Inaugural ATmosphere Conference and the Umoya Fellowship

In my funemployment, I’ve been contributing a bit of code to the rsky (pronounced risky), a Rust implementation of the AT Protocol (ATProto) infrastructure used by BlackSky. The creator of rsky and BlackSky is Rudy Fraser. On March 2nd, Rudy announced an initiative: the Umoya Fellowship led by TDr. Linda Maepa for blacksky folks to attend the ATmosphere Conference in Seattle this past weekend. This felt like a good opportunity for me to meet folks working on ATProto and an opportunity to meet Rudy in person. So here’s my recap!

This Weekend I Learned

With the folks I met at the conference, conversations ranged from comparing and contrasting ATProto’s infancy stage to other social media platforms; to technical discussions about productionizing relays and PDS infrastructure using established service mesh strategies; and the grassroots work of community building.

Building Communities

The three talks on building communities I saw were:

• @ngerakines.me talk on the Lexicon Community which would allow ATProto developers a place to share and re-use lexicons,
• @essentialrandom.bsky.social (MsBoba) literally developing tooling that gives the Fujoshi community a familiar sense of place within Bluesky. I very likely will follow MsBoba on twitch to see her developing streams, and
• Rudy Fraser building BlackSky. I was very flattered to be mentioned! One part of Rudy’s talk that I latched onto was skeuomorphs . More on this below!

  

Tech Themes and Topics

Skeuomorphisms

Most people know how to use a calculator. Rudy mentioned skeuomorphisms and gave an example of various calculator programs (calc.exe to the iOS calculator app) that gave familiar user interfaces from which users already know how to use in the real world. I see ATProto OAuth being a workflow that is a skeuomorphism. The usual third party identity provider flow that everyone is familiar with (e.g. “login with Google/Facebook/etc.”) is skeuomorphed to using your ATProto handle (e.g. barackobama.bsky.social) instead of say an email address to login to various ATProto services (e.g. an ATProto based & skeuomorphed Reddit).

Private Data

There were several sidebar conversations but one that I was particularly interested in was the private data conversation. It seems like there is potential with developing the concepts of private data over ATProto. The big hairy audacious goal here is end to end encrypted messaging and I think the generally accepted means to do so is MLS.

Special Thanks to TDr. Linda Maepa

I’m deeply grateful for your sponsorship as an Umoya Fellow. The opportunity to attend the ATmosphere Conference and connect with so many brilliant people in person was invaluable. Thank you for making this experience possible.