Atmospheric Group Terminology and NSID

Working Groups WG Community Standards
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The current proposal for interoperable groups is called “opensocial.community”. There have been a number of scattered discussions about changing the name, as well as related terminology questions like what product features built on it might be called, what should show up in OAuth consent screens, etc.

I think it is important to get this settled sooner than later, and am creating a dedicated thread for proposals/discussions.

Notable previous conversations:

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Atmospheric Groups WG Next Steps (September 2026)
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Here is one proposal:

  • a “group account” is a dedicated network identity (DID+handle) that powers an “atmospheric group”
  • an “atmospheric group” is the pattern of organizing multiple individual participant accounts in an interoperable way that works across app modalities and software implementations. The core of this is data localization and consistent group access/visibility across apps of different types.
  • this WG is standardizing an interoperable way to manage atmospheric groups (membership, roles, moderation, etc). We expect this to be the most popular way to implement things, but there might end up being alternative/competing ways to go about it, and that is fine. The goal is to be the “default” and most broadly interoperable system, not a “universal for all time” system.
  • we use the intermodal.group domain (group.intermodal.* NSIDs) for this specific standard. Developers and protocol folks refer to it like “the intermodal implementation of atmospheric groups”
  • “atmospheric groups” is the terminology that comes up in application and OAuth surfaces, and is how folks talk about this functionality generally (“a cool benefit of SportsApp app is that it uses atmospheric groups, so you can use CalApp for calendar events and visibility just works”)
  • folks can use basically whatever terminology they want for product features: group, circle, organization, team, club, etc. “an OrangeApp Team is just an atmospheric group”

I think “group” should appear in the NSID we go with, but I’m not strongly opinionated about intermodal.group specifically. Something wonky/specific works well to signal that this is an implementation thing, not the broader concept. It could also be something like opensocial.group. “Standard Group” in analogy to “Standard Site” is sorta nice.

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I’m for it as described. No strong feeling between intermodal.group and opensocial.group.

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Sounds good to me.

Re intermodal.group I do feel like it’d be good to not use “opensocial”.

I think personally that’s mostly driven by the way it didn’t feel good when the Social Web Foundation was formed and it felt like it was basically saying the “Social Web” is ActivityPub, without acknowledging the other equally “social web” protocols such as ATProto or Nostr.

I’m not saying that’s quite what we are doing with opensocial.group, it just feels like it’s a bit overloaded to be used as a way to refer to a very specific group standard on ATProto.

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Tagging @erlend.sh @essentialrandom.bsky.social @brittanyellich.com for input.

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I agree with just about all of it.

I’m using my own domain for NSIDs as I experiment. I’d love to contribute to and point at a standard.

I like something in *.group. Leaning against OpenSocial because I’m confused by naming collisions.

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I’m not sure I have a super strong opinion here, intermodal.group is fine with me!

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Intermodal group is a cool name, though i wonder why not use a word like atmospheric if the expectation is that the popular terminology will be “atmospheric groups”. Is the goal to disambiguate between the concept of atmosphere groups and the reference protocol?

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Is the goal to disambiguate between the concept of atmosphere groups and the reference protocol?

Yup, I tried to address that in my post. I think “atmospheric group” is the concept and design pattern, and intermodal.group is a specific implementation of it.

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+1 for intermodal.group.

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As an update, the tangled repo and current version of the proposal use opensocial.group.

I’m now leaning towards that name personally. It is a bit friendlier, retains more of the history of this WG and Brittney’s original proposal, etc.

It would be good to settle on a final name soon. I don’t think this WG has a formal consensus process, so i’m not entirely sure what that will entail. But definitely if you would have a problem with that being the name, or have a counter-proposal, weigh in soon?

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Website for opensocial.group
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Yeah, as much as I some initial, light opposition to it, at this point it feels like we could just go with it.

Intermodal is a little starkly nerdy, which isn’t really a pro.