Lea: A Social App for Researchers

Asst. Prof. Maria Antoniak (Uni. Colorado Boulder)

We will present Lea, a social app for researchers built on ATProto. Lea has many custom features for researchers, including

1. paper tracking, discovery, and discussion pages,

2. customized and verifiable profiles for researchers,

3. extensive safety and moderation features to keep discussions calm and productive.

We'll discuss our goals, challenges, and open questions for Lea.

Chive: Decentralized preprints with ATProto

Assoc. Prof. Aaron Wite (Uni. Rochester), Chive

Chive is a decentralized preprint service featuring threaded review, formal endorsements, and a community-curated field taxonomy—all as portable ATProto records users own. Chive provides a rich plugin interface, making it imminently extensible as the ATmosphere grows. It currently provides builtin plugins for integration with existing ATProto services, such as Semble, Leaflet, and WhiteWind.

Chive will be launching a call for alpha testers in the next week or so, with a plan to roll out an open beta around the time of the workshop.

Long talk, Morning session 1

Skysquare is context as a service

Travis Simpson, Skysquare Inc

Skysquare uses AT Protocol to reattach public discourse to its source, transforming the web into a socially annotated commons.

This is not a conceptual proposal — Skysquare is a working system, and the session will include live architecture walkthroughs and concrete examples of AT Protocol integration in production.

Astrosky: an independent online home for astronomy

Emily Hunt (University of Vienna), astrosky

What's the point of doing science if you can't tell anyone about it?

I'll present The Astrosky Ecosystem, a community project by astronomers to democratize social media access for the space science & space fan communities.

I'll talk about our 30 months of running custom feeds, as well as our future plans to start PDS hosting and even venture towards an astrophotography appview.

Studying social media through the ATmosphere

Sophie Greenwood (Cornell Tech), Skygest

The AT Proto ecosystem empowers novel social media research. Our research showcases three promising directions in this space: 1.

1. Experiments on self-hosted feeds (Paper Skygest findings and customization interface)

2. Experiments on existing feeds via collaboration with feed designers (collaboration with Graze and Aendra),

3. Observational analyses of social media (SAEs on AT Proto posts)

Coopetition in the ATmosphere

Mathew Lowry, myhub.ai.

How can we best manage competition and cooperation in the Atmosphere? Ideally we'll bring together work from multiple teams to discuss a concrete example.

(This is version 2 of this post, published using the permanent versions pattern on my wiki, where the latest version can be found. If you have any questions or suggestions about this workshop, either:

• post a comment here

• or select some text, click "Share via Bluesky" and post your comment or question to Bluesky. Make sure you mention @mathewlowry.eurosky.social).

But first, what is coopetition?

And why does it matter?

"Coopetition is a business strategy blending cooperation and competition, where rival companies collaborate for mutual benefit, such as developing new tech or expanding markets, while still competing fiercely in other areas like pricing or features, creating a paradoxical yet strategic interdependence".

Possibly nobody else coming to Vancouver was actually fully grown in 1995, so you're going to have to take it from me: we are living through a 1995 moment in decentralised social computing. Back then, the new protocol-based information ecosystem was for publishing, whereas today it's for social media. In both cases people are being incredibly creative with it.

Back then, however, there was unguarded optimism. Today, the optimism is there, but it feels a little wiser, and far less oriented towards VC-fuelled instant wealth. We know that the commons we're building can be captured.

For me, the key question boils down to this:

How do we help all these innovators both cooperate - thus growing the Atmosphere to the benefit of all - and compete - thus demonstrating its sustainability?

This is in fact already happening:

• independent teams first built highly distinct apps using the same underlying lexicon - eg deck.blue, flashes, anisota.net

• we're now seeing "stage 2" cooperation, where different teams, having built different lexicons for similar use cases, are now cooperating - eg standard.site, from the teams behind leaflet, pckt.blog and offprint.

I'd like this workshop to explore two questions:

• How far can this go? Can new apps emerge simply by adopting, adapting and recombining lexicons and other open-source components developed by multiple teams, while maintaining credible exit? What are the natural limits of this?

• How can it be encouraged? How can this cooperation be encouraged and supported to make the most of scarce resources?

Recombining components: an example

I'm not completely lacking in self-interest so I'd like to use MyHub as an example to structure the conversation around.

Last year I realised that I may be able to rebuild MyHub.ai by combining components from multiple teams, creating a user-friendly "onramp" platform for new users that nevertheless maintains credible exit:

(from MyHub on the ATmosphere or watch the video version)

The above "reading/thinking/writing/publishing stack" is built from multiple components, upon which various teams are already working for their own purposes:

(This table is screenshotted from my wiki, as leaflet doesn't do tables. It's also incomplete - I would hope to add more before and after Vancouver).

Note that credible exit is guaranteed precisely because it is built from open, shared components: myhub aims to compete through integrating them together in a user-friendly way, for the masses of users who will never visit GitHub or Tangled.

Supporting cooperation

I have developed a model which I would recommend funding organisations consider if they want to cost-effectively support the development of a portfolio of Atmospheric start-ups.

Briefly, the model focuses funding on developing components useful to multiple start-ups - the Inbox component required by Sill and MyHub, for example, would be prioritised because it serves (at least!) two startups.

But components need not be limited to code: it could also include shared infrastructure. The obvious example is the CoCoMo content moderation service, relays and PDSs being developed by Eurosky Social. There may be many more, but - crucially - only a conversation amongst startups can identify them. Of course those conversations, and the resulting cooperation, are already underway on Bluesky, at meetups, in Signal groups ...

I'd like to explore this with the atproto.science community in Vancouver because I think this model could give that cooperation a boost, as it:

• is incredibly cost-effective: each grant literally supports multiple start-ups

• builds cooperation between startup teams, to mutual benefit.

As an added bonus, both results will grow the ATmosphere as a whole, which in turn will lift all startups.