AHOY! 2025 - Laurens Hof on the shapes of the ATmosphere

Laurens Hof ( @laurenshof.online ) gives a talk at AHOY! European Social Web Day in Hamburg in 2025 about the shapes of what the ATmosphere might become.

Thank you all for being here. I’m going to kick off with appreciation — on the shapes of things to come.

Why are we here — altogether? Why are we here bringing people from the tech side — the true builders? Why do we have policy people? Why do we have community builders? We have quite different types of groups of presentations together — you’re a little bit all over the place. To make sense of it all — to connect it all together — I’m going to give you a short presentation on the shapes of what the atmosphere might become.

But first — we go back to Twitter. There are very many different ways you can look at Twitter. They’re all good. I’m going to pick out a very specific way — because it frames what Bluesky can become — and that’s simply: Twitter was a way where communities and places became an emergent property.

What we mean by that is — for a lot of people, Twitter was something you log into — you have a feed — you get your dopamine — you scroll — very exciting. But in other ways, it’s also where the first communities started to form — whether that’s Black Twitter, Teapot Twitter, NBA Twitter — you name it — what community started to form? We also start to get a sense of place — of what it is.

And I think it’s very interesting to see that people describe Twitter as both a walled garden and also the town square — places like a garden and a town square. They’re very different places — they don’t really make sense described together. Twitter as these two different places. And I think that’s a sort of sense that we start to get — that this is a place — but we don’t really know what it is yet. So we have this very different sense of describing it.

And then later — this is how we started writing about it. I should have said — I write 31st Report, a weekly newsletter on everything decentralized social networks. I started with the various — later got very interested in Bluesky — 80 protests — well, I still get very interested in the 51st — because it made this idea of communities and places very direct, very explicit.

What the fitting version of Mastodon set is — like a place. It’s a server — like a physical server — and on that server, there’s one community. One community, one place — and they all connect with each other. It turns out — this gives you some very interesting things you can do with building communities. It didn’t — it also has some downsides, which I’m not going to get into. Give me a beer and we’ll have a very long talk about it later — but that’s very much not for this conversation.

And then Bluesky came — and Bluesky is a very different model. If you want to describe how Bluesky technically works — there are going to be conversations about that — super interesting. But I try to make sense of it as a conceptual model — where there’s like this one giant data lake — like there’s all these — well, the technical term: PDS. And they just exist somewhere — and the social app can just step into that — and that might become a community — that might become a sense of place — that might become…

Like — we don’t really — we’re starting to only just now get a sense of — OK, what is even a community on Bluesky? What is a community on AT Protocol? We have, for example, Black Sky — with them trying to build the community — amazing — very much recommend that you check out.

And we’re still struggling to describe Black Sky — like it’s a group of people — but it’s also a custom feed — maybe it’s also a social app — we don’t even know yet. Like we know that it’s a group — similar to — we’re going to have a conversation directly after with Andrea — about again — how do you build communities? This is new. We don’t really have — what I’m trying to get here — we don’t really have the full language of it yet.

Same — what are places even? What I described earlier as like a social app — turns out that’s actually a collection of very different senses of software. It’s a relay — it’s an app view — it’s labelers, etc. And they have — like the type of people who put googly eyes on Raspberry Pis — they realize — hey, that app view — we can split it up into even more components — and it gets like — I’m ashamed — it’s ashamed — it feels not here — it’s — we’re missing the language of describing what this social app is — when it turns out that you can split it up into very many different components.

And that’s why we’re here. We are connecting policy — we’re connecting public — we’re connecting the tech — together — because we need to build — we need to build together — in a way of — how do you say this? There’s very much interest from the public policy side — building social networks is very much in the collective mind of — hey, maybe it’s not great that tech billionaires — like the oligarchs — own our social networks — we need something different. That’s why we have a conversation with the Safe Social people, for example, later this morning as well.

Like — there’s this brought awareness in the public conversation — of hey, we need to do things differently. And we’re doing things differently here — with Bluesky — with the atmosphere — but we need to be able to explain that. And it’s even harder — when we ourselves are only just starting to get a sense of what this thing here is.

Because so far I’ve only talked about — mainly about Bluesky — where we’re going to have talks — have Tangled, for example — you can build completely different things. You can build a GitHub competitor on AT Protocol. How does that relate back into the conversation of — hey, we want to build an independent, decentralized social Internet?

Another practical example — recently, Bluesky hit the accounts of certain Turkish protesters at the demand of the Turkish government. This got a significant amount of media attention — which understandably so. It’s a very difficult tradeoff decision that Bluesky had — Bluesky PBC. (I’m using PBC — public traded company — to refer to the company specifically.)

It turns out that people get a sense of — oh, I don’t like that — when social platforms censor protesters. But the technical side hit a very much more interesting, complex conversation — where what turns out — they’re doing — is they hit the protesters from view — only in Turkey — and only specifically on the Bluesky app. You can run like flashers — or, um, skits — we’re having a conversation with Sebastian Vogelsang later today as well. And you log in with skits within Turkey — you see these protesters.

And that’s a very concrete example of how the design decisions — how we’re trying to understand of how this network works — has a very real impact on public policy — of how this works in the world. And we’re just starting to find out.

That’s why we’re having this here. That’s why I’m super excited to have you all here at Ahoy — like we’re building a shared language. We’re building it as we are doing. We are — the direction of the network is still wide open. That’s very voted down — like maybe it turns out that Bluesky — that the new general direction of the atmosphere — is going to get very much into apps — into clients. Maybe it’s way more into the server side — like the app views — like — what is the core direction — on like where? Your motivation happens.

For example — I thought until pretty recently that the core direction of motivation was very much on the app view — like the app view — like Bluesky or Spark. We’re also having a very exciting conversation with the people from Spark — which Joe — awesome — perfect. Like I thought that moderation is going to happen there. And then I wrote — like last week — about the situation in Turkey — and I realized — oh, maybe the conversation about moderation actually happens way more on the client than on the app.

I’m not — I follow this stuff closely — because like I write about it every day — I find it very hard to formulate a good answer for that. And that’s why we need you all here — together — to — from all different directions — both from the tech builders — the policy people — like everybody in between — to get you all together — to build the shared language of — oh, where are we even going? We don’t even know yet.

And that’s honestly — to me — one of the most exciting things — to be here together — to realize — hey, this is a network where the direction is still open — the possibilities are still open. We can shape this all together.

And for that — shaping altogether — thank you all for being here.

The videos from AHOY! European Social Web Day held in Hamburg, Germany, are being republished along with transcripts as part of the process of preparing for ATmosphereConf 2026, taking place March 26th - 29th in Vancouver, Canada.