Erin Kissane is going to be conducting a series of interviews and research to produce A Cloud Atlas, an ecosystem map of atmosphere apps beyond Bluesky and microblogging.

The AT Community Fund has contributed $2500 to support Erin’s focus on this work, and we’re joined by Bluesky as a Presenting Supporter @bsky.app

Additional support for Erin's work is welcome through the Open Collective by both individuals and organizations.

Erin’s introduction to the project is below, and you can read her longer, cloudier post about it at wreckage/salvage or follow Erin at @Kissane.myatproto.social.

A Cloud Atlas

From the inside—from the perspective of someone attending Atmosphere Conf or watching the right livestreams or faithfully reading Laurens’ dispatches—the Atmosphere is a fizzy, exuberant system of rapidly increasing complexity, density, and utility. But from the perspective of someone who really only knows about Bluesky, the Atmosphere can seem like speculative fiction or vaporware. For people who mostly know about Bluesky and are aware of the AT protocol but consider it a boring piece of infrastructure, the Atmosphere is a distraction from the more pressing concerns of Bluesky-the-platform’s nature, texture, and governance.

As a person who lives mostly on the inside but spends time mostly with people on the outside, I can see the immediate value and the potential of the Atmosphere but I’ve wrestled with the best way to make this inside sense visible and useful to people working on the outside: Technical explanations persuade tech people, and there’s plenty of material for those people. But technical explanations and even project lists or app directories don’t really reach the many, many other people who are trying to live their lives and do the things they need or want to do with as little hassle, fuss, and learning-new-models-of-anything as possible.

Also: I love maps.

So I’ve set aside some time in the late summer and fall of 2026 to dig in with the creators of a dozen-odd atmospheric projects to learn about what their tools and systems let ordinary people do, and also to explore their plans for the future and their reasons for doing this work now instead of something else. When I’m done I’ll release what I’ve learned in a few different formats: some written, some certainly more visual. Probably at least one boring data table for people who, like me, cannot resist a data table. Starting with 12-15 projects will only gesture at Atmospheric diversity, but it’s a start and a number small enough to let me go a deep with the creators and leaders making these projects. I’m interested in the people stuff for its own sake and also because “people stuff” is a big determining factor in the micro- and macro-decisions that push project evolution in particular directions. This is another way of saying that vibes matter.

I’ll be conducting the interviews for this project in August and September and starting to publish results and artifacts in October. If you’re interested in speaking about it or being interviewed, send me a note and let’s talk—I won’t be able to get everything into this first cut but there will certainly be successor projects, either by me or others or both.

About

A Cloud Atlas will map roughly a dozen atmospheric projects in ways that are explicitly useful and inviting to people who are interested in the social internet for what they can do with it rather than for its abstract potential or engineering affordances.

What it is

• A v1 ecosystem map of the Atmosphere geared toward non-protocol-touchers with clear feature explanations of what’s actually available now and what’s in the pipeline.

• Featuring 12–15 projects people outside the protocol community might not know about (so not Bsky.app).

• Primary audience is ordinary people out in communities—people who need this stuff now, before next year.

Structure

Projects selected by invitation and inbound interest to build a balanced cohort.

• Two rounds of formal contact with each selected project: One interview, one readback/revision pass arranged as a bounded two-week feedback period so projects can review a output and offer final clarifications and suggestions.

• Primary Output: The ecosystem map deliverable, format TBD, will emerge from the shape of what comes out of the interviews. Some structured text, some more free-form written material, and some kind of visual format, probably some tables.

Basic coverage includes

1. Purpose / core features snapshot: What affordances exist right now? What kinds of activities people and communities can undertake immediately.

2. Vision / where we’re going: What’s on the formal roadmap, what’s part of the founder/builder’s vision for the project as a whole.

3. Guardrails: What’s the situation with moderation, relevant trust and safety stuff, project governance, data policies if the project shuts down, all that kind of stuff that can bite users who take the plunge.

4. Vibes: Who the makers are as people and why they are doing this work, in this way, right now.

The AT Community Fund is a project fiscally hosted by the Raft Foundation, and has been the entity hosting the AtmosphereConf global community conference - 2025 in Seattle, and 2026 in Vancouver.

Special thanks to the Modal Foundation for their contribution (as Free Our Feeds) to IndieSky, the final portion of which went to support this initiative.

A new Atmosphere Community Co-operative is underway, with further updates soon. Subscribe to this site or follow us @atmosphere.community