Launching a Cloud Atlas

Erin Kissane is launching "Cloud Atlas" — an interview-based guide to the apps and projects emerging on the AT Protocol/Atmosphere, intended to make decentralized social media infrastructure more legible to people interested in alternatives to centralized platforms. This is something I haven't seen done from the outside — developers of these apps and services tend to be their own marketing departments and PR teams but this isn't (solely) that.

The human texture and qualitative specificity of projects in the Atmosphere are as interesting to me as any set of technical and design specifications could possibly be. Interesting for their own sake, and also for the ways they’re shaping each project’s current state and its likely futures. I also believe in just getting out there and gathering foundational knowledge. There's value in offering classification systems even when they're provisional and even when they’re only one among many. I read a lot of oral histories and interviews and human-textured research from older social movements and periods in technology that inflects my understanding of the world now—the ACT UP oral history project that kept me sane in during the Covid Tracking project, the very human testimonies of the Combahee River Collective, even the (delightful) work that came out of the early stumbles of the Worm Community System. I like to think that if things go even halfway well, the work we’re all doing to make new online social systems legible will help in the present and be a useful ship’s log for the people who come after us. Understanding what we’re trying do—and why—will matter later, is the bet.

This is the kind of work that keeps projects both alive and afloat in the minds of many. I'm extremely curious to see how Erin pulls this off and kind of hoping that my own project, Livtet gets to be in this party.