The Atmosphere Community Cooperative is another step towards building a truly open social web ecosystem

Link: Introducing the Atmosphere Community Cooperative

AT Protocol is the underlying protocol that powers Bluesky, Chicago.com, Sill, Surf, Leaflet, and many other social apps and services. It’s designed to be open, decentralized, and interoperable: the idea is that no one entity owns it, and any tool built on the protocol is theoretically interoperable with all the other tools. It’s one piece of an emerging, diverse open social web that’s free of monopolistic control.

At the News Product Alliance summit last month, Joe Germuska and I presented on AT Protocol with Frank Sharpe and Andjela Padejsky from Chicago Public Media. The protocol has allowed them to build Chicago.com more efficiently: they know two codebases they write on the protocol will work together. It’s also proven to be useful scaffolding for LLM-assisted development, which has allowed their development team to punch above its weight. There hasn’t been much attention paid to the protocol in spaces like journalism: our presentation and events like Protocols for Publishers are the exception. Nonetheless, I’m certain it will be an important building block.

But a building block that can be manipulated by a single owner introduces risk that newsrooms and other mission-driven organizations shouldn’t tolerate. (Consider what happened to Twitter.) Independence is vital; without it, a building block becomes a single point of failure.

Now the folks behind AT Protocol ecosystem pillars like the annual Atmosphere conference have filed to form a co-operative organization.

“As we look toward the third AtmosphereConf in 2027, we’re happy to announce that we’re transforming into a cooperative dedicated to supporting the health, growth, and stability of the Atmosphere.

This is the first post from the Atmosphere Community Cooperative, a new global cooperative based in Canada that is governed by and for the community, for the good of the ecosystem and the people inside it.”

This is a big deal for lots of reasons. The first is that it further formalizes the idea that a bunch of AT Protocol support and governance is independent of Bluesky. The protocol itself is already supported by a working group at the IETF, and the directory of identities is forming as an independent Swiss Association. This, then, is a third independent ecosystem org, ensuring that it’s not just the protocol that’s decentralized, but governance and support of it, too.

I do also think it’s really interesting that the Atmosphere Community Cooperative will be a real co-operative organization, adhering to international co-op principles, and established in Canada. Between this, the Swiss Association, Bluesky’s Delaware Public Benefit Corporation status, the IETF working group, and other participants like Dutch public interest organization the Modal Foundation, there is a plurality of geographies, organizational approaches, and communities involved in the protocol’s development and success. That feels like much-needed organizational innovation in addition to the technical gains. All of which makes AT Protocol safer to build on.