Let’s build an Atmospheric Web

There’s a story we tell ourselves about the last quarter-century of publishing on the web that goes something like this: as blogging and personal websites started gaining traction and challenging the gatekeepers of traditional media, tech platforms emerged that channeled that energy into their locked-in spaces. Facebook and Twitter, once seen as champions of a new democratized “social media”, fenced in the digital commons, and everything from the death of Google Reader to the rise of the influencer curdled the promise of the internet into a sclerotic space mediated by a few corporations that aided a rising global tide of reactionary authoritarianism.

As someone who’s told that story many times myself I recognize it is, of course, woefully incomplete. For one, I remember what it was like blogging in the early days — exciting, yes, but also often too difficult to do simple things, hard to gain traction, and too inaccessible to the same folks who’d been locked out by the very gatekeepers we wanted to take down. Also: remember IE 6? Not exactly halcyon days.

The web of today is a tangle of these years of choices, choices we often didn’t get to make or were made to drive shareholder value, but choices nonetheless. Platforms provided discovery and monetization in exchange for openness and ownership, for example. The idea that we have to choose between ownership and distribution, though, is increasingly false thanks to decentralization.

In fact we can now use the AT Protocol, the underlying technology behind Bluesky, to give everyone access to an open, discoverable network that they can maintain ownership of. We call this network The Atmosphere (get it?) and it feels every bit as revolutionary as the web once was.

How Atmospheric Publishing Works

Those early days of blogging were a time of maximal openness on a much smaller web. Anyone with a bit of technical wherewithal would set up a domain name, provision some open source software, maybe tweak a few templates, and be off and running. Early adopters got first mover advantage and media coverage, effectively solving their discovery problem.

More people meant more voices and perspectives, it also meant it was harder for all those new people to find the good, or even relevant, stuff. When the idea of a “social graph” where you would find and follow your friends arrived, the platforms realized that graph could be a starting point for delivering personalized recommendations, soon followed by ads. For a glorious time, it all mostly worked while all of the incentives were aligned.

Narrator: the incentives did not stay aligned

Eventually, the idea of maximizing engagement took over the platforms, much to the detriment of the people using them. By then, though, everyone was locked in, without a way to take your social graph to a different network, or even no network at all. Operating at the scale of billions meant platforms were basically immune to upstart challengers.

The Atmosphere offers something different: ownership and distribution. When you publish something using AT Protocol it gets added to a global firehose of all the other content published to the network, sort of akin to an open Google index that anyone can write to and, just as importantly, read from.

And anyone can run any part of the network, from the data storage servers, to the app views that show your posts, to personalized search feeds that find you the good stuff.

Right now, the vast majority of Atmospheric posts are from Bluesky, the microblogging network made by the same people who built AT Protocol (and my employer, fyi). There’s no reason that has to remain true, though — this post you are reading right now, published on Leaflet, is an Atmospheric post.

Getting Started

Publishing to The Atmosphere is a bit more involved than just putting up a website. Thankfully, there are new tools emerging to make the fiddly bits easier so everyone can focus on doing what they do best, whether that’s blogging , recording vertical video makeup tutorials, coding on a livestream , saving bookmarks , or scribbling in the margins of your favorite sites.

All of these services save your data to your Personal Data Server , so even if they disappear or you decide to move on, your data stays with you. And the file formats of that data are open Lexicons that anyone can build on top of and extend so you never lose your data (coding tools like Claude Code are particularly good at building simple web apps on existing Lexicons).

And these are early days still for developers who want to build on a truly open web, not just within the constraints of what centralized platforms allow. The protocol docs have everything you need to start building — whether that's a new kind of Atmospheric app, custom feed algorithms, or integrations with existing tools.

If you already have a blog, or maybe you also have a 2026 goal of resurrecting your dormant blog, you can use the standard.site Lexicon to add your posts to The Atmosphere. As more posts use standard.site, new tools like docs.surf will aggregate those posts, making them searchable and discoverable. Anyone can create custom feeds, with algorithms they decide on not opaque code meant to keep you locked in and “engaged”.

And you keep your identity yours, starting with a classic domain name just like we started with twenty (or, yikes, thirty) years ago.

The idea of an Atmospheric web isn’t nostalgia for the sake of it to harken back to a web that often felt less burdensome, sure, but was also smaller, less diverse, and harder to use. The Atmospheric web shows what’s possible when anyone can participate in truly global social infrastructure while keeping ownership of their work.