Affordances of the Atmosphere

As seen on atmosphereconf.org

ATmosphereConf 2026

ATmosphereConf is the global atproto community conference. Join us in Vancouver, Canada, March 26th - 29th, 2026.

Hello, everybody. Let's talk some design affordances, all right?

If you haven't met me, I'm Tynan. I am a founding contributor at @ecosystemaction.com . I also run @atproto.boston . And if you've seen the lobster or heard me talk about my lobster children, that is them. They are a bunch of high schoolers who I mentor to build robots. And they're competing this weekend , so I had to represent. Woo! Yeah.

I came into design through Georgia Tech's industrial design program. That's sort of how I got involved in this space and research. And I want to bring some more of that here to the atmosphere.

So affordances, big weird word that maybe we don't talk much about outside of design.

But basically, what it means is the possible actions that an actor or person can perceive readily within the environment.

So for instance, stairs afford sitting, climbing to an able-bodied person. But to a wheelchair user, they do not afford climbing.

That's because an affordance represents specifically a relationship between the individual and the environment. You don't just have a capability, but in a relationship with the person in that space, you have an affordance.

So a capability without a signifier or without being self-evident of the environment itself is not actionable by the user, and therefore, not a real affordance that results in actions to be able to be taken.

Now, we in atproto are familiar with lots of really great capabilities that we have in the atmosphere. You've got decoupling of data and apps. You can reuse that data across lots of different places. You sort of have this headless website that anyone can build an interface for. There's no real first party claim to data. You can delete stuff, maybe, because you're also really publishing to the web. But we, as users now, have a lot more agency than we used to have on centralized platforms, and we can exert market forces in a way that we couldn't before, and we can move around without losing anything in the process.

These are really cool capabilities, but if you don't manifest those into perceivable actions, there are not affordances. The user, the person, cannot do those things.

The agency that we're trying to provide won't be executed. So we need to make those executable.

We can elevate capabilities into affordances and help people establish new mental models around all these affordances by doing good product design.

So let's see some examples, because people are doing a great job here in the atmosphere.

I, as an atproto user, can use my account in lots of different places, not just Bluesky. So this is the login screen for @pckt.blog . We've got a couple signifiers, like the little butterfly and user handle, to indicate that my Bluesky identity is usable in this place. Shout out to @thisismissem.social and FedCM for working on making this user experience even better in the future0.

I can use my atproto account for all different kinds of activity, not just skeeting. So this is @skyreader.app , which is an atmospheric RSS reader, and they added the ability to save articles to @semble.so or @margin.at , which is a bookmarking service on the atmosphere.

And what's cool about that, we all know that the permissionless open access of the network means that you can kind of just build stuff. So @ronentk.me here, the CEO of Semble and @cosmik.network , had no idea they were building this, and required no intervention. So he found out alongside the rest of us, and is like, "Cool! I'm excited to try it!"

I can interact with people on different services. So this is a clip from the Witchsky client, which is a Bluesky client fork of social-app. They add these helpful little badges next to people's names of what PDS service they're using. So I can see @drkalyncoghill.blacksky.team 's posts, and I can see also that she is on the Blacksky PDS. And even though we're on different services, we can still engage, and follow, and interact with each other totally normally.

I can even interact with people across different protocols. We just heard from @quillmatiq.com all the great things Bridgy is doing. So I can see everything on his Mastodon account, get bridged all the way across, and interact in a perfectly native way.

I can engage with the same activity in different places. You might have been assembling your conference schedule today using SmokeSignal, or Atmo.rsvp, or on the official conference website. All of that is pulling from the same activity, the same data on the atmosphere. And that's why we're able to get multiple different experiences that might work better for different people.

I can even move my account without losing anything in the process. So we've had a lot of successful migrations to @eurosky.social , which is very exciting. The EU Haul tool is really usable, and we have totally normal users happy and satisfied with their moving process. And again, you can interact with them all just the same.

This one I like a lot, too, because obviously, some projects end. Every product doesn't last forever. Some people might remember the original Skylight, not @buildwithtori.com , but Skylights0, which was a film reviewing app on the atmosphere. The maintainer decided was they were done with that project, which is OK. They could build a tool to allow people to migrate their data out of Skylights and into @popfeed.social , which is another film reviewing app on the atmosphere. And so all that data gets to live on. Skylights is able to go to rest, but all the people and the users and their reviews and data get to continue to be useful in the atmosphere.

This is a weird one. My social activity doesn't necessarily need an app. So some of you might be familiar with @teal.fm , but if you're not, it is a atmospheric alternative to Last.fm, which is a music scrobbling service where you can log your listening activity across Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, whatever you use, so that we can have social music discovery features outside of an individual streaming service. Teal is like that for the atmosphere, so you can scrobble all of your listens to your PDS, and then we get all the atmospheric advantages where people can build visualizations and wraps and all those things. But Teal doesn't exist. It's not a product. This is the website. It just says coming soon, eventually. @pds.dad and @zeu.dev and all of them are busy with other things, so keep working on it. Maybe we'll get Teal eventually, but not yet. But it's the atmosphere. You can just do things...

Somebody made Teal! There it is! This is not at Teal.fm, but this is a full Teal experience where you can see genres and activity and trending, and I can see what people are listening to.0

So we've really barely started to manifest all the possible affordances with these great capabilities that we have.

How might we, as a community, overcome the hurdles preventing the mass adoption and, importantly, the execution of agency made possible by liberatory network technology?

I think we need more designers, more researchers, ethnographers, system thinkers, humanities experts to help make all these affordances legible, to help people establish new mental models around all these affordances, and really to make the agency afforded by all this decentralized technology accessible to people so they can exercise that agency.

So that's what we're doing. Ecosystem Action Research, you might have heard of us in the last month or so, is a little band of volunteers. I think we're at 13 now, of those types of people. We're going to try to bring more research and design activity to this space and facilitate these discovery processes alongside the community, with the community to answer some of these big ecosystem-wide questions.

What we envision in the long term is that the atmosphere at network ecosystem contributors and participants are empowered to exercise the agency afforded by a public interest internet. And that includes all sorts of people like moderators and knowledge workers and organizers and artists, journalists, builders like you, and just everyday end users.

So our mission at EAR is to equip and support the people and organizations who build with and on top of the app network technology to empower people who create on and organize with and steward trust and safety for internet communities.

I want to thank @danhon.com for encouraging me to make this talk and @christian.bsky.social , you might know, helped sort of get started all of the EAR activities.

And I have a list of all the resources and concepts and examples in a symbol list right here for all of you0. Thanks!