Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)

I’m coming home from ATmosphereConf filled with hope and a renewed sense of purpose. I want to talk about why.

But first, some context.

The problem with social media as it exists today

I have strong opinions about social media. A lot of these come from reading books like The Chaos Machine and Careless People. I highly recommend both if this is something you’re interested in, but if you just want a high-level overview, the story goes something like this:

Many social platforms started as human-centered. Then they had to start making money. A lot of them chose the easy path: advertisements. Those advertisements created algorithms that drove engagement and kept people on the platforms. The platforms started A/B testing to get folks to spend more and more of their time scrolling, because the more time spent on the platform, the more ads they could show. Over time, the content that performed best was the most divisive, because that was what kept people looking, interested, and engaged.

The result is that social media has become, ironically, some of the loneliest places to be. When you open Instagram today, most of the content you see is advertisements and not posts from the actual people you’re trying to connect with. Users lose trust, genuine connection, and autonomy over how they spend their time as they become more addicted to these platforms.

I don’t think any social media platform was designed to do this. But it’s where most of them have ended up. If you open Facebook or Instagram or X (formerly Twitter), most of what you see is ads, hateful content, or mind-numbing videos designed to keep you entertained but not informed.

Another thing that makes this difficult is that these platforms are really hard to leave. Once you have a group or community connected on a platform, getting everybody to move at once is nearly impossible. Folks are used to these apps because the platforms have been designed to create habits that keep people coming back.

In mainstream social media platforms, you are the product. For that reason, I have mostly abstained from social media, except for the past couple of years where I’ve started to spend a little more time on Bluesky.

I started using Bluesky in November of 2024 when there was a big influx of users coming over from Twitter after the November 2024 presidential election. For the most part, I really enjoyed being there. There were no advertisements, and there was no downranking of links, so it felt like a place that was open to meeting, sharing, and connecting. I made some actual friends on Bluesky, and it’s a place where I feel comfortable being myself because of the safety and moderation mechanisms built into it. I found real connection on the internet again, and it felt like it had been a long time since I was able to find that.

Last year, we interviewed Nick Gerakines on the Overcommitted podcast. As part of that conversation, he started talking about ATProto, which is the underlying protocol that runs Bluesky. I’ve never been extremely passionate about decentralized protocols, so I hadn’t really looked much into it until that conversation. I knew they existed, but I was not chasing them just for the sake of building something decentralized. What intrigued me was the portability concept: the idea that as a user on Bluesky or any other ATProto app, I own my data. Your social graph and all of the connections on it belong to you. Your content (your posts, likes, comments) belong to you. If a platform built on ATProto starts making decisions that you don’t agree with, it’s easy to switch to a new app that’s also built on ATProto. You don’t actually lose anything, and it can be as simple as logging out of one app and into another with the same login.

If Bluesky ends up turning into Instagram and having mostly ads tomorrow, you could leave without any issues. That was the thing that drew me in. There’s a way that they’ve engineered out the spiral that has afflicted so many other social media apps.

What ATProto actually is (for the uninitiated)

Before I go much further, I want to explain what ATProto really is for folks who aren’t as technical or aren’t familiar with it.

Each individual that signs up to Bluesky or any of the other Atmosphere apps gets an identity. That identity has its own repository, kind of like a personal folder of files associated with it. Whenever you make a post, like something, or comment on Bluesky, a new file is added to that repository under your identity. If you signed up on Bluesky, your identity and all of those files most likely live on a Bluesky server called a PDS (Personal Data Server).

However, all of those files are publicly available. Any other app built on ATProto can take those files and render them. So you could use another app like Blacksky and have the same exact posts, comments, and likes that you do on Bluesky. And if you ever decide that you don’t like what Bluesky is doing or you don’t like where they are hosting your data, you can move somewhere else, keeping your followers, connections, and content.

Bluesky is the most visible app in the Atmosphere, but it’s definitely not the only one. There are tons of apps being created by builders in the Atmosphere, including things like Stream.place for live streaming video content, Flashes for image sharing, and Skylight Social for videos. But there are many more! The Atmosphere is filled with cool applications that are all worth checking out as you get more familiar with it.

Because the Atmosphere can run on multiple PDSs, it’s considered a decentralized protocol. No one entity owns all of the data.

ATmosphereConf and the community

That brings me to ATmosphereConf. This is the conference that just wrapped up over the weekend in Vancouver, BC at the UBC campus. I go to a lot of tech conferences, and this one was different in a very cool way.

It was interdisciplinary. This was not just a software conference or a design meetup. There were journalists, scientists, builders, and several other disciplines, all in the same room. In addition to conversations about the apps people are building and ways to make things work across multiple ATProto apps, there were also conversations about how the protocol can improve things for other fields. Scientists talked about using decentralized data for research. Journalists discussed infrastructure for sharing their work that isn’t built on mainstream media. The whole conference ran a full day of ATProto for Science on the Friday before the main event.

It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology. And I don’t mean this in the crappy way a lot of companies with fake missions claim how they’re making the world better while making themselves and their shareholders more money… I mean that people are actually building social apps that help people, things that bring people together in person, things that create mutual aid opportunities, things that can bring together scientists, citizens, and lawyers to build a future we all want to be a part of.

The first thing I noticed about the conference was this: in building a decentralized protocol, the community has somehow managed to centralize the people.

There were some talks that really stood out to me. Erin Kissane’s talk, “Landslide,” was the opening keynote for the main conference day. She talked about how we are currently living on shaky ground and that our information systems are crumbling. ATProto is an opportunity to fix that. (Erin has been doing related work on this for a while. Her 2025 ATmosphereConf talk in Seattle and her essay on the same theme are both worth your time.)

I also attended Rudy Fraser’s talk on Blacksky, which was excellent. It was an overview of a lot of the things he learned by building Blacksky and the Blacksky community, much of which has actually brought people together more in person.