Atmospheric Groups WG Next Steps (September 2026)

Working Groups WG Community Standards
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Hey folks,

The opensocial.community proposal was published about a month ago, and it feels to me like there is rough consensus around this direction. I’m interested in the next steps to nail things down, hopefully in alignment with atproto spaces protocol timelines. I wasn’t around for some of the earlier WG discussions, so please let me know if i’m stepping on any toes or missing some process knowledge.

One thing to get settled is the NSID and terminology, which I started a separate topic for just now. Related to that, maybe we should rename this Discourse forum name from “WG Community Standards” to “WG Atmospheric Groups”?

The current proposal text is a Google document, which is accessible and easy to comment on. As things get more stable, should we move to git, or would that be less broadly accessible? To throw out one option, we could create a group account for this working group, give it the domain handle, and use it on tangled.org to version the draft specification text and lexicons. Eventually we can put up a website with docs/resources on the same domain name. Account control could end up under lexicon.community or the atmosphere co-op being discussed (not sure if there was earlier discussion around these governance aspects).

IIRC a couple changes to the proposal text have been discussed, but we don’t have an issue or task tracker. The tangled option above could help with that, or we could come up with another way of tracking open questions.

Reference software implementations will be helpful. Bluesky is planning to internally prototype a dedicated space host which implements the group management logic (a “group host”), and could share the source code for that when it is ready. I’m guessing that other folks are doing similar implementation work. App services will need to re-implement the group membership/visibility rules using synchronized data (as discussed here), and libraries could reduce duplicate work. Probably some shared test cases would be helpful?

Should we schedule another WG call? Maybe last week of September or early October?

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I think that would be helpful. I was looking for the category earlier and I wasn’t quite sure if “Community Standards” was the one or if that was more broadly used for other community.lexicon.* lexicons or something.

That sounds great. It might be good to be able to use the issue tracker / PRs for change management. That way we can all see how the spec is changing clearly ( maybe the Google doc does that, too, I don’t know ).

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I’m also ready to pin some things down. I want to be in the next call if this is the topic.

I’m working on a prototype for groups on top of the permissioned data spec and the “opensocial.community” spec, for atmo.rsvp/openmeet use cases, and hitting the edges.

“Atmospheric groups” makes more sense to me as a title than “Community Standards”.

I think we should use the google doc for a little longer. Get more feeback in from non-technical folks, group and community users and hosts before moving source of truth for the spec to git.

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Cross-posting that a tangled git repo did get created, and we could start tracking issues there:

I also think we should do a WG meeting next week. There is a Lexicon Community meeting on Thursday, so maybe Wednesday? Will get details sorted soon.