IndieSky working group, 50K donation from Free Our Feeds
The IndieSky working group will work together on R&D, code, and infrastructure on how and why to run different parts of the ATProto stack. Free Our Feeds is supporting the effort with an initial donation of 50k
We're pleased to announce the kick off of the IndieSky working group, including an initial donation by the Free Our Feeds team to support coordinating the working group and fund initial R&D on infrastructure software, setup, and tooling.
IndieSky is short for independent, exploring what it means to run different parts of the composable AT Protocol architecture, both individually for small deploys, as well as commons infrastructure, where we share costs, code, and maintenance together.
Organizations like NorthSky are looking at data sovereignty for their community through PDS hosting, Blacksky continues to implement the ATProto spec prioritizing community safety & self governance, and devs are building everything from RPi-powered whole network indexes to forks of Bluesky software with experimental features.
The next step is to host, operate, and moderate these services at scale, sharing commons infrastructure where we can, and supporting each other by pooling knowledge and funding.
IndieSky supported by Free Our Feeds
The Free Our Feeds organization has launched their campaign to raise funds for independent governance and infrastructure at scale, participating in the wider AT Protocol ecosystem.
We’re raising funds to launch a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire (including Bluesky itself).
The Free Our Feeds team have generously stepped forward to be the first funders of the IndieSky Working Group, with an initial donation of $50K USD.
The AT Protocol has a wickedly cool and wildly inventive community, and the ATProto Community Fund has done outstanding work to support them with their first initiatives: ATmosphereConf and the Location Data project.
For Free Our Feeds to partner with ATProto Community Fund was a very easy decision to make and we're fantastically excited to be able to support them in continuing their work.
— Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com, Free Our Feeds custodian, IPFS Foundation, and DASL project lead
The first thing that this enables is that Boris Mann and Ted Han, who have been volunteering their time, can get compensated with a small monthly retainer to help organize and scale the working group and other ATProto ecosystem initiatives.
Secondly, the ATProto Community Fund can support developers and commons infrastructure projects with small donations and funding infrastructure, and support them in further fundraising, entity creation, and other best practices.
This is a very small amount of funding compared to what is needed to develop software that is used by millions, or operate moderation at scale, but it means we can unblock experiments and make it so that devs aren't paying for server costs out of their own pocket.
Commons Infrastructure
Many ATProto infrastructure components have become easier to run and deploy in the past several months, but there is more to do to go from developer R&D and early code to running systems.
Some of the needs include:
- running PDS hosting not as small personal projects, but as part of smooth sign on for apps, data sovereignty at scale, or other organizational tooling – including shared jurisdiction specific moderation
- relays are relatively cheap and easy to run with the full network firehose of 35M+ being available for 24 - 72 hours depending on storage, but they do need to be setup and maintained and connected to by apps and PDS's, plus ban bad actors and network level attacks
- historical data availability, as well as large scale API availability for certain features like search that might contain months or years of data
- shared CDN layers, especially for higher resolution photos, PDFs for academic papers, and of course the big challenge: video
All of these topics and more were discussed at the IndieSky day following Ahoy conference in Hamburg Germany last week. Read our post with notes from the event.
Boris Mann
We have an IndieSky Europe group forming, and have planned a working group kick off in early May for everyone to join, details below.
Free Our Future (Apps)
There is value in running Bluesky "clones", like the Deer Social project which is a fork of the same open source code that Bluesky runs in production (and that we recently supported with an honorarium to also start producing mobile releases), but we also want to become independent of the single Bluesky microblog content, social graph, etc.
Flashes is re-using the Bluesky microblog data format, but shown in a more Instagram like way. Flashes is built by Berlin developer Sebastian Vogelsang, who wants to do more, but as a single developer needs support for European moderation compliance and other commons infra.
This UI is such a cool idea: let users determine the degree to which their feed is popular versus reverse chronological. Via @joe.sprk.team's excellent #ahoy25 talk
— ændra. (@aendra.com) 2025-04-24T15:24:31.411Z
@aendra.com comments on Spark's in app feed settings.
Spark, which is one of a number of new video-focused apps, is unique in developing its own independent Lexicon data types for videos, posts, and more. Longer video support, running their own PDS, a relay in Brazil, and support for embedding many different Lexicon types are some of the features shared at the recent Ahoy conference.
With ATProto's support for user owned, portable data + shared logins, we can enable building many more apps. With commons infrastructure in place, everyone from civil society to entrepreneurs can build new apps that are user-centric by default, and data sovereign to their jurisdiction.
Working with Free Our Feeds
Free Our Feeds are aiming big, and none of the team involved have had this as their day job so far.
Free Our Feeds have now raised part of their goal, are hiring for an interim executive director, and reached out to us at the ATProto Community Fund to start providing real impact and support for independent infrastructure by donating to the IndieSky initiative that is very much aligned with their goals.
Free Our Feeds is talking to large scale institutions and government level funding initiatives. What does it mean to run digital infrastructure like roads or power plants, and how can we work with governments worldwide to have them support this? The Free Our Feeds team will also take the lead in helping to solve policy and regulatory issues that we come across.
We'll be supporting the Free our Feeds team by keeping up with the latest in the fast moving ATProto developer community, actively supporting communities, teams, and startups that are running independent infrastructure, and highlighting areas for further research.
Support IndieSky
We've added the IndieSky project to the list of the ATProto Community Fund OpenCollective.
As an individual, you're welcome to start supporting us with monthly donations to the IndieSky Commons Fund which will be allocated across projects, or give directly to our first grantee Deer Social.
Larger sponsors are also welcome, please get in touch to discuss what you're interested in supporting.
Join the Working Group
If you are interested in operating independent ATProto infrastructure, are developing tools to make this easier, please join the IndieSky Working Group.
The first Working Group kick off meeting is planned for Thursday, May 8th, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 1800 CEST.
