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"plaintext": "This was a week of many firsts for me. My first time in Canada. My first time in Vancouver. My first(ish) time in the PNW. My first trip with Air Canada (they have free beer and wine??). My first time meeting dozens of friends I had only interacted with online. My first time facilitating a workshop at a conference. My first talk at a conference. My first time missing a competition event since joining the Lobstah Bots as a mentor. And my first ATmosphere Conference."
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"plaintext": "I've been obsessed with tech ever since I was a child. I was that kid who bounced between iOS and Android with every phone, just to get a taste of what was happening on both. My first phone was an iPhone 4s, which @reckless.bsky.social will agree ('s' notwithstanding) was the best iPhone. My first Android was the OnePlus One, which I bought using an invite code. Back in the day my dad @nickpurdy.bsky.social founded @pastemagazine.bsky.social, which combined with my tech affinity is probably why I wanted to be a gadget writer for a while. Loyal reader/listener of @theverge.com is definitely important to the story."
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"plaintext": "We did get there. I joined a Discord server aptly named \"Make Friends After College In Boston\". I did make a friend. We hit it off and I started to feel better. Then I looked for a new robotics team to join as a mentor. A couple emails later and I was in the lab of @lobstahbots.com. All of the mentors there are in their 20s. We have fun. And the kids are just the sweetest you'll ever meet. Don't take my word for it. They won 7 consecutive unique awards over the three seasons I've been with them. The judges just can't let them leave an event without a trophy. They are affectionately known as My Lobster Children. This year they nominated me for the Woodie Flowers Award, the only recognition available to mentors rather than students."
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"plaintext": "So all this time I'm jamming to The Vergecast, reading all about platforms and the internet and the destruction of our global information ecosystem. You know, normal reading. I became quite interested in the developments of distributed social networks. Mastodon and ActivityPub seemed promising. I joined and posted, but never managed to meet anybody. Then Threads came along. A big platform that will definitely attract a mainstream user base, and with promises to connect to the Fediverse, great! I knew the eventual rugpull would come. So I tried it out for a while. It was better than X-Twitter, but still had that platform ick. Eventually, I learned more about Bluesky, which I joined in August 2024 via invite code. They were building on a protocol like Mastodon, but this wasn't the W3C blessed ActivityPub. It was something else. Once I understood it, with much help from @davidimel.com's reporting on the Waveform podcast, I knew. This one has legs."
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"plaintext": "My plan back in the summer of '25 was to play the long game. Spend the time and energy to become a notable part of the community, and opportunities will follow. That was my prediction. At this point I can safely say that prediction was correct. In less than a year, I went from some rando who hardly posts on Bluesky to a community organizer, founding contributor at @ecosystemaction.com, and speaker at the ATmosphere Conference. I have relationships with not just the biggest names in the atproto space, but in internet history. Crazy. Tell me a year ago that I would shake hands hug and break bread with the likes of @quillmatiq.com or @rude1.blacksky.team, or meet the creator of Google Reader, and I would have laughed."
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"plaintext": "I gave a talk! At a tech conference! They paid me to do this! Seriously, I want to express my immense gratitude to @atprotocol.dev for sponsoring my conference travel and lodging. I was lucky enough to convince my boss to let me not take PTO in exchange for a report on the conference and ecosystem when I get back. That's the strongest testament to the value of my work in my career so far. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who attended my talk or watched it online. I had a great time. The response from friends, family, and the community reassures me that I'm doing good and valuable work."
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"plaintext": "This past December, @christian.bsky.social put up a forum post asking if anyone would be interested in helping facilitate design and strategic action research in the atproto ecosystem. I, having been looking for an opportunity to plug in with my particular skillset (not dev), jumped on the opportunity. Since January we and 10+ other volunteers have been forming an organization to do just that. We held our first live community engagement at the conference, and facilitated two workshops in collaboration with @modalfoundation.eurosky.social and @germnetwork.com. People loved it! We had 5+ teams practice real research, learning and producing value from design research methods. Everyone I talked to about EAR supported it's premise and look forward to seeing it produce work that the ecosystem desperately needs."
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"plaintext": "It's hard to know how strong of a bond you are forming with someone when all your interactions are online. Dozens of faces are now familiar to me after a few months of chronic skyline surfing. When those bonds are not just likes and replies but a shared recognition of the immense threat to our society from big platforms and the need for a vibrant open internet, its more than a familiar face. There's mutual respect and appreciation. Trust. And lots of hugs. Not awkward hugs but genuine squeezes of love. The me from a year ago starved for human interaction in a brand new city could never have predicted the amount of joy in a room of 200 of my best friends."
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"plaintext": "This community, this movement, this ecosystem, it's all still delicate. The room got real quiet on Saturday afternoon when Jay announced Attie. Productive conversations are happening about that situation. Refer to @trezy.codes last two blog posts for the story. What Attie put into perpsective for me is that the broad public interest and investment in atproto is far from self sustaining. This could all come crashing down. Bluesky told us to treat them as a future adversary, but one misstep can have them behaving like one tomorrow, or today even."
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"plaintext": "They hold the power in this ecosystem in public attention, in users, in capital, and in protocol governance. That power needs to be carefully considered and distributed as soon as feasibly possible. Otherwise, well we've seen that movie enough times. I hope Bluesky's negligence doesn't irrevocably harm the movement that has grown so much larger than them."
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"plaintext": "What gives me hope is this community. Not the technology persay. Technology is just a means. Like Rudy says, \"community is the only moat.\" This community has the best, most joyful and hopeful culture of any tech community I've ever observed, let alone been a part of. If the whole Bluesky PBC dies tomorrow, I trust that the protocol and community we have can still be an immense force for good in the world. And that is worth the fight every day."
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"description": "Reflections on my first ATmosphereConf",
"publishedAt": "2026-04-03T20:49:45+00:00",
"textContent": "This was a week of many firsts for me. My first time in Canada. My first time in Vancouver. My first(ish) time in the PNW. My first trip with Air Canada (they have free beer and wine??). My first time meeting dozens of friends I had only interacted with online. My first time facilitating a workshop at a conference. My first talk at a conference. My first time missing a competition event since joining the Lobstah Bots as a mentor. And my first ATmosphere Conference.\nHi, hello, welcome\nif you are reading this and already know me from the internet, the conference, or another atproto meetup, there's gonna be some exposition here. I want to catch up everybody else on what I've been up to the last few months. This one is for family, friends, old classmates, old neighbors, the works.\n> TL;DR: I've found my people.\nHow I got here\nI've been obsessed with tech ever since I was a child. I was that kid who bounced between iOS and Android with every phone, just to get a taste of what was happening on both. My first phone was an iPhone 4s, which @reckless.bsky.social will agree ('s' notwithstanding) was the best iPhone. My first Android was the OnePlus One, which I bought using an invite code. Back in the day my dad @nickpurdy.bsky.social founded @pastemagazine.bsky.social, which combined with my tech affinity is probably why I wanted to be a gadget writer for a while. Loyal reader/listener of @theverge.com is definitely important to the story.\nPretty quickly I took to making and building. I made several Iron Man cosplays under the mentorship of @blackbuzzard.bsky.social, combining arts and crafts with my first forays into electronics. Yes, the glove and chest piece lit up. I even added a laser pointer to the gauntlet.\nIn high school I joined a FIRST Robotics team. School was alright, but team 4468 is where I gained experience. I made lifelong friends who later became college roommates and now my groomsmen. My coaches and team built me into a capable leader. They lead me to my dream undergrad program at Georgia Tech. I hadn't heard of Industrial Design until I was a sophomore in high school, but this robotics-team-marketing-lead-turned-team-captain loved it immediately.\nCollege was an absolute blast. I met my now-fiance. I learned so so much about design, interaction, organizations, people. GT will always be a home for me. I landed a full time offer at the beginning of my senior year by way of coursework and an internship with my now employer. It was the smoothest on ramp to a position one could imagine. I spent two semesters doing project work with the team I eventually joined. The interview was essentially a formality. When I saw so many of my friends struggle to find a job or go back to school for a master's degree, I felt I couldn't say no. It's consulting work at a Fortune-500 enterprise software and staff-augmentation firm. Not inspiring, but it pays the bills.\nMy path to my current employment was so smooth, I worried that I wouldn't survive in the fires of today's job market. I struggled to frame my experience and skills in a package that would attract recruiters. I felt unhireable. Even if I ever wanted to ditch corporate and do something else, where would I go?\nWhen I graduated and we moved to Boston for @alanascorner.online's masters program, I had a rough bout with depression which lasted several months. I've always been the 'no medical conditions shockingly stable' person, so this was hard to swallow at the time. I had just gone from living on campus, with all my best friends in my hometown city where hundreds knew me, to a new place in a corner of the country I'd hardly ever been to and a city in which I knew only two people in the whole metro-area. Every bit of structure and familiarity was gone. It took a while to build back up a community. \nWe did get there. I joined a Discord server aptly named \"Make Friends After College In Boston\". I did make a friend. We hit it off and I started to feel better. Then I looked for a new robotics team to join as a mentor. A couple emails later and I was in the lab of @lobstahbots.com. All of the mentors there are in their 20s. We have fun. And the kids are just the sweetest you'll ever meet. Don't take my word for it. They won 7 consecutive unique awards over the three seasons I've been with them. The judges just can't let them leave an event without a trophy. They are affectionately known as My Lobster Children. This year they nominated me for the Woodie Flowers Award, the only recognition available to mentors rather than students.\nSo all this time I'm jamming to The Vergecast, reading all about platforms and the internet and the destruction of our global information ecosystem. You know, normal reading. I became quite interested in the developments of distributed social networks. Mastodon and ActivityPub seemed promising. I joined and posted, but never managed to meet anybody. Then Threads came along. A big platform that will definitely attract a mainstream user base, and with promises to connect to the Fediverse, great! I knew the eventual rugpull would come. So I tried it out for a while. It was better than X-Twitter, but still had that platform ick. Eventually, I learned more about Bluesky, which I joined in August 2024 via invite code. They were building on a protocol like Mastodon, but this wasn't the W3C blessed ActivityPub. It was something else. Once I understood it, with much help from @davidimel.com's reporting on the Waveform podcast, I knew. This one has legs.\nThe atproto community and ecosystem were still in a nascent state at the time. I have long had a distaste for the 'front door' entrance to employment, especially in the current landscape of automated applications and filtering. Most of my success I found through 'side entrances', relationships, inroads via trusted sources, rather than trying to stand out among the crowd.\nOver the course of the summer I spent more time with Bluesky and started exploring other atproto apps. I made friends by hanging out in the Atmosphere feed by @cameron.stream. I joined a couple DWeb calls, where I met @bmann.ca and @bnewbold.net. In August I attended the ATProto NYC Community Hack Day. By this point I was already trying to figure out a way to make this my job. The space lacked designers and researchers. Maybe I could provide that.\nI guess you could say this was always going to happen. That I would find a community of people who care about the same things I do. I was confident I would too, but was scared of how long that could take, and if it would really work out.\nI'm glad it did.\nMy plan back in the summer of '25 was to play the long game. Spend the time and energy to become a notable part of the community, and opportunities will follow. That was my prediction. At this point I can safely say that prediction was correct. In less than a year, I went from some rando who hardly posts on Bluesky to a community organizer, founding contributor at @ecosystemaction.com, and speaker at the ATmosphere Conference. I have relationships with not just the biggest names in the atproto space, but in internet history. Crazy. Tell me a year ago that I would shake hands hug and break bread with the likes of @quillmatiq.com or @rude1.blacksky.team, or meet the creator of Google Reader, and I would have laughed.\nNeedless to say, the plan worked. Not only do I have a pathway to a career, I am a part of a community. I've met great people I can trust because we share an optimism for the future.\nSo anyway, how'd the conference go? Amazing.\nVancouver\nHOLY SHIT THIS PLACE IS GORGEOUS. UBC campus is incredible. There's cherry blossoms here?? I now understand why the first custom feeds were about moss and trees. Great food, great people. I'd love to come back and explore the city properly.\nCareer growth\nI gave a talk! At a tech conference! They paid me to do this! Seriously, I want to express my immense gratitude to @atprotocol.dev for sponsoring my conference travel and lodging. I was lucky enough to convince my boss to let me not take PTO in exchange for a report on the conference and ecosystem when I get back. That's the strongest testament to the value of my work in my career so far. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who attended my talk or watched it online. I had a great time. The response from friends, family, and the community reassures me that I'm doing good and valuable work.\natproto.local\nAfter meeting @ronentk.me at the NYC Hack we started @atproto.boston. I've been running monthly meetups since then. On the Friday of AtmosphereConf I had the thought to get together all the organizers of local atproto meetup groups to talk about how we run our nodes and to provide a space for aspiring local organizers to connect. I held an I conference session for atproto local organizers, and atproto.local was born. We are an alliance of regional community nodes, now over 14 strong. New clusters of people who call the same city home coalesced into new nodes. Boston itself had a surprisingly large contingent at the conference (I need to take more pictures). The organizers of nodes around the world are now aligning under the #atproto.local banner, with our webring homepage at @atproto.camp. I expect this initiative to be a strong driver of the next doubling of attendees at ATmosphereConf 2027. In person events are special. More events in more places is essential to growing our community and spreading the agency of a liberatory internet to more communities who need it.\nEcosystem Action Research\nThis past December, @christian.bsky.social put up a forum post asking if anyone would be interested in helping facilitate design and strategic action research in the atproto ecosystem. I, having been looking for an opportunity to plug in with my particular skillset (not dev), jumped on the opportunity. Since January we and 10+ other volunteers have been forming an organization to do just that. We held our first live community engagement at the conference, and facilitated two workshops in collaboration with @modalfoundation.eurosky.social and @germnetwork.com. People loved it! We had 5+ teams practice real research, learning and producing value from design research methods. Everyone I talked to about EAR supported it's premise and look forward to seeing it produce work that the ecosystem desperately needs.\nRelationships\nIt's hard to know how strong of a bond you are forming with someone when all your interactions are online. Dozens of faces are now familiar to me after a few months of chronic skyline surfing. When those bonds are not just likes and replies but a shared recognition of the immense threat to our society from big platforms and the need for a vibrant open internet, its more than a familiar face. There's mutual respect and appreciation. Trust. And lots of hugs. Not awkward hugs but genuine squeezes of love. The me from a year ago starved for human interaction in a brand new city could never have predicted the amount of joy in a room of 200 of my best friends.\nCaution\nThis community, this movement, this ecosystem, it's all still delicate. The room got real quiet on Saturday afternoon when Jay announced Attie. Productive conversations are happening about that situation. Refer to @trezy.codes last two blog posts for the story. What Attie put into perpsective for me is that the broad public interest and investment in atproto is far from self sustaining. This could all come crashing down. Bluesky told us to treat them as a future adversary, but one misstep can have them behaving like one tomorrow, or today even.\n> Decentralization isn't about servers. It's about power.\nThey hold the power in this ecosystem in public attention, in users, in capital, and in protocol governance. That power needs to be carefully considered and distributed as soon as feasibly possible. Otherwise, well we've seen that movie enough times. I hope Bluesky's negligence doesn't irrevocably harm the movement that has grown so much larger than them.\nMomentum\nBeing together in person is catalyzing. I know that from working remote for three years. Bonds form stronger and faster. Ideas flow. Action is viral. I love the amount of momentum spurred by the conference. I expect it to continue, especially as aptroto.local spreads far and wide. Even in the face of blowback, or of limited funding, I have hope.\nWhat gives me hope is this community. Not the technology persay. Technology is just a means. Like Rudy says, \"community is the only moat.\" This community has the best, most joyful and hopeful culture of any tech community I've ever observed, let alone been a part of. If the whole Bluesky PBC dies tomorrow, I trust that the protocol and community we have can still be an immense force for good in the world. And that is worth the fight every day.\nI'll definitely be back next year."
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