Despite the trust and safety difficulties that smaller, independent developers often face—like a lack of easy access to industry tools and resources—the community around AT Protocol has an incredible ethos of building a safer, more resilient Internet ecosystem. We were grateful to be invited to present to and spend time with this community at ATmosphereConf 2026 in Vancouver, Canada.

I was joined by ROOST Head of Product Juliet Shen to give a trust and safety crash course and to introduce Coop, our open source safety review dashboard and queuing tool, to this community of people building on the open Internet. Our talk drew 35+ people in the room and another 50+ via live stream, and sparked exactly the kind of conversations that remind us why accessible, open source trust and safety tools matter.

For the curious, we've published our slides and shared all referenced links in this thread. A recording is also available on the conference website.

What is AtmosphereConf?

AtmosphereConf is a conference for the community surrounding the AT Protocol (atproto), a protocol and set of open standards that aims to build a decentralized social Internet. The collection of apps and services built on atproto is referred to colloquially as “the atmosphere,” hence the conference name. While atproto originated at and was popularized by Bluesky, AtmosphereConf is completely community-led and self-organized.

The conference spanned four days with two “pre-conference” days of specialized tracks, workshops, and social events on Thursday and Friday, plus two main conference days on Saturday and Sunday with the main tracks of talks. There were over 350 attendees including independent atproto developers, journalists, trust and safety professionals, community organizers, and technology enthusiasts. In addition to the officially-scheduled conference content, there was the ever-important “hallway track” where people met, chatted, and hacked on things in the hallways and social rooms.

The focus of the conference went far beyond the dry, technical content that you might expect from an event centered on something as admittedly nerdy as a protocol; instead, there was a strong focus on everything from building community and empowering individuals to saving journalism and building a better future—along with some excellent book recommendations. Two of the recurring phrases that were embraced and repeated by presenters and attendees alike were “we can just do things,” and “people, not platforms” (lovingly co-opted from anew.social). Attendees gave a standing ovation to Erin Kissane’s opening keynote “Landslide/Holdfast” which took us on a journey from a disaster in Valdez, Alaska to geeking out about how awesome kelp is—and how we can learn from both as people trying to (re)build foundations for a better, more robust society.

Highlights

Beyond our own talk, the real energy at AtmosphereConf came from the breadth of conversations and sessions happening throughout the week.

On Friday, ROOST hosted a trust & safety unconference session: an hour-long space for unstructured conversations on T&S tools and practice. Several atproto developers building their own projects joined and asked about what basic tools were available and what a minimum safety stack looked like without a dedicated T&S team. Much of the discussion focused on CSAM detection, perceptual hashing, and user reporting flows—some of the core parts of ROOST’s ecosystem.

Across the main conference days, we were energized by how many talks centered on trust, safety, building resilient technology, and putting people first. Here are a few specific highlights:

• Sebastian Vogelsang shared a presentation about Eurosky covering why they believe social media must be treated as critical public infrastructure—and touched on how they could take advantage of ROOST projects like Coop and Osprey to deliver shared moderation infrastructure.

• Jennifer Mitchell gave a lightning talk about Gander Social and their pro-social approach to trust and safety.

• Joe Germuska and Ben Werdmuller presented “A Free Press needs Free Protocols” in which they explored how trust has been eroded on the Internet, and how open protocols could better connect publishers and audiences.

• In “Journalism must create its own algorithms,” Aendra Rininsland shared her work on custom feeds, classifiers, and labelers—and how publications could use their own custom feeds to rebuild trust.

• Lindsay Blackwell presented “Content Moderation Futures” in which she presented her research into content moderation on major platforms, the issues she found, and how it could be improved.

• Dr. KaLyn Coghill covered Blacksky’s approach to trust and safety in “Creating a Safer Web.” She discussed their community-run moderation service, best practices, and what to consider when implementing your own trust and safety tooling.

• Giulia shared “Two Years of Skywatch” covering her experience and reflections on running a community labeler powered in part by ROOST’s Osprey, and how labelers fit within the larger categories of moderation, trust, and safety.

The variety and diversity of projects also stood out to us across the conference; it demonstrated that while all of these projects may be building on the same protocol, there are so many unique challenges when it comes to their trust and safety stories. This deeply resonates with a core belief at ROOST: open source safety tools are critical to enable pluralism across the online ecosystem. For example, while Bluesky is a short-form social network, Streamplace handles live-streamed video; Tangled is a collaborative code development forge; Spark delivers infinitely-scrolling short videos; Leaflet focuses on long-form blog posts, Fedica enables posting and tracking analytics across protocols and networks; Graze helps people and orgs build custom social media feeds. These are all built on or with atproto, but have very different user interfaces, interactions, content types, experiences, communities, and ultimately, safety considerations.

Our takeaway

Historically, much of “the atmosphere” has been centralized around Bluesky, who has their own trust and safety team running Osprey in production to help reduce harm. While that’s still true, atproto and the larger community feels like it is at an inflection point: it’s not only possible, but being actively demonstrated that other projects can begin delivering on the decentralized promise of atproto by hosting their own personal data servers (PDSs) and creating their own distinct experiences. Communities like Blacksky, Eurosky, Northsky, and Gander have begun to build their own apps, host their own data, and take ownership of their own trust and safety story.

With this growth and increased decentralization comes the more urgent need for accessible tools that anyone—not just Bluesky-scale services or traditional social networks—can self-host, integrate with their stack, adapt to their needs, and contribute back to for the benefit of all. The atproto community and ROOST share strong perspectives here, as there’s a pervasive culture of building, sharing, open sourcing, and centering the experience of individuals. We’re excited to see how the community adopts, adapts, and contributes to ROOST projects—and we’ll be here right along with them.

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to the AtmosphereConf organizers for putting on such a welcoming, diverse, and energizing conference, and to the many friends we met (and rideshared with, and dined with) throughout the week.

We also want to recognize the shout-outs and kind words from folks at Eurosky, Modal Foundation, Skywatch, and others: it means a lot to all of us building at ROOST to hear that our work is useful, deployed in production, and already protecting users across the Internet.

And a big thank you to all of our contributors, including Ayu, Caleb, Chenyu, Dom, Emelia, Ethan, Hailey, Ibiam, Juan, Leon, Li Yu, Paweł, Regis, Shalabh, and more who make ROOST possible by building with us in the open.

Get involved

Whether you attended AtmosphereConf or are just reading about it, we invite you to get involved in our mission to build the open source safety commons. Join our Discord server to chat with the community and fellow contributors, check out our code on GitHub, and follow us at @roost.tools on Bluesky and atproto.