The Atmosphere, Explained

A new internet is being built atop a modern web commons called the atmosphere.

It's a pro-social reimagining of the digital world most of us know today as a dismal status quo of monopolistic data enclosures. So severely has the well been poisoned that the mere mention of "social media" makes us sick to our stomachs.

Unlike the platform-mediated internet that designs for attention-capture, a genuinely social internet designs for agency, instilled in persons and communities alike.

The new internet isn't coming soon, it's a present reality comprising hundreds of social applications interoperating with one another as one network. 45 million of us have already left the old world, now directing our liberated attentions toward a digital sphere of our own making.

The Old

What we leave behind.

The monopolized web as we know it enforces a tight coupling of platform and user-data, effectively keeping users captive and pitting the platforms against each other in a zero-sum game of "who can claim the most users".

You can set up simultaneous residence in all these platforms, but your identity and the data it's comprised of may not travel freely between them. What happens in Facebook stays in Facebook.

This leaves our online identity in a perpetual state of fragmentation as we string a mishmash of competing platforms together to establish some semblance of a unified digital expression.

The New

Personal data ownership begets collective power.

The latest iteration of the social internet builds on emerging web standards that separate user data from the platform. This decoupling has major implications for the individual web user's agency.

Once your data is no longer tightly coupled with your social media app of choice, that platform becomes a mere custodian of your data as opposed to being the owner of it, the same way a bank keeps your money safe on your behalf but it doesn't strictly control your use of it.

Every application in the atmosphere-net builds atop the same standard, technically called the AT protocol or atproto for short. What the AT stands for is no more important than the AM/FM1 protocols that make your radio work, or the SMS you send to that friend who (justifiably) refuses to install WhatsApp.

What matters is what this standard of interoperability affords us as netizens.

Nomadic homesteading

Digital agency as akin to home ownership.

Instead of renting personal data-space in a rigid apartment complex2, in the atmospheric model we each get a campervan for our data.

This makes every application a mere entrypoint to the wider network. The network, the atmosphere, extends far beyond the application-bound borders of any single platform.

Not every app is a data-host. Many not listed here opt instead to defer account-hosting to a bigger provider like Bluesky or Eurosky.

Whichever atmospheric social app you start out on will grant you a virtual campervan - a storage-space of personal data - that's yours for life. With it you're free to traverse the atmosphere in its entirety.

Freedom of movement across the world-wide web

Signed up for Bluesky? You'll begin your journey as @alice.bsky.social, like a van that comes with a bit of promotional branding on the side.

Don't wanna be hosted by Bluesky (in the USA) any longer? Then exercise your freedom of movement3 and haul your digital storage-space over to the data custodian of your choice.

There are plenty others to choose from4:

Blacksky (USA) alice.blacksky.xyz

Selfhosted Social (USA)

Northsky (Canada)

Eurosky (EU)

Tangled (EU)

Roomy (EU)

Tophie (UK)

Moving makes no difference to your presence on Bluesky or any other social apps you've signed into with your atmospheric account. The branding changes, but your root identity and accompanying social graph remains undisturbed5.

And if you're an online professional in need of personal branding you can change your username to be your own top-level domain6 - erlend.sh is mine.

Now the only branding on my van is my own, though keen observers can still check out my virtual license plate7 to see where I'm actually registered.

This completely upends the power dynamics of social networking as we know it. Our digital identities, people, co-exist at the center of our network commons.

Platforms are moved out to the margins. But far from being invisible, they are the flashy neon signs welcoming outsiders into our global fellowship by presenting them with a familiar form factor like the 'news feed', 'group chat', 'code forge' or 'photo reel' in the shape of an app.

Come for the widgets, stay for the collective sovereignty.

and as evidenced by the AM/FM hybrid, the AT protocol might later exist in conjunction with other protocols that solve the same problems with a different technical implementation.

in the physical world I live in one of these and I quite like it! But on the web where I have the ability to teleport, a static apartment is too constrictive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement

Most of these double as both platform and data custodian the way Bluesky does, for ease of onboarding. As web users become more accustomed to data storage and data platforming as two separable jobs-to-be-done, we expect data storage specialists to become more commonplace at the local level.

Behind every username in the atmosphere is a unique ID number that works the same way a phone number does, enabling the ID holder to switch service providers without losing their contacts.

costing between $10-$50 per year.

my public records on the network.