of discussions with US-based organizers, includes key use cases, examples of organizing, and highlights gaps.
Using Graph Databases with ATProto	Michael Blum	A discussion of how others are using graph databases to query and make inferences with ATProto. Employing the community edition of Neo4j we embark on an exploration of the ATProtocol as it relates to graph data structures - empowering data science (k-neighbor) and fraud detection (bots, spam). Using the graph viz layer included with Neo4j allows for a visual investigation of dense and complex social graph networks.
Community AT Protocol Documentation		A lot of good info is scattered between Discord (API touchers and PDS admin), github discussions and issues, blog posts, and so on. Bluesky maintains docs which are a mix of AT Protocol (which should be split out perhaps as basis of community) as well as bsky specific APIs and endpoints. How and where do we start gathering community AT Protocol documentation? (Specification work / governance is its own topic)
Building a Network of Technology/Software Cooperatives		In a similar vein to what @jdp23.thenexus.today added, building a network of software cooperatives will require a social network with both private (within or between co-ops) and public facing systems. atprotocol might also prove useful in other parts of the systems/network and I am looking at several possibilities. Suggestions welcome!
Decentralized science		Many systems in academic / institutional science are built heavily around monolithic infrastructure. Recent events have illuminated failure-modes in this architecture; for example, changes at the National Institutes of Health could have large cascading consequences because of the critical importance of public services and databases like PubMed to biomedical research. And, all of this on top of a publication / dissemination ecosystem that has already been widely viewed as experiencing a crisis for many years (one description of many). It seems like there are key ingredients for building a distributed repositoroy of scientific knowledge in the Atmosphere, and that such an effort could make a big difference to science in this critical moment.
Micropayment solutions		Advertising leads to walled gardens. Nobody likes paywalls+subscriptions. But without monetization of some kind, there’s limits to what people are incentivized to build. Is it possible to implement a lexicon for micropayments, allowing users to pay a few pennies to see a feed, access content, or support eachother?
Cross Protocol Groups		Both ActivityPub and AT Protocol have no groups specification that broadly works across many implementations. Can we define a groups protocol that is explicitly designed to work across these two protocols, with bridge-level awareness? For the user, you would pick some groups like “Friends” or “Fans” or whatever, and posts would only be visible / interacted with / etc by those groups.
Building new “Services” on ATProto	Ms Boba	When you implement a labeler, one of the first operations you do is adding a “service” to your PLC document marking your PDS as a labeler service. This is a really interesting pattern which (as far as I know) is only reserved for labelers right now. Could we use it for more services? And how could we make it easier for clients to support additional services?
What Went Wrong with Web2.0?		The web of old was good until it suddenly(ish) wasn’t. What happened? It’d be fun to hear from people that were there, and to think more deeply about how we can make sure not to end up in the same place again. Is an open social protocol like ATProto really enough, or is there more we should be paying attention to?
Lore, fail whales, and war stories		It’d be fun to have a session for just telling stories about the bad good old days. Selling invites, hellthread, Alf, 303 notifications, Brazilians, “API touchers,” Clearsky…and the blocks, my god the blocks.
Incentivizing relays and appviews		In practice, one of the weakest parts of ATProto’s current [de]centralization is the lack of production-grade relays and appviews for the main app.bsky app. How do we convince orgs to run relays and appviews for apps that aren’t their own?
Bluesky/ATmosphere: benefits for government		Doing social media without supporting those undermining democracy. Integrating public policy participation communities with the global Bluesky conversation via CMS-ATProto integration (see the 3rd thing you probably didn’t know about Bluesky). Anything else?
Artificial Intelligence on ATProto	Cameron Pfiffer	I work on an AI project that’s AT-native, and it’s brought up some interesting ideas about data use and privacy. ATProto is also a promising tool for general AI applications. I’ll do a lightning talk about an interesting application prior to a group discussion, and hopefully it’ll inspire some discussion about where the AT community should place its attention. We’ll probably discuss the user intent proposal, so take a look in advance if you’re planning on participating in the discussion.
“IndieSky”: self-hosted bluesky appviews		how bsky can help facilitate them. particularly scaled-down “distributions” folks can run. bunch of existing projects around that.
Flexible app embed UI		How do we embed and display other Lexicons. There have been early discussions around Frames. Robin Berjon has a Tiles concept. This is crucial for being able to do things like displaying a Smoke Signal Event “in” a regular bsky microblog posts. Even more amazing would be the ability to “RSVP”, “Subscribe”, or “Pay” directly in a social feed.
Decentralizing the PLC Directory		Currently the core accounts directory PLC.directory is centrally run by the core Bluesky team. How might we decentralize or run it as a consortium of multiple entities around the world?