The agenda for #ATScience is up! Check out the speaker list and full schedule below 👇
The range and quality of proposals we received really exceeded our expectations - thanks to everyone who submitted something!
March 27, Vancouver - can't wait to see you there ✨
Sessions include >
The richest man owns X.
The second and third richest men control Google.
The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.
And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.
See the problem here?
why do nerds
suddenly appear
every time
I post here
New blogpost about atproto
It's not federation, it's not a p2p mesh. It's a secret third thing: practical.
www.pfrazee.com/blog/practic...
What are we doing here?
On Bluesky, yes—but social media in general?
But also here—in this moment. On this post.
Gathering info?
Performing identity?
Testing an argument?
Seeking recognition?
Activism?
Passing time?
As we scroll, are we conscious?
Are you asking yourself: What am I doing here?
In a seminar, a speaker knows her audience. In a newspaper, writers imagine readers.
On social media, who is the audience?
—those who follow you?
—those who might see it algorithmically?
—an indistinct, unbounded crowd?
What possibilities for meaning emerge—and what possibilities are foreclosed?
When we say public discourse, what do we mean? Before social media, there were:
—the agora
—printed pages
—broadcast signals
Each had form, structure, limits and affordances.
What form does social media impose on discourse—beyond its content?
What are we doing when we speak into these systems?
This seems to be a common reply to my thread, so I'll address it here. Basically, the argument is who cares if this is a misleading attack on Newsom, he's bad so if it hurts him it's fine.
And I think it's important to push back on misinformation so that when there are legitimate criticisms...
Here's the documentary that 1.1 million Hungarians have watched over the past week, documenting the damage that Viktor Orban's regime has done to health, education and public transportation in Hungary
with English subtitles:
youtu.be/9NQEcLIiOpM?...
joining @danabra.mov fight. let's swap discover to a for you like feed. it allows us to better connect with others. it doesn't work well during boostrap but given the current discover experience for a fresh account, just default to a for you feed seeded with cat pics until there are enough likes
Thank you!🙏🙏
@atproto.science hey guys 👋
we have migrated our handle to @skysquare.app and noticed the ATmosphere 2026 page is still linking to our old .bsky.social handle, which is 404ing. would you mind updating? 🙏🙏 thanks! looking forward to the event!
atproto.science/events/atmos...
NEW: “CBS Evening News” producer Alicia Hastey sends a bombshell farewell note:
Stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”
My 70 year old dad, whose favorite band is The Righteous Brothers, just informed me that he enjoyed the Bad Bunny show bc even though he didn’t understand the words, “it seemed like everyone on stage was having a good time!” So there ya go lol.
This is nonetheless more favorable terrain for Trump than for the American system. As New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote (here in The Post), “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Trump has for years stoked the idea that actually, having your own facts is fine. And even as his base chooses facts that he finds inconvenient in the moment, he’s still pushing toward the next phase: Everyone is entitled to the facts that Trump presents. What institutions of power will be left to disagree?
These are the last words in the last column I wrote for The Washington Post, titled "When institutions crumble, strongmen step in". www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
For those of you who:
* Feel enraged to watch billionaires destroy important newsrooms
and
* Recall vaguely that Jeff Bezos was once considered a courageous owner who fortified the Washington Post
I recommend this piece by the Post's former fact-checker
glennkessler.substack.com/p/a-billiona...
"When in doubt, draw a distinction."
Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that.
This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one.
I will post them one at a time. Ready?
The GREAT SUPPRESSION is here.
X and TikTok are actively censoring users and throttling profiles in real time. Social media has officially shifted from a toy to a tool, and these platforms are no longer safe or trustworthy.
When you do not own the platform, you do not control your voice.
This is at least the 3rd app coming to Vancouver to talk about how ATproto allows users to add social/semantic layer to the web. The potential is immense. Also an interesting overlap with myhub, launched almost 6 years ago. This is going to be So Much Fun.
In 2025, as Bluesky grew from 25M to 42M users, we took actions to keep it welcoming, using proactive design to reduce toxic content by 79%. Our 2025 Transparency Report shares how we're building a safer platform while keeping a transparent and human-centered approach: bsky.social/about/blog/0...
LFG!! @skysquare.app 💪❤️👊
📢 New #ATScience speaker! @simpsontw.bsky.social will present their project @skysquare.app : “Skysquare: context as a service.” Skysquare uses ATProtocol to reattach public discourse to its source, transforming the web into a socially annotated commons 📎
It's not just "the cloud." UC Berkeley professor unpacks the physical cost of digital lives—from real energy use, ecological strain, and labor hidden from view. news.berkeley.edu/2026/01/21/t...
When will the great migration of journalists follow?
"Hundreds of nonprofit local news organizations have sprung up, from Lafayette, La. to New Bedford, Mass. to Chicago. Rather than relying primarily on advertising revenue, nonprofit newsrooms are sustained by coalitions of philanthropic institutions, local businesses, individual donors and readers."
BREAKING: The UK Government is working with Canada and Australia to launch a coordinated ban on X, per the Telegraph
(🦋) BLUESKY NEWS: The South African Sociopath—everyone knows who I mean—has apparently just made a series of changes to Twitter that launched a new exodus. The per-second growth rate here at BlueSky is now *more than triple* what it was yesterday.
So welcome, Twitter refugees! This is *way* better.
🐒🐵✌️
An homage...
ChatGPT's new image generator explaining our logo for the folks in the back.
