State of the Atmosphere (CONF 2026)

I should be cleaning the house right now but instead I'm writing about the ~Atmosphere~ again...

It's been a full week since I first arrived in Vancouver, for Atmosphere Conference. I am back home now and still don't have a full grasp on my thoughts, but it was a pleasure to meet so many people enthusiastic about the growing AT Protocol ecosystem.

People who have been building the web and related technologies for decades (some even longer than I've been alive,,, shout-out old-heads <3), and others that are just getting started or just curious about decentralized social media.

It was really awesome to get to meet everyone in person, and You & Me really helped me piece together faces with their online identities... I was blown away by the adoption of this little app. I want to say a huge thank-you to everyone that used it to connect.

By the end of the conference, nearly every attendee had made at least one connection. And together, we made over two thousand connections in just the span of a four day conference.

I think one of the coolest things was seeing all the add-ons that people build for it. This is one of the most interesting things about atproto in general. If people want to extend something in the atmosphere, for the most part, they can.

Big thanks to@business goose🪿 for building SuperConnectors which allowed people to see the scale of our networking in real time, and also created some competition amongst connectors by adding a leaderboard tracking the top connectors. I had a lot of fun watching @Victoria and @Trezy compete neck and neck for first place before being completely obliterated by @Ranga Krishnan who came seemingly out of nowhere collecting 143 connections... Victoria and Trezy, you're winners in my heart. <3

@Bailey Townsend 🦀 had his You & Me QR code connected to his badger badger badge:

And @Jim Ray had a badge with his You & Me QR Code as well, but his was an entire PDS running on a raspberry pi with an e-ink display, and linked with his own app called locket.computer that creates a unique image based on your connection.

@Jim Ray and @Bailey Townsend 🦀 scanning each others e-ink You & Me badges.

I didn't get to catch as many of the talks as I would have liked to, as I was hiding in my hotel room for a majority of the conference anxious about socializing and speaking on stage lol. But I did get to see a few great talks in person, and a few more via the @Streamplace live streams. (I was watching all of the streams at once and bouncing between them 😂)

While I wasn't super present at the talks, I did get to meet a lot of people in passing, and after conference hours. That @Cloudflare sponsored after party was definitely a blast hahaha. Who knew atproto would bring me to a queer nightclub with male go-go dancers and such an excellent drag performance. Let's just say I ended up spending a little more money than I had anticipated that night hyping up the talent. I love Vancouver 🥹

Speaking of money, there was a lot of talk about it. People obviously would like to be paid, and many are wondering when the money will actually start flowing. I'm not totally sure how I feel about about this. I guess it's just a part of tech culture; everyone is looking for investors to fund their projects.

I'd be happy to make some money too of course, but I also know that I'm going to have to work for it. And the thing about investors is that even if there's all the enthusiasm in the world about a technology, they're not going to usually going to commit unless you can give them an actual statistical reason to.

General consensus: there is no money. at least.. not right now.. well, that's not entirely true. There are investors who I'm sure have money, but it seems like nobody is in a hurry to part with it 😅

On the final day of the conference I had the wonderful opportunity to speak about building for the atmosphere as part of a design panel with the support of @Darrin Loeliger, the designer at @Bluesky, @Pieter Montoulieu, the creator of @Aether OS, and also @dame, the artist behind @Anisota.

I was absolutely terrified to speak but I think it went well. It would have been much more difficult without the support of these three by my side.

Here's an upload of our talk. The link for this video may change in the future, but I'll update it if that happens. I am currently tasked with uploading all of the talks to YouTube, which will be easy peasy, and I'm already set up to do, but I'm waiting for the start and end times in the VODs to be cleaned up a bit before uploading the rest.

There's really too much to cover, including a whole discussion about the future of @Standard.site. I could probably talk for hours on end about all of this but I'm going to try and wrap things up. I'm extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to attend Atmosphere Conf 2026 on the beautiful UBC campus in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. I hope I'll get to visit again someday.

I'm looking forward to catching up on the talks that I missed once they're eventually uploaded to YouTube. We're also beginning to see a lot of atproto-native viewing experiences for the talks which I love to see, maybe I'll watch on one of these platforms.

I'm also looking forward to seeing this community grow beyond Bluesky. This conference really felt like the start of something bigger than we fully realize. There was a level of kindness and support across the community that's rare in tech. And it seems like some of the bigger players are starting to notice the opportunities that this open social web thing might bring.

Thank you everyone who was there, it was so nice to meet you.

Oh and of course it was great to connect on You & Me too.

XOXO Brooke

Oh yeah, and Bluesky released some AI thing, I'm not really sure who that's for. Maybe cool for developers ? Maybe ? I'm really not sure that the average user wants something like this... Though maybe feed generation could be nice?

One of my main concerns is, what happens from a customer support point of view when people start breaking their apps by modifying it using AI and then Bluesky isn't able to reliably provide support because every interface is vibe-coded slop? Will they just tell people to ask the robot?

There's also the concerns from the developer community that something like this diminishes their efforts to build on the protocol, but that's a talk for another time...

Again, I'm not sure... But it will certainly be interesting to see where this goes, if anywhere.