Toni Schneider's interview on The Verge's Decoder podcast gives Jim and Alex a chance to once again revisit the (good, healthy!) tensions at the heart of the Bluesky app and atproto. Plus all the latest news, releases, and updates.

Links & Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-08-06-shinkansen-mindset

Ethan Marcotte coined the term "responsive web design" back in 2010 and instantly gave a name to the loose collection of technologies that were fundamentally changing how the web was being built. A decade later, he brought that same insight to another revolutionary force within the industry, the workers themselves.

Either one of these would be an invaluable contribution to how the web gets built and Ethan's sharp intuitions grounded in moral clarity offer some valuable lessons to the exciting, if still uncertain, early days of the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-08-03-designing-for-uncertainty-ethan-marcotte

Jim and Alex return to the livestream with another news roundup from across the Atmosphere,including a proposal to fix localhost, more webdevs getting into atproto, Mu Social's opinionated news feed, and more.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-07-23-livestream-protocolly-atmoseed

There’s no shortage of diagnosis of what went wrong with the social web, most of it on the social web. It’s a familiar space for writer, speaker, and researcher Erin Kissane, who’s spent a career with a sharp eye and an indefatigable resolve doing what she fully admits isn’t really anyone’s job.

Sorting out the why we’re building new apps, networks, and protocols is just as important as the how, and Erin is a steady guide. In this wonderfully wide-ranging conversation, she and Jim work through familiar arcs of technology with some important takeaways for a new generation of network builders.

Links and Resources

Erin’s work

People and ideas referenced

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/2026-07-22-erin-kissane

Jim and Alex are back after a holiday weekend and a backlog of atproto news. Daniel Holmgren has shipped the permissioned data proposal just in time to celebrate America's semiquincentennial, with the help of plenty of community input and a new communities feature in the Bluesky app being developed in lockstep.

Tangled has added full-text code search and a new microVM-back CI engine, and there's a new tool for mirroring your GitHub repos over there. Plus, new releases from Anisota and the general availability of Roomy.

We also take a digression or two into effective outreach on other platforms, and don't miss the new job posting on the Bluesky Atmosphere team.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/network-in-your-hand

Daniel Holmgren, Head of Protocol at Bluesky, joins Jim and Alex for a live AMA on the permissioned data project. Their conversation starts with a core question: why does permissioned data need to be a separate protocol at all, rather than an extension of the existing public one?

Then Daniel answers your questions about how “spaces” compose into communities, governance issues around community-owned DIDs, writing to another person’s PDS (short version: don’t), a Giphy-style sharing use case, moderation in non-encrypted spaces, and why space declarations are lexicons rather than records.

Up top, the usual news from the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/ama-dholms-irons-still-hot

Head of product at ROOST, Juliet Shen, drops by for a conversation about Coop reaching version 1.0. Coop is ROOST's review and moderation platform used by organizations of all shapes and sizes, including Bluesky. It's also the first trust and safety tool that manages detection, review, and reporting in a free and open source tool.

Juliet and Alex get into why encoding moderation policy in the open matters—including The Christchurch Call Foundation—and where AI actually fits into a moderation workflow.

They also dig into what the 1.0 release means in practice: a more manageable memory footprint, Scylla now optional (with some tentpole summer movie cross-promo potential), and the ability to run a full production instance on a small team's budget.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/roost-v1-juliet-shen

Jim and Alex return to the livestream, now at a new time and day and even a scheduling widget on the Off Protocol homepage built on the event community lexicon. They take a look at the growing new crop of Standard.site-powered personal sites, while wondering what happened to their own sites, and the new class of reader apps showing up.

Alex covers Coop 1.0 from the team at ROOST and how even small teams now have access to moderation tools. Eurosky keeps launching new things at a pace possibly intended to confuse American audiences, we want your feedback about permissioned data, Streamplace VOD is now in closed beta, and more.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/cobblers-kids

Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee and Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren step in for Jim and Alex on the livestream this week. They get into Standard.site's community-built publishing lexicon getting an integration into the Bluesky app, as well as a long-awaited overhaul to the TypeScript SDK. Daniel shares the latest from the permissioned data project, including a target of June for a formal proposal and PDS alpha. Plus news from PDS Moover, the launch of Latinsky and Medsky on Acorn, self-hostable small language models for moderation, and more news from around the Atmosphere.

Links and Resources

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/in-our-timeline

Standard.site is, as best we can tell, the most successful community-driven Lexicon in the AT Protocol ecosystem to date. Even more amazing, this shared format for blog posts, articles, and newsletters was built and continues to be governed by three competing blogging platforms: Offprint, Leaflet, and pckt.blog.

Jim sat down with three of the core team members, Brook from pckt.blog, Miguel from Offprint, and Jared from Leaflet, to walk through how they found each other, why they decided a single shared format was better than three competing ones, and why they deliberately kept it small.

This conversation gets into the design decision to standardize on the metadata while keeping the content field open and customizable, the gnarly work of migrating thousands of existing posts to a new format across a decentralized network, and how this core team of competitors governs the standard. They also lay out where they see things going with the possiblity of new types of reader apps, new ways of monetization that support writers, and what permissioned data on the protocol might unlock.

This episode was released the same day Bluesky added Standard.site to the core app as a new avenue for discovery.

Listen and read more at atproto.com/off-protocol/do-this-together-standard-site