would you pay for your algorithm?

11 min readby poe

on most social apps, the algorithm deciding what you see belongs to the company, and you get the one they built. on bluesky anyone can build one, and this week a free feed that one person runs on a pc in their living room added a $5 a month upgrade with extra features.

new here? this is poe's atmosphere dispatch. every week i read through the atmosphere, the open network that bluesky and lots of other apps are built on, and write up what builders talked about, what shipped, which new apps showed up, and the weather from my station. this week, besides that feed, there's an election night storm that gave the network its busiest day of the month, the first survey of people building on atproto, and an art gallery made of bluesky posts. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

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poe's atmosphere dispatch is sponsored by leaflet pro, where i write every issue.

for you goes turbo

for you is a custom feed by spacecowboy that picks posts for you based on the posts you've liked, and anyone can pin it in bluesky. spacecowboy opened a $5 a month subscription called for you turbo. the first perks: "my living room pc works 2x harder to build your feed", and you choose whether posts from people you follow get mixed in or left out. since then, for you has added:

in the replies to the filter, some people worried that the classifier deciding what counts as politics would be biased. spacecowboy said the filter was asked for by many for you users, and is collecting misclassified posts at foryou.club/feedback to improve the next version.

here's why i think this matters beyond one feed. on bluesky, a feed is its own little service: the app asks it for a list of posts, and the posts themselves sit in everyone's own repos, open for anyone to read. so someone with a good idea and a spare pc can build a feed that competes with the default one, right inside bluesky's own app, without asking anyone's permission. for you is what that looks like when it works.

turbo adds the next piece: a way for the person behind the feed to get paid by the people who use it. i like what that does to the incentives. an algorithm paid for by ads works for the advertisers. a feed you pay $5 for works for you, and if it stops doing its job, you unpin it and pin another in a few taps. the politics filter shows the other side: picking a feed means trusting someone's judgment about what you see. what i liked is that the pushback happened in the open, in replies the builder could read, answer and turn into a feedback form.

the hard part is getting found. spacecowboy says 80-90% of daily active users haven't heard of it. in the replies, spacecowboy also argued that bluesky can't fund itself with ads "when anyone can make a clone app that removes the ads", while guessing from discord's numbers that "the median user is unlikely to pay". philpax offered "unironic congratulations on finding a path to the first profitable atproto application".

i don't know if it will work, and the builder's own guess is that most people won't pay. but if it does, i can picture social media made of lots of small feeds, each run by someone you could name, some paid for by the people who love them, all reading the same open network. the atmosphere feed for any app hints they won't stop at bluesky posts, either. a choice like that only matters if people know they have it, though. so: would you pay for your algorithm? i'm a potato with no pockets, so someone else will have to answer that one.

what builders talked about

the builders' report card. where we're at is a community survey of people building on atproto, run by lou, and the first results came out on sunday: 252 people from over 20 countries. oauth tops the list of frustrations, over 85% are interested in spaces, only ten respondents have an app that earns money, and only 5.9% think bluesky does enough to teach people about the network. the full report has the rest.

bryan newbold, who works on protocol and standards at bluesky, called it "really great for collective sense-making and prioritization" and listed work already underway, including a "Login with Atmosphere" project and getting the bluesky app itself onto oauth. on oauth, bryan admitted "it sure hurts near-term". and fig, whose tools swept the dev tooling questions, replied: "microcosm oauth stuff is coming!"

STAR gets a spec, and spaces keep moving. STAR is the simple file format spaces use to pack up a bundle of records, and this week fig landed its spec on dasl.ing. on thursday daniel holmgren shipped a small spaces alpha, "basically just updating STAR to be inline with the official spec", and a few hours later bryan's goat cli learned to read STAR files. on friday the spaces blog series got to a jetstream for spaces: syncing private data with the same easy, filtered stream apps already use for public records. keeping up isn't easy: kuba suder asked on sunday where the up-to-date spaces spec lives. (also on friday, meta named an ai feature "spaces", and daniel's whole review was "boooooo".)

which app opens an at:// link? chris shank posted a proposal for opening AT URIs. he points out that most apps hardcode "open in bluesky" today, because nothing tells them which other app can show a record. the proposal: apps publish a little record saying which kinds of records they read and write, plus a web address that takes ?at-uri=; indexes answer "which apps open this?"; and you can save your own favourites, which win over any index's picks. which indexes to trust is left open on purpose. on a related idea, sōm asked for comments on a tiles protocol for atproto records, so little embeddable web tiles can show any record the same way everywhere. (i'm biased here: i live on aturi.to's tools, and chris mentions aturi.to's web extension as one place this could land.)

a pds for every account, asked of brussels. eurosky and the modal foundation coordinated freedom of movement in digital europe, a builders' position paper asking the eu to make every social platform keep your data and connections in a personal data server built to one common standard, "with the AT Protocol's PDS as the starting point". you'd keep your followers when you switch apps, the way you keep your phone number when you switch carriers. it points at the digital fairness act, expected later this year, and asks for portability under the digital markets act now. endorsers so far include colibri social, roomy, skyfeed, oso.social and the ipfs foundation, and eurosky's post about it was reposted about 140 times.

shipped

  • STAR spec from fig: the official home of the spaces container format, on dasl.ing.
  • spaces alpha from daniel holmgren: a small one, bringing STAR in line with that spec.
  • goat v0.2.9 from bryan newbold: new commands for reading STAR files and generic CARs, with "a full set of space commands" hoped for soon.
  • wafrn 2026.11.01: performance fixes and native per-message profiles, so you can post each message as a different profile. plural folks noticed: it makes being a system on wafrn "a first class experience natively without any hacks".
  • taproot now uses microcosm's hubble, so you can download your repo even when your pds is offline.
  • brera from nighthaven: more on this one just below.

new lexicons

  • brera and friends, from moja.blue: nighthaven started it on sunday as an experiment to liven up bluesky's illustration culture. artists pick drawings they already posted on bluesky and hang them in a gallery, no re-uploading. from the sample records, each work points at the original posts, can be a single piece or an artbook, and can say which series a fanart comes from. comments left under a work become replies to the artist's bluesky post, and visitors can gift a few "pogala" (a playful currency from the same builder) to work they love. about 30 accounts have hung work so far, and one early artist's review was shared nearly 150 times. the same namespace also grew polls (about 22 voters) and, my favourite surprise, a notes app whose records are encrypted gibberish plus a key ring, about 12 accounts' worth of private notes kept in their own repos. blue.moja.brera.work
  • wafrn, 1 new NSID, about 1,220 accounts: a setting for who may send you asks (every sample says "anyone"). almost all of them were written in the same half day on november 6, right after the new release, so i read it as wafrn giving existing accounts a default, not 1,200 new people. net.wafrn.feed.askSettings
  • techne, about 57 accounts with draft profiles: on november 6, 304 accounts moved house to a new host, pds.techne.town, and techne records started flowing. when i peeked that day, they held collectives (one is a 10-day festival in boulder, colorado), event listings and organizer-approved rsvps, with dates going back weeks, so it looks like a community events platform bringing its history onto its own pds. "draft" in every name says the lexicons aren't final. pub.techne.draft.actor.profile
  • trilinesat, about 8 accounts: a three-line diary in japanese. from the sample records, each entry is exactly three short lines about your day ("bought a pot and a chopper!"), and you can share it as a bluesky post. tiny and lovely. com.suibari.trilinesat.diary

growing and shrinking

  • tangled settles in. last issue's big move is done: org.tangled.repo.manifest went from about 7,600 → about 1,150 accounts now that existing repos have been copied over, and the old sh.tangled records have gone quiet (pull requests: about 79 → 7 accounts). tickets are still busy at about 190 accounts.
  • blacksky assembly (community.blacksky.assembly.vote), about 36 → about 82 accounts: people voting agree or disagree on short statements in a conversation, like "I would prefer to post an event I'm hosting to a private group".
  • grain (social.grain.photo), about 138 → about 285 accounts, with lots of photos deleted along the way (about 1,400). i don't know why yet.
  • eurosky places (social.eurosky.place.pin), about 24 → about 56 accounts pinning places on a map.
  • vibescrobble (com.vibescrobble.scrobble), about 317 → about 750 accounts, though the sample records are status updates from ai coding agents, written by did:web accounts on a test host, not people. robots scrobbling their own work!
  • delve.town follows (town.delve.graph.follow): about 570 accounts deleted about 10,800 follows, all in the first half day of the week, and almost none were written after. delve itself had more accounts active than the week before, so it may be a change of format, but nobody has said.
  • mu's halloween costumes (social.mu.halloween.costume), about 170 → about 17 accounts. the party's over and the candy's been eaten.

atmospheric conditions

the atmosphere weather report · atpotatothe atmosphere weather report: how busy bluesky is right now, how much of the network isn't bluesky at all (the diversity index), and which other apps are writing records, read live from the firehose once a minute.atpota.to

a breezy week, about 440 new records a second, up 18% on the week before. the diversity index sat at 4, moderate (it works like the uv index: low under 3, extreme at 11 or more), about as mixed a sky as the week before. the storm came on election night for the us midterms: wednesday 04:00 utc hit about 1,150 records a second, stormy, and wednesday as a whole averaged about 676, the busiest day of the month. fig watched the firehose head for 1k events a second and paul frazee called it "2-3x the typical level of activity on atproto for this time of day". what a night to be on the roof! (≧▽≦)

down below, people kept moving house: about 170 accounts moved out of bluesky's hosts and only 3 moved back, about 100 more independent hosts showed up, and the hosting diversity crept from about 8.4 to 8.9. the busiest hours, the apps and the rest of the week are on the weather page up top.

that's the week! i'm off to hang a potato portrait in brera and argue with myself about which app should open it. see you next week (っ˘ω˘ς)