ATmosphere technology to support organizing and activism

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I’m working on a post about anti-surveillance organizing and activism on decentralized social networks, and one of the points I’m going to make is that the ATmosphere offers a lot of Innovative and very useful functionality for organizers that doesn’t exist on centralized social networks today, and complements decentralized implementations of classic social network activism tools like blogs, newsletters, microblogging, live-streaming, etc.

Here’s some of the examples I have so far …

  • custom feeds, like Flock and other ALPRs and KOSA/KIDS Act (curated) (both of which I created with Graze) which are great for people wanting to follow a topic.
  • knowledge networks, like Bee’s Age Verification and ID Checks Semble collection. A good example of where this is useful: as I was writing this article the STOP CSAM bill suddenly resurfaced. Why is STOP CSAM so problematic? The connections on this Semble card from the Fighting Bad Internet Bills collection have links to posts from EFF and the Internet Society with in-depth analysis – as well as an action from Fight for the Future.
  • Public deliberation and collective decision making, like Blacksky People’s Assembly. A good example of where this could be useful is in discussions about whether a compromise bill is “good enough” to support, one of the toughest challenges in legislative activism. Of course at the end of the day everybody’s going to make their own decision, but peoples decisions will be a lot better if the deliberation process is better.
  • End-to-end encrypted private messaging, via Germ Networks. (OK Instagram kinda sorta had this for a while but they’re getting rid of it so it still counts!) Signal’s great, but every activist I know is sooooo overwhelmed by Signal messages that an additional secure channel is really valuable.

What do people think about these examples?

Are there others I’ve missed?

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The hyperconnectivity enabled by atproto is a huge boon for organizers:

atproto solving for the cold-start problem of social networking also means that we can begin to shift the excess of energy currently going into mobilizing over to organizing without that having to be an either-or choice between building communal reputation and trust in the public “town square” vs closed spaces of greater safety and coherence.

In that same vein I also think Verification on the open social web is going to be a really big deal for organizers. Online ‘clout’ is replaced by webs-of-trust, which in turn can only be established by engaging pro-socially with peers on the open web.

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There has been some good writing by Mosh, Erlend, and Meri about this topic worth pulling in.

Permissioned spaces coming to atproto will also unlock a lot of important affordances for crafting protected spaces for organizers. For example, permissioned spaces on semble would turn into community-run search engines.

My hope is that atproto is the missing infrastructural piece that enables us to really shape digital spaces around the specific needs organizers and their communities rather the the way these communities have been forced to adapt themselves across various hostile platforms.

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Another incredible affordance I alluded to in the first article: atproto’s composable stack presupposes infrastructural specialization amongst institutions.

The type of institution you are and what technical capacity you have determines your participation in the infrastructure commons, which isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition.

Smaller orgs opt into the web-wide coordination project incrementally by means of atproto-OAuth integration, standard.site etc.

Medium sized orgs can contribute to the web-of-trust by running labelers, verifiers, feeds and blocklists.

Large orgs can operate load-bearing infrastructure like PDS hosting, custom clients and AppViews in cooperation with tech-specialists like Blacksky, Northsky and Eurosky.

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Relevant to organizing/activism are both censorship resilience and surveillance.

Censorship resilience, IMO, is the most significant feature that ATPROTO/open social can offer for organizing/activism. It underlies all of the features you have described – because what good is any feature if it could be taken away at the discretion of the service provider. The ability to move to a different service provider (PDS, App View etc) or self host without losing the social network that activists have invested in building should be what draws in this community the most – if this is made salient. Many today are reliant on the centralized social networks and Slack and Zoom without considering that they are subject to service denial at any time.

Surveillance IMO is the next important thing – which many activist groups ignore in using the centralized tools above, because they lack convenient alternatives.

https://solidarity.social was build on ATPROTO and Matrix to address these two issues squarely. The https://solidar.app was recently updated to support secure group chat with a UI mirroring the group chat released by Bluesky. The secure group chat works via Matrix rooms which have E2EE. This provides organizers and activists a pathway to leave centralized group chat like Facebook groups etc.

I am happy to discuss with you separately where we are with Solidarity Social. I think your readers would appreciate knowing that there is an ATPROTO operator dedicated to serving the organizer/activist community.

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Thanks for these enlightening examples @jdp23.thenexus.today !

As one of the Semble team, we’d love to hear if you have any additional ideas for how Semble could support your organizing. There are also a few other atproto annotation tools like Skysquare and Margin that provide complementary affordances for social annotation and curation. We like to call social annotation tools a “co-augmented reality layer” that supports navigation of a complex and sometimes hostile information environment.

Another interesting example we saw on Semble was for collective sensemaking around a particular event (W Social)

ps the Semble link you provided looks like it got corrupted, I think you meant www.hawley.senate.gov — Semble

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Great feedback, all, thanks much! Agreed about the potential of permissioned spaces (and steps in that direction like Blacksky’s community-only posts), and also about the architectural value of AT’s composable stack. The articles from Mosh and Erland, and Meri’s presentation, do a great job of sketching the future possibilities and the value of building for organizers and I was already planning on linking to them. My main focus on this article though is what’s possible right now. At least in the US, there’s a huge amount of energy in opposition to AI data centers and Flock cameras, as well as increased awareness of the risk because of the threats of ICE/CBP/DHS and NSPM-7. Over the next month or so we’e got skirmishes over bad internet bills in Congress (and several states), the Stop the Big Tech Takeover week of action, the week of action against ALPRs, and the rampup of Solidarity over Surveillance. So seem like great opportunities to have an impact while also attracting newcomers, the classic self-reinforcing cycle.

A few more-targeted responses:

Agreed on putting more energy into organizing, not just mobilization. For the “general-purpose account as an alternative to the cold-start”, athe examples I’ve been thinking of are the ability to easily add people to collaborative editing of a Leafelt blog/newsletter (back in Get FISA Right days, we used the Wetpaint wiki for this, and the barrier of asking people to sign up for a new account was significant) or a Semble collection.

Yeah, I should mention some of these … the US Government Contributions labeler is a very relevant example.

That post is actually what inspired me to set up the Bad Internet Bills Semble collection!

It’s true, but in practice for this kind of activism (in contrast to direct action and rapid response) this hasn’t been enough of an incentive for a lot of organizers to move; they tend to treat it as “yeah that’ll suck, we’ll have to figure something else out when it happens.” I was talking with a local progressive organizer who’s very frustrated that his group won’t. move off of Google Docs, Zoom, Slack, FB and his take was that it wouldn’t become a priority until people in the group started getting arrested.

I’ll mention solidarity.social although your business model (while I certainly understand why you’re taking that approach) is a big barrier for most organizing use cases.

Thanks! Two things that leap to mind are the ability to pin a post to be the first one that people see in a collection (useful when sharing collections with people who don’t have context) and a collection display mode where it shows the notes on all the cards.… I’ll keep my eye open for other possibilities as I explore more.

Good suggestion on the other tools. And yeah, sensemaking and navigating the hostile info environment is certainly a good way to frame things.

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Thanks – that is good feedback. Sounds like stopping surveillance might be a more immediate motivator - which solidarity.social certainly offers and they will then be ready to flip the switch to use Element/Matrix instead of Slack/Zoom instantly when the arrests happen, since the matrix accounts for activists would already have been setup and in use due to use of the Solidar App.

I would like to arrange a Signal call with you when you are available - the business model can be adapted to find a mutually workable solution - so I would like to hear if you have any leads on who I should discuss this with to get broader adoption in the activist/organizer community.

Good to hear about the Solidarity Over Surveillance initiative. Would be good to connect with them. We launched an initiative recently to build up hyperlocal organizing.

Precinct Connect aims to connect people with like minded people that live around them, via Bluesky, that they can then work together on:

  1. Voter support and turnout
    -Registration
    -Assistance & GOTV
    -Voter protection/election defense
    -Election oversight and audit
  2. Rapid Response
  3. Mutual Aid

We have respondents in 50+ metro areas across 30+ US states.

We are engaged in discussions to scale the respondents via our partners that include a large union, Indivisible Action Coalition, Citizens Oversight and Field Team 6. I would like to hear your suggestions and how this might intersect with your initiatives.

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