On atmospheric generatives…

I want to revisit @kevinkelly.bsky.social 's post eight generatives better than free — on qualities that can generate value even in environments, like the internet, where everything can be copied — for the Atmosphere0.

Right now, data on atproto is fully public, so content itself is not a moat for anyone building in the atmosphere; permissioned data may change that, but only by degrees.

But that doesn't mean there aren't ways we can uniquely create and capture value!

Here are kk's original "generatives" that can't be copied:

immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability

Looking to these generatives for inspiration, I'm thinking about variants or new generatives we might consider as we build in the atmosphere. Hopefully this gestures at some approaches we might collectively take towards making all this sustainable.

Four new ones I'd like to propose:

contextualization, fluidity, aggregation, relationality

Contextualization

We can provide strong, sensible defaults, plus more contextual experiences — more personal, more situated, more bespoke.

A mix of personalization and social sensemaking, scoped not just to individuals but to local social contexts, of different scales.

This might include affordances for things like custom feeds, and filtering by your social graph.

More interesting, I think, is exploring deeper ways to switch between communities in ways that feel more meaningful. Giving different publications distinct identities in a tool like Leaflet hints at this but we can of course go way further. @blackskyweb.xyz is doing really interesting work here e.g. with Acorn .

We can bring together all kinds of flexible primitives, both on the protocol and UI level, and build things that feel super different for a live global news experience vs. a place for your local community to plan events vs. your small business connecting with customers.

This is kind of also like interpretation through a network lens — lots of opportunity for building bespoke assemblages of tools and services based on particular needs. Think: custom enterprise @standard.site publishing tools and community sites!

We also get some nice affordances for authenticity, from basic bidirectional linking to trace provenance, to more formal attestations for things like canonical creator <> supporter relationships or community memberships.

Fluidity

Kind of like accessibility, combined with contextualization — we have levers we can pull to lower friction in all kinds of ways.

We can improve user experiences along many dimensions: simplicity, speed, legibility, personalization and more. Doing this in the atmosphere gives us some unique ways to do this in a fluid and interoperable way, where these experiences flow and permeate across apps and contexts. @jay.bsky.team named her publication The Liquid Frontier for a reason!

We can make it easier to get started writing, easier to discover new interesting things to read, and easier to subscribe and follow publications over time, to name just a few that are relevant to those of us building for writers / creators / publishers!

We can also make immediacy become more dynamic and customizable — thinking of things like bespoke automation workflows and notifications, and more context-rich ways to package or bundle things. Say, publish something in a members-only private space, and later unlock as fully public…or just for mutuals, etc.

Aggregation

Very related to findability, but I think this can work in more specific ways in the atmospheric paradigm! This is not just about search but about curation and good taste (always_has_been.jpg), and about aggregating things in local and personal contexts.

In the atmosphere aggregation becomes even more powerful and more important. To a large extent it's a filtering problem — sorting out what you care about from the global firehose, and presenting in an accessible and easy to digest way, can be really valuable. Excited by what @cosmik.network is working on not only with @semble.so but @atproto.science to give new relational lenses on knowledge and sensemaking in research contexts and beyond.

Similarly, it can be valuable to translate between lexicons, to make otherwise isolated classes of content more legible and interoperable and portable across contexts…both personal (show my bookmarks from various apps together in one place) and global (help me search all bookmarks across the network)! Shoutout @blaine.bsky.social and @aaronstevenwhite.io 's promising work here on data interop, and @anew.social 's work bridging between open social networks.

As with findability, this is really about attention, and how it can work in weird and interesting ways when you have a big open network and social graph to play with. Lots of potential for improving discovery, whether for great longform writing or people in your city you should be friends with.

Relationality

There are a lot of different ways we can leverage the power to construct community0 in the atmosphere, and lots of ways to interweave the global network with your specific social graph to make relationships feel more tangible — closely related to immediacy and personalization as well!

As one example, I'm really interested in how we can expand relational modes around patronage — going beyond the basic "I pay you a little each month; you send me occasional updates" to more complex and nuanced creator <> audience relationships.

We can make tools for creators, and flows for supporters, that feel nicer — more personalized, more contextual, more fluid.

With richer context we can begin to build more ongoing evolving relationships, that give a greater sense of communal energy and belonging. We can make signals around patronage more meaningful and visible; what that relationship signals socially becomes more powerful. Things like @atprotofans.com and @at.fund are cool prototypes in this direction, and there's so much more to explore.

One example might be exploring ways to surface that relationship to your social graph: if I'm supporting your work, how can we not only show that to my friends, but do useful things like give them a discount or other incentive to follow and support your work too? I think it'd be great to play with this more in @leaflet.pub .

What do you think?

I'd love to hear more ideas! Both on these and other generatives and, more practically, how we can apply them!

Lots of interesting tensions here — intimate vs. public, local vs. global, personalization vs. scalability — many that are inherent to the dynamics of the internet but become more urgent and vivid as we try to build good experiences for people and communities that harness but are not subsumed by a global social environment.

One of the conversations I find most exciting is around how to build flexible and useful tools for organizers — taking the potential of the atmosphere to our local communities, building things to serve their needs. For further recommended reading see:

@mosh.bsky.social 's post Building for Organizers

@erlend.sh 's post On-protocol Organizing

Let's see what we can build together!