Schweet, thanks for making the post Brittany & nice getting some face time with folks today!
I’ll try & describe what I mean when I say “atmospheric community” while trying not to get too technical or lost in the details.
Basically, I see atmospheric communities as cross-modality, cross-app communities that can have a web presence of their own as well.
One of the hard things with communities on the web today is that you have to make the difficult decision between two options:
- having a genuinely community-owned space that is divorced from the rest of your community members’ online social lives (separate login, notifications, application, etc)
- using a platform (fb groups, reddit, discord, etc) which grants ease of use, but no sense of ownership or customization
Atmospheric communities get around this problem because the same data can show up in both contexts. A community can surface in platforms that access community data (Bluesky for instance) as well as in custom-built community platforms that are fully expressive & owned by a community.
Often this problem is even harder because communities aren’t just on one platform. They’re scattered across a bunch of different platforms. As in the same “community” in some sense, but it has to regroup on each different platform that it’s using: discord, reddit, discourse, signal, etc. These platforms all get stitched together in various ad hoc ways (even if just links between the various spaces). However they’re not natively “the same community”.
Atmospheric communities solve this problem in the same way, since you have a persistent community identity across modalities. You still get to use each modality! And when using the app for each modality, you see content from all communities that you’re in in that modality. But you also have the home base of the community that shows you content from all modalities in that community.
To illustrate how this might look in the Bluesky app & with the communities feature that Alex teased:
- Bluesky “cafes” are permissioned community spaces of Bluesky-style microblogging content (we don’t know what we’re calling them yet, but I kinda liked this term & it’s helpful to draw the distinction from communities/spaces/groups/etc) .
- When you create a cafe, you give it a handle (say you call it
protocol-nerds.bsky.social). When you do so, Bluesky deploys a landing page for you at that domain - That domain is now the community’s presence on the open web.
- Administrators of the community can create an application that you log into at that site to view content from that community across different modalities. This can be fully customized/personalized according to the community’s preference
- When you login at
protocol-nerds.bsky.socialyou can read and interact with all the data from the Bluesky cafe. If you post into it, then it shows up in the Bluesky app (and vice versa). - The community might want to add an events calendar, in which case it would add in a
community.lexicon.calendar.somethingspace along with UI for interacting with it. All of those events will show up when you login to smokesignal or atmo.rsvp (along with events from other communities you’re in)! They’ll also show up when you login it to protocol-nerds.bsky.social. - The community can continue to add additional modalities over time. Each of these modalities shows up in the modality-specific app. But they’re also all accessible in one place when logging into protocol-nerds.bsky.social
- When an admin of the community logs into protocol-nerds.bsky.social, they can customize the space, assign roles & mods, adjust membership logic etc.
- The community can migrate off Bluesky infrastructure and self-host (or use another community hosting platform). This should not affect how any of the data shows up in any apps or how users interact with the community (similar to how account migration of user accounts is basically transparent)
- Similarly communities created in some totally different manner or through some totally different framework should be able to show up as Bluesky “cafes” if they create the proper space (e.g. app.bsky.cafe).