About the Atmosphere

Summary

I’m writing this from the beautiful UBC campus in Vancouver where ATmosphereConf 2026 is taking place. It’s a gathering of developers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are passionate about keeping the web and our online conversations free and open. The mood here is excited and very collaborative, and I’ve been meeting many of the people who are building products in the Atmosphere. But what exactly is this Atmosphere that I’ve been mentioning in my posts? It’s the thriving ecosystem of over a thousand interoperable social apps and services that run on the AT Protocol (atproto). Bluesky is one of the apps in the Atmosphere. You can use Bluesky on its own as a vibrant, well-run social network that’s free of ads and lets you control your own algorithms. But because it’s built on an open protocol, your Bluesky login is actually an Atmosphere login and the key to many other apps and tools. There are far too many to list but here’s a sampling to give you an idea. Use your login on Flashes, a photo app, and your Bluesky social graph travels with you. Use it on Skylight, and the same thing again. Every Atmosphere app you sign into already knows who you know. That’s not magic. It’s what happens when your identity belongs to you instead of to the platform. And that’s just the start. As more apps integrate with each other, new experiences are emerging. Say you write a long post on any Atmosphere-compatible publishing platform— Leaflet, Pckt, or Offprint are emerging native ones. If you’re committed to WordPress, you can plug-in via standard.site. Posts written on any of these platforms are interoperable with each other. And if you cross-post to Bluesky, engagement can flow back. For example, if someone likes your post in Bluesky, that activity shows up on Leaflet, too. You don’t have to manage multiple accounts. You just post, and your community finds it wherever they already are. When you look at your Bluesky feed today, you might already be seeing posts that originated on s...