Atmosphere

A Problem

You and most of your friends and family all use that one platform. It's been good to you for many years, most of your friends have stuck around through data sales to shady third parties, government censorship, and addictive algorithms tuned to enrage. You've thought about leaving to The Good Site, but no one else is interested because, like you, their friends, families, photos, and memories are on The Bad Site.

Imagine renting an apartment and being required to forfeit all belongings on move out day.

Upon termination of this Lease Agreement, whether by expiration, breach, or mutual rescission, Lessee shall forfeit and surrender to Lessor all personal property, fixtures, improvements, and chattel acquired, purchased, or otherwise obtained by Lessee during the term of occupancy, said items becoming the sole and exclusive property of Lessor without requirement of additional consideration or compensation to Lessee, notwithstanding any claims of ownership, equity, or unjust enrichment that Lessee may assert to the contrary.

A Solution

Atmosphere is an open system of creating applications and social sites popularized by Bluesky. If old social is an apartment with a bad lease agreement, Atmosphere is a market of apartments where your tenancy is at will, you own everything, and can move to any apartment in town.

Bluesky is just a consumer of Atmosphere. Bluesky has defined what a post is, where they live, the order you should see them, and if you should be able to see them. However, each part can be managed by an individual while still participating with the greater Atmosphere

The Journey

At this time, you'll most likely be joining on Bluesky. This process is the same as most other social media sites, except you may notice that there is the ability to change the site you‘re signing up for. When you create your handle, you'll notice that you are @myusername.bsky.social.

As you're scrolling through your feed, you notice that companies, apps, and even other users have their actual website as their handle like @porksmealplanner.com and @zachary.vandervelden.dev. This allows you to verify the identity of that account across Bluesky and others in the atmos.

You also notice there isn't a video feed but see some users discussing Skylight so you download that app. You log in using the account you just created for Bluesky and notice that you have all the same followers, profile picture, and your posts show up here as well.

A couple years down the line, you notice that Bluesky is not keeping up with the trends of other social sites and has implemented a new "No cats or dogs" policy. Since it's very important to your followers and livelihood that you post pictures of your cat Suzi, you decide to migrate your account to Petsky. On Petsky, with no additional setup, you have all your friends, followers, posts, and settings that you had on Bluesky but can now post pets prolifically.

On Petsky, you're still able to participate in all the Bluesky happenings and those that are on Bluesky can still interact with all your non pet pictures. In many ways, it's like you never left.

For more on Atmosphere, check out Dan Abramov's post which provides a much more in depth overview with technical details.