Early on in my time here I was sketching out a Bandcamp alternative hosted on the ATmosphere. The necessary affordances weren't there to make the market work (private data), but there was also not a way to get funding to build it because there is no moat or ROI. The data model is open, competition
Ted Han★ 韓聖安
I've been talking about this for months with others. SaaS products built around data moats are not a thing in the Atmosphere. The whole point is that users data should not be enclosed. This is a space that requires other types of business models.
Mar 31, 2026 at 2:41 PM
On atmospheric generatives… - Scraps!
How can we build moats on an open network? How can we make money when all the data's free? Here, I sketch some ideas for new generatives — contextualization, fluidity, aggregation, and relationality — for value creation in the atmosphere.
The Unsolvable Dilemma: Open Networks vs. Economic Sustainability - Nightflight
A conversation with a Fediverse core developer revealed the structural problem: donation models fail, and even specialized contributors can't make a living.…
Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money
Economists think Open Source is a business model. Devs know better, and fund it accordingly.
A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications
Last week I spent an energizing, educational, occasionally infuriating week in Vancouver around the ATmosphereConf, a community event gathering developers, investors, data scientists, the odd academic
StratosFund - Fund open source projects in the Atmosphere
A unique funding model for open source projects in the Atmosphere. Help your favoirite projects bring your most requested features to life.
Moving beyond the charity framework
A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source in the long term.
ATmosphere technology to support organizing and activism
There has been some good writing by Mosh, Erlend, and Meri about this topic worth pulling in. Permissioned spaces coming to atproto will also unlock a lot of important affordances for crafting protected spaces for organizers. For example, permissioned spaces on semble would turn into community-run search engines. My hope is that atproto is the missing infrastructural piece that enables us to really shape digital spaces around the specific needs organizers and their communities rather the...
I need people to stop trying to solve funding problems in the Atmosphere by trying to be attractive to the same funders and funding models that put us in this situation in the first place. Empowering individuals and communities via technology was step one. Step two is doing the same for funding.
I've been thinking about the beauty of open data and how the AT Protocol and wider Atmosphere ecosystem has been recapturing that open data environment that once defined the web. It really does feel special. vale.rocks/posts/atproto-ethos #atproto #ATProtocol
The AT Protocol Harkens An Old Web Ethos
vale.rocksnot to get too ahead of some other stuff i'm working on but i think every news org should be able to build experiences like this that they own via atproto. once permissioned data lands you can tie in business models really well. "substack on atproto" is too narrow, we can do better.
nilay patel
Was just scrolling our homepage revchron feed and caught the same vibe as when I was myself a hardcore Engadget reader in 2006ish. So happy with this, so much more to come
Here's the updated "Funding Models Are Not Binary" slide from my Feature/Product/Business talk #ATmosphereConf. Turns out there are even more great examples already in the Atmosphere!
I wonder if having some kind of "atproto Foundation" would help with fundraising for the broader atmosphere? Currently there is no easy way to invest in the atmosphere so would-be funders default to bsky cc @ecosystemaction.com
Erin Kissane
Knight Foundation's kind of an exception here, tbh, and has a specific interest that's different from the VCs—and also a specific connection into the protocol. I'd love to see them send money to a slew of atmosphere projects and I wouldn't be super surprised if they did.
My takeaway from Atmosphere: it needs to be WAY easier for builders to get paid So I built at.fund at.fund detects the tools you use, and tells you how to fund the builders who make those tools. And if you're a builder, it takes seconds to add records to that tell your users how to fund you 👍
at.fund
novel funding mechanisms
funding models that doesn't depend on VC. funding models that keep things accessible and open but yet provide enough incentive for people to pay
Company as a Commons
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Let's Talk Money - Interlinked
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