Ms Boba: Yearning for the Open Protocols

Ms Boba ( @essentialrandom.bsky.social ) gives a talk at ATmosphere Conf 2025 in Seattle called Yearning for the Open Protocols.

Hello and welcome. My name is N. Boba, and I'm here representing Fujocoded LLC, a somewhat unusual company with a bold, ambitious mission. But before I tell you about it, here’s an ominous question to ponder:

Why are you here today?

I don’t mean “to attend the conference that Boris and Tim kindly put together.” Dig deeper. Why do you care about open protocols enough to spend your weekend at the Atmosphere conference?

Are you excited to get your hands dirty with a new technological toy? Are you angry at how the tech industry squandered the potential of the web? Or is it that you see the huge second-order effects that social-network lock-in has not only on people’s well-being but on democracy itself?

For me, it’s all of those things. But put simply, I’m here because I love the internet—and above all, because I love the niche, often weird subcultures that find their homes in it. The ones that give even the weirdos space to find joy, connection, friendship, and to build community.

A few years ago, after Tumblr’s porn ban scattered my community all over the web, I set out to explore what niche communities like ours needed to thrive again. I realized we needed to empower them with the skills to create and control their own social spaces. And to help them help themselves, I founded Fujoded.

Today, I’ll show you the work we do and why it matters. I’ll cover three things:

I’ll introduce Fanworks Fandom—my community—and why communities like ours matter to the web.

I’ll showcase three projects I built to introduce this community to ATProto.

I’ll explain why we must engage niche online communities early to solve the problems we all care about.

Fanworks Fandom

Keeping it simple: Fanworks Fandom is a loosely aligned community centered around creating fanart, fanfiction, and other creative works inspired by existing media.

You’ve probably seen us around—for better or worse—but here are two things you might not know:

1. We’ve been around a long time, and participation has been stigmatized.

Because of copyright law and other reasons, participation in fandom—especially shipping subfandoms—has historically been stigmatized, and still is in many circles. Many of us rely on the online world for connection and on anonymity for protection. Please continue pretending you don’t know what I look like.

We run a lot of online events, projects, and initiatives. Some have decades of history and thousands of participants—and we often do all this without knowing each other’s names or faces.

2. Despite the stigma, we contribute a lot—both online and offline.

Examples include:

Helping save beloved series like Star Trek

Archival work of old sites and media

Creating Archive of Our Own (AO3), which serves thousands of fanfics each minute with a fully volunteer staff

Making a sizable portion of the reaction GIFs you use

Challenging local legal cases that threaten the internet

Raising $18,000 to teach version control to hobbyist coders (the project that launched Fujod)

And yes, I have a zine here if you want to see it. It has catboys.

Why does this matter to you? I’ll borrow the story of someone else: Matthew Haughey, founder of Pinboard.

In 2013, he gave a talk about his “enemies-to-lovers arc” with fandom and how it changed his perspective on the relationship between communities and platforms. He described discovering that fandom users of Delicious had spontaneously converged on elaborate tagging conventions—basically building a community-driven classification system complete with Greasemonkey scripts and browser extensions, all without a steering committee.

Fans had MacGyvered an entire system.

As Matthew concluded:

Fans are an example of real people using machines to talk to one another. They are community already happening on the internet—something organic you can’t easily engineer.

Despite antagonistic relationships with platforms, despite stigma, fans have built online spaces of genuine joy and connection—the opposite of today’s alienating, constantly-in-fighting internet.

ATProto is far from the first attempt at decentralized social networks. But people online need what we’re trying to build more than ever.

Fans have a lot to teach everyone about how to build real communities on the web.

Our Projects

Last November, I needed a bit of a pick-me-up (for reasons I’m sure you can imagine). With our flagship projects winding down for the holidays, I decided to use my live-coding streams to explore a question:

How do we get fans interested in open protocols?

This is complicated, but being an insider helps. As we say in my country: I know my chickens. And my chickens—whether they admit it or not—love falling for bait.

Bait must be used cautiously. People sense it when they’re being baited. Outsiders can’t always tell the difference between enticing bait that tastes sweet and artificial bait that tastes like betrayal.

But as a member of Fanworks Fandom, I recognized that ATProto had one piece of delicious-tasting bait our community would not resist:

the labeling system.

Fans have a primal need to label things. If you saw the Delicious era, you know.

So when I saw Bluesky’s decorative labels—what I call “badges”—I knew we had the perfect entry point to pique interest.

Old-school web badges are still alive in our corner of the internet. They are ripe for exploration.

But what should we do with them?

Before the next slide: remember, we may be weird, but we come in peace.

In shipping fandom, which characters you pair—and in which order—is serious business. Some are open to many pairings; others have fixed configurations and will mute or block people who ship “incorrectly.”

It may seem like an overreaction, but niche online communities often don’t make sense from the outside. Trust me: this is a thing. It’s so much of a thing that when a Japanese fan mapped different shipper types to animals, it became a worldwide naming convention.

I asked the community to help me turn these animals into labels—and built the Fujin Labeler.

I built it in a two-to-three-hour stream using Alyssa’s Labeler Starter Kit. That let me focus on learning ATProto and helping my community understand it alongside me while building something that excited them.

Explaining ATProto to Nontechnical Fans

I want to show you it is possible to talk about what we do in an accessible, only-slightly-simplified way. When presenting, I usually pause between dense sections—pretend I’m doing that here.

You’ve heard people talk about ATProto. It may sound magical or confusing, but step by step, it’s approachable.

Since the early web, our community has had to work around platform limitations—extensions like XKit for Tumblr, software like TweetDeck. Platforms tolerate, break, or paywall them.

If you hate this, so do many technologists.

Wouldn’t it be nice if software was designed to be compatible with other software, so anyone could build tools and services?

To make this possible, creators need to agree on how data should be shaped and how actions should be represented. This is a protocol: a set of rules that let different applications understand each other.

You already use protocols: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HTTP.

Using a protocol is easy. Making a new one and getting developers to adopt it is hard—especially for social networks.

BlueSky’s developers studied previous attempts like Mastodon and then coordinated on building the AT Protocol and its test application, Bluesky. They hope others—us—will build independent tools and platforms that share the same language.

How ATProto Works: Personal Data Servers (PDS)

Here’s something cool and widely applicable: the Personal Data Server, or PDS.

When you create an account on an ATProto application, it creates and assigns you a PDS: a collection of all your data.

Unlike traditional platforms, your data is not locked inside the service you signed up on. Think of a PDS as your personal folder that different software can read from and, with permission, write to.

PDSes speak to something we all feel: the desire to own our data.

With a PDS:

all your data remains yours

services cannot hold it hostage

you can move platforms without losing your posts, images, tags, or connections

Your PDS is also assigned a DID (Decentralized Identifier)—a unique identifier used across the entire network. It’s not tied to URLs, usernames, or services.

This means:

software can find you regardless of where your data is hosted

you can move your PDS to another host or your own server

if Bluesky bans you, your data remains intact and portable

Inside the PDS are collections—folders—of your data: profile, posts, follows, likes, etc.

For example, in the folder for my likes, you’ll find the labeler’s turtle-type post I liked, which signaled to the labeler to assign me the turtle label.

Labelers don’t read your whole PDS; they listen to the firehose—a stream of all network events (posts, likes, unlikes). When someone likes a labeler’s post, it reacts instantly.

This is what protocols make possible.

Project 2: AO3-Style Labeler

In our second project, we adapted AO3’s rating and warning system:

Ratings: exactly one per fanfic

Warnings: multiple allowed

This labeler is explicitly for fans—not moderation. You cannot pay me enough to do moderation. It is a thankless job, and I know better.

But labels help people decide whom to follow or block. They serve as “before you follow” signals.

This project let us explore:

what a labeler’s PDS looks like

how a labeler announces its services

how other applications discover labelers

Labelers expose endpoints defined in lexicons—files describing the shape of data and actions. They allow automatic code generation and standardized behavior. If you want to know what something can do, look up its lexicon.

Project 3: The Fanworks Labeler + Feeds

Here we stepped up again:

labeling posts, not people

labeling via an external website, not by liking a post

allowing login via PDS to label your own posts

sending others’ posts to a Discord server for approval via emoji

The website was built in Astro, a community favorite, now with ATProto integration.

Once we have labels, we generate feeds for each content type—to help fans track what’s happening.

Tags could work, but tags imply “global search,” while niche communities often want reach within their network, not beyond it.

To make feeds appear in the Bluesky UI, we used the feed generator starter kit to create entries in our PDS. Each feed points to a separate feed service. To get feed contents, applications consult the feed service using endpoints described in lexicons.

Why We Did All This

Not to move huge numbers of fans to Bluesky. Not to encourage everyone to make labelers. Not even for our Discord integration.

Our secret plan is more… sinister:

to join initiatives like the lexicon.com community.

Shared lexicons should be “by the people, for the people.” But who shows up? Mostly technical folks.

To join, you must:

know the initiative exists

know why it matters

understand ATProto, protocols, RFCs

parse technical language

There are structural barriers. But lexicons shape the long-term ecosystem. If niche online communities want the protocol to serve them, we must learn to contribute.

And with a bit of guidance, laypeople can give valuable feedback.

Even small things matter: we rallied our community to upvote a GitHub issue about labeler limits, taking it from 6 to 47 votes. The change likely won’t happen for technical reasons, but the exercise showed:

people want to engage

and they can

Fans know how to do the internet—very differently from tech folks. It’s up to us to stop developers from reinventing “Twitter, but decentralized.”

By bringing in our experience, we can avoid platform biases baked into lower-level protocol design and bring a bit more Tumblr, a bit more Amino, LiveJournal, AO3—sites beloved by our communities.

Conclusion

When people try to build decentralized social networks, they focus on getting developers to make “TikTok but on ATProto,” “Reddit but on ATProto,” etc.

That’s the wrong focus.

Regular people want what open networks can give them. We need to enable new people—nontechnical people—to use these tools and find their place in the ecosystem. Then they’ll invite others and build services that shine not because they’re for everyone, but because they’re for real communities.

Eventually, building a meaningfully different web cannot be done with the same people, tools, and incentives that built the one we’ve now officially lost.

Thank you.