If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that the ATProtocol was the future of social media. If you'd asked me at the end of last year, I would have told you that it was the future of the web, as well. Today I think it could be bigger even than that.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but I just spent five days in Vancouver with 300 people, all of whom are finding uses for this protocol from their unique perspectives. I hope this edition helps get across a fraction of the potential apparent to everybody there.
Full recap
In case you haven't seen it, Five days in Vancouver is my personal path through AtmosphereConf 2026.
It - and this megathread on Bluesky - gives a reasonably exhaustive set of my personal highlights from the conference, so I'll just focus here on the best of the most significant trends.
Science in pole position
My workshop explored how the atprotocol offers us a social web of scientific knowledge, carried and created by the scientists themselves, supported by research institutions.
It took place at the end of an entire day dedicated to the many different ways the world of science is using this protocol. The keynote opening that day was spectacular, setting out how Modular Science is moving onto the Atmosphere: watch the stream, or check out one of the speakers' own video and blog post.
But the entire day was just one innovation after another. For example, astronomer @emily.space unveiled Nebra, a tool to cost-effectively alert telescopes around the world to focus on rare, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stellar events like supernovae.
That sounds super technical but it is a specific example of a hugely important idea: anyone can be a data source. If this was adopted by citizen science, for example, everyone would be able to instantly sharing scientific data with the world as soon as they record it, allowing anyone else to use it and combine it with other data, visualisation tools, and more.
Making the web social
Before I got there I was already exploring the theory of integrating the Atmosphere into websites to make the web social again ... meanwhile, the conference organisers were actually DOING it, integrating both streaming service Stream.place and event site Atmo.rsvp with the conference website.
That might not sound terribly impressive if you've already embedded a YouTube video into a blog post. The key difference is that users can access these different apps with the same Atmosphere account, unlocking cross-tool integrations and conversations which are impossible with yesterday’s siloed walled gardens.
That's why I sincerely believe that ATProtocol will not double the value of the web - I think it's going to square it.
Another example: a developer (Brookie) spent one day just before the event creating a QR-code-based networking app called YouandMe. It took the conference by storm - together, we created over 2000 connections in 4 days... which someone else then visualised via Superconnectors, creating during the conference.
Because in a permissionless ecosystem there's nothing to stop innovation and collaboration.
Building communities, and making them smart
There is one missing piece, however - communities on ATProtocol require permissioned data, so this was unsurprisingly one of the top themes of the conference. Check out:
Rewilding the internet from Habitat.network, which days after the conference released their first local-first private data app for collaborative notemaking.
Meanwhile, in a future modalities workshop, I argued for helping communities transform their fast-moving flow (chatter) into slow-moving stock (wisdom)... and minutes later @andyschwab showed me a demo of exactly what I was looking for (15 seconds in).
Where's the media?
Most if not all of the innovations during the science day would be very useful for the news industry, which is also about publishing knowledge backed with evidence.
But while the media was the focus of several sessions there weren't many journalists. Imagine missing @aendra.com's "decade of algorithmic F*ckery" timeline!
The above is just a fraction of what you will find in Five days in Vancouver, and that contains just a fraction of the conference as a whole, so I'm also ploughing through everyone else's post-conference reports and curating them here: All the Stuff I Like or Do or Think about Everything tagged recap & atmosphereconf2026.