Projects
A commitment to action
We're keenly aware that we need to act quickly, and to organize, contribute and build even as we continue to raise funds towards our goals. And while our projects are still taking shape, we are putting our funds to work to build core elements that we know need to be in place. Our first efforts cut across the following themes:
Community of practice: The community is full of talented developers who've already built amazing services with very few resources. We are communicating daily with developers, policy makers, investors and funders about the potential of open social approaches.
Building towards protocol standards: while ATProto doesn't yet have a process for protocol standards, many active conversations are underway. We're looking to support the creation of a process and participate in its deliberations.
Regulatory understanding: decentralized tech can sit uncomfortably next to regulatory regimes, which are often designed with centralized tech in mind. We're mapping out how existing regulations could affect the implementation of ATProto-based applications, initially focusing on Europe.
Developing shared resources: costs for setting up and running applications can be prohibitive for developers and small companies. We're aiming to provide independently operated technology to foster experimentation, collaboration and shared knowledge.
Activities
Regulatory research
We put $50,000 to support research into how ATProto's architecture relates to regulatory obligations for content moderation. Clarifying regulatory responsibilities is key to any maturing technology; we are particularly concerned with the ability of developers and platform operators to respond to the requirements of regulations such as Europe's Digital Services Act and the GDPR. This research will lay groundwork for clarifying relationships to many regulatory regimes and enable novel content moderation solutions.
Indiesky
We are working to support the ATProto Community Fund. We've backed them with a $50,000 grant to explore and develop independent ATProto infrastructure, and their IndieSky working group, to build the tools, funding, and research to build and share infrastructure, cutting down on costs and sharing code and maintenance. Indiesky is also offering small donations and infrastructure costs for small deployments.
Eurosky
Under the Eurosky initiative, we aim to build European social media infrastructure to power social web applications and services, focusing on building tools for developers and companies, rather than consumer-facing apps. Eurosky is a collaboration of people and initiatives managed by Free Our Feeds, including several of our custodians, Robin Berjon and Sherif Elsayed-Ali, together with Sebastian Vogelsang, the founder and CEO of the ATProto photo-sharing application, Flashes. Eurosky also intends to operate several components in the service of independent ATProto development, including a European Personal Data Server (PDS) provider, a relay, and an index.
We're initially investing $40,000 toward the building of a commons for content moderation, which we're calling CoCoMo. CoCoMo should lower the barrier to entry for developers and communities who want to use ATProto, but may not have the funds or capacity to manage the very real content moderation obligations.