Collaborative news curation as a service, demonstrating the value of social media based on protocols, not platforms and a “playbook for killing information voids.”

On Tuesday night, you may have noticed something a little different on Bluesky. Here's a peek behind the scenes of how the election feed came together. Endlessly grateful for this collaboration with @wnyc.org/@gothamist.com & @bsky.app!

Great time at the @atproto.boston meetup. Great to chat with you @ronentk.me and @wesleyfinck.org! Lots to think about and build! Looking forward to playing with semble.so! Thank you for organizing @tynanpurdy.com!

Strong agree! @bmann.ca is a mycelial mastermind and we're grateful to be working together

Strongly believe atproto could be the foundation of an *amazing* stack for education infrastructure

Interesting workshop - March 19-20, 2026 datasociety.net/announcement...

Overwhelming to hear about how much the AT community showed up today at IETF. I wish I could've been there. I'm sure many people deserve special thanks, but I do want to highlight @bmann.ca for helping to get people there. I feel so fortunate to be a part of such a great group of people.

Do we have a term that is the opposite of "enshittification"? E.g., the pattern of ecosystems increasing in quality (and resilience to enshittifaction) as they grow

ALRIGHT FRIENDS, let's get you READY and WRITING! have you hit your MACROBLOGGING MACROS today?? "I WILL WRITE [N] WORDS" "I WILL CREATE [N] DRAFTS" "I WILL PUBLISH [N] POSTS" FIRE UP ALLL YOUR @leaflet.pub PUBS! UNFURL IDEAS over MANY PARAGRAPHS! TODAY your CHARACTER COUNT is INFINITE!

Montreal watch party for #ietf124 🍿 World Series but for protocols 🙃

#ATProtocol #MTL @bmann.ca @awarm.space @iame.li @ronentk.me @wesleyfinck.org @maparent.ca

Reminder! IRL ATProto Boston happening this Thursday 🍻 bsky.app/profile/atpr...

YES I will say though one of my overarching ideas about what is happening is that sensemaking procedures are breaking down and instead of being legibly rebuilt we are now producing, consuming, and enjoying nonsense. And it's gonna keep getting weirder

A reminder that we're having a small #ATProto_MTL social gathering tomorrow evening at Café Nocturne starting at 6pm EST. Stop by if you're interested in Bluesky, ATProto, dweb, or open social generally. RSVP on Smoke Signal »

Cool idea for high signal curation (sharing screenshots until @defenderofbasic.bsky.social sets up crossposting ;) ) Looking forward to enabling this with semble.so !

«Silicon Valley isn’t building apps anymore. It’s building empires.» The Authoritarian Stack: A mapping of firms, funds, and political actors turning core state functions into private platforms, by @francescabria.bsky.social et. al. for @fesonline.bsky.social www.authoritarian-stack.info

I think we should dogfood from day 1 by starting The International Journal of Authenticated Takes. We accept publications in multiple lexica that are AT-relevant, and we publish as a peer-review overlay journal.

I see a huge opportunity for how the AT Protocol could reshape academic publishing. Imagine researchers publishing continuously and atomically — before, during, and after research projects — in public connected continuous streams of discovery and insight.

You cannot say enough bad things about the banning of links on social media platforms. I truly feel it has a sizeable role to play in the downfall of society that we're witnessing.

Next up: Designing Institutions That Listen: The Future of Responsive Governance - @bethnoveck.bsky.social (@northeasternu.bsky.social)

"People need *time* to be able to participate in democracy but we've created an economy where no one has free time and a majority of the population is living paycheck to paycheck"

Excited to be attending the Foundations for the Digital Commons today in Portland ME! I'll try to liveblog highlights here :)

Europe needs an EU Sovereign Tech Fund. Open source software powers everything from healthcare to energy grids, yet it's chronically underfunded. Read the Public letter. openfuture.eu/blog/public-...

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” Willful ignorance is also motivated by social identity concerns--it is driven by ingroup favoritism + outgroup derogation and fuels conspiracy belies. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@creativecommons.bsky.social and @continuous.foundation are teaming up to make reuse the default for modular science. Join the cohort working to shape incentives for reuse in modular science. The group will kick off in January 2026. Apply by Sunday, Nov 30 continuousfoundation.org/reuse-form

This is so bleak: www.404media.co/a16z-is-fund...

Can we create this future please? "Collective Intelligence as a great scientific, technical, and political project that aims to 'make people smarter with computers, instead of trying to make computers smarter than people'" link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

A write up about code sharing platform @tangled.org by founder @anirudh.fi - ATProto powered, and yes, aiming to be better than Github, Gitlab, and a host of others.

YES This is how we win

"communication is not simply a transmission of data, but a negotiation of meaning, a shared labor of understanding. This is the promise of a rhetorical contextualization... to reimagine UX not as a set of optimized interactions.., but as a site of ethical deliberation and collective possibility"

Great read on "science enshittification" and the better futures possible with new open social networks like bsky! Also 🎯 re pivotal role of institutions - "real change depends on institutions investing in tech that puts community before shareholders." www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... h/t @bmann.ca

If you're in NYC today and feeling spontaneous - come collective sensemake with us at this rad unconference organized by @exgenesis.ingroup.social ! I'll be there to talk about @cosmik.network and Semble. luma.com/8tyya5lg

So cool to be able to let users signal their data preferences, and in a protocolized way so that all ATProto apps can reuse it. It’s a great fit for us with semble.so and we’re planning to incorporate it there!

Looking forward to seeing folks tomorrow! bsky.app/profile/jata...

I'm excited to finally have a preprint of this paper up, a few years in the making. In it we argue that industry-driven manipulation of social media research is well underway and that norms and institutions in the field are ill-prepared to resist tech's influence. arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

on how the developments on atproto and the open social web are getting more and more intertwined with global politics plus some interesting links that stood out to me this week

"Rationality research, in addition, compares behavior to standards whose realism can itself be questioned. This is further exacerbated by the generality of the normative standards themselves."

What if we did a single run and declared victory

Science Bluesky has the juice. 🧃🧪

This is such a paradigm shift for developers and the more ppl wrap their head around this the more we’ll see cool stuff being built!

1/ quick notes from a great meeting yesterday with a Boston area researcher, interested in cutting edge research tools like Discourse Graphs, @cosmik.network and science social media. The research questions they are looking at are too complex and interdisciplinary to be tackled by any single lab >

Meanwhile on Twitter (dizzyingly weird over there 😵)

One of the best things about working on @graze.social is that fully 100% of the people I have met have had a sense of wanting to mutually lift one another up, and I think that's special and unique and part of what's happening in ATProto, and why I'm happy to push on this every single damn day ❤️

So many researchers too, I don't get it either :\

looking forward to speaking at Better World by Design this weekend in Rhode Island. “Better World by Design is a student-led initiative at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design that celebrates the interdisciplinary collaboration between designers, educators, innovators, and learners.”

🎯 I think we all have books that are like "mind-space beacons" - finding someone else who's been drawn to them almost guarantees we'll connect on a deeper level. Every book, podcast or webpage can become a meeting place for minds.

Once again, EVERY R1 research university depends on federal funding for ~15-25% of its budget. You simply can't unplug the largest or 2nd-largest source of $$ of every R1 university & expect it not to have devastating consequences for graduate education, which will spill over to undergrad education.

Berlin, Boston, NYC - cool to see so many ATProto meetups! 🌱 #atprotoidea: overlay @smokesignal.events on a map? Also - option to set notifications when people in my network are attending an event in a certain location :)

Hypothesis: the simple act of each of us publicly sharing more what we're paying attention to (reading, watching, ..) would dramatically enhance collective sensemaking. In open source software they say "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"- perhaps there is a parallel for open source *attention*?

Sick of living in an obscenely wealthy country utterly incapable of strategically investing its capital for pro-social gains. blog.erlend.sh/saving-democ... ..in which I argue that Norway should invest in the AT protocol and network, by whichever means necessary.