Hi Friends,
Sometimes I take in too much information and feel an overwhelming urge to regurgitate it back out onto a blank page. I call this feeling “Too much input”.
Sometimes I give into the urge and brain dump a blog post or essay length vomit of words. At various times going back as far as 2014, I’ve even tried to publish these random rants, but never consistently.
Today I need to talk about TikTok and some of the NEW alternatives.
It’s 2025. In January of this year while I was visiting LA, I learned about something called the AT protocol or @proto. It has been a very long time since I got this excited about something like an internet protocol.
A techy-friend I was visiting with suggested that I listen to an episode of a podcast where Nilay from the Verge interviewed Bluesky’s CEO. I listened to it on my drive back to AZ. Twice.
How much do you know about Bluesky?
Before listening to the podcast, I had a Bluesky account. But I wasn’t very active with it, and I didn’t know much about its underlying technology. Like a lot of people, I was never a big user of Twitter, but I was/am seriously looking for alternatives to Meta’s apps: FB & instagram.
Pretty sure that podcast recommendation changed my life.
It absolutely overwhelmed my Q1 of 2025.
Or rather @proto did. (AT stands for *Authenticated Transfer *🤓)
@proto is the open source protocol that Bluesky is built on.
*Think of this moment like when a new game engine has just been released, like a new unreal or unity, but for social apps, the devs get excited. *
Let me explain.
Byeeee TikTok
I was never a fan of TikTok.
I had it installed (Android), but locked down without any permissions to my phone. Whenever a friend would share a TikTok link with me, I’d wade through a series of “Only this time” permission prompts, usually multiple times until it worked, watch a thing, and then force close the app.
I was like this for 2 reasons.
- I didn’t want the Chinese government training super scary social surveillance algorithms with my user data.
- I didn’t want another app addiction. (It’s taken me literally years to “quit” FB, and I still have an account that x-posts from insta, albeit with <10 posts / year.)
The Addiction is Real
I’ve been aware of and studying “neuro web design” since the aughts. When it comes to social media app design, I know enough about how the sausage gets made to not be a person who eats very much sausage.
“None for me, thanks!”
The main reason I kept myself off of TikTok was because I saw immediately from my friends who were early adopters, that it was even more addictive than its predecessors.
A great feature for those who have gone on to become full time content creators, but personally I treated TikTok like cocaine, or any other substance that is around me all the time, but one that I don’t personally want to get hooked on. By saying “No, thank you”.
The ATmosphere
Cut to the 3rd week of March 2025 (end of Q1).
My obsession with this new social identity protocol has landed me as a speaker at the first ever ATmosphere Conference, and at a table at the first-day-after-party in a Seattle brewery, sitting between two people who are building TikTok clones on this exciting new open protocol.
Between two of the clones
I got to learn an awful lot about these two upcoming apps and what makes them similar and unique, and I left the table genuinely hoping to see both of them grow into millions of users.
But before I talk about differences between them, what is this ATmosphere thing anyway…
Walled Gardens
Today social media exists as a bunch of independently owned walled gardens.
As creators, we share content like text 💬posts, pics 📸, short form 🎬 and long form 🎥videos etc, and that content sits in silos based on which app publishes and distributes that particular type of content for us.
Short form video goes on Insta & TikTok, long form on YouTube. Text and pics we post on X, FaceBook and Insta, etc etc.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
What if all of my content that I’ve ever created as “@immber” could reside in one place instead of spread across a ton of different apps?
The @ beauty yet to be realized
On the ATmosphere your @proto identity starts with an empty “PDS” or Personal Data Store.
A PDS is like a giant folder that automatically saves not just every post shared, but also lists of followers & following, plus every Like or comment interaction across ALL ATmosphere apps. Bluesky is just the first app, but more are coming fast!
You own your content
If you’ve already made a @handle.bsky.social identity, you already have a PDS! 🎉(everything you’ve shared, liked, or commented on is in there along with your following and follower lists)
The domain part of your @identity is important, it tells you who is hosting that PDS “folder” for you. Today bsky.social is doing this for us for free to grow the platform.
Portability
But, also your @identity’s PDS is portable.
The same way you can pick up all of the files and text and images of any website then move them to a new hosting provider, you can pick up your PDS and move it anywhere you want.
My identity’s content is mine to move to whatever domain I chose, even if the app (bsky.app) goes away, my PDS is still mine and saved at bsky.social. If bsky.social is going away I can pick up my PDS and move it somewhere else.
You can literally even host it yourself on a raspberry pi at home, really, you can put it anywhere. (It’s also fine to let bsky.social host it for you for now.)
Flip the Feed
Ultimately this new underlying open-source-protocol-engine thing makes it so that YOU the content creator, not the apps, own your content 💬📷🎬🎥.
But it also lets the scrollers decide how to consume it.
Stay with me…
Because identity and context go together, and together they make another reason why I only ever made one TikTok video myself. #HairTok
As I explained to Tori from Skylight that night in the brewery, I have too many interests and not enough followers on any given platform to bother posting anything because it would be out of context for some % of the people who might actually see it.
So most of the time, I just don’t post.
Slides from the inventor of oAuth
Earlier that day, Blaine Cook, the person who literally invented the concept of “Login with” while he was an early employee at Twitter had shared this picture on one of his slides.
It illustrates how we all have separate identities in different online spaces.
Friends vs Professional Contacts vs Family
The “social” identity wants to share cat pics, respond to birthday party invites, and post vacay pics, while our “professional” identities need to post our resumes, and like to write long form blog posts.
Some of us might want to, or for safety need to keep all of that separate from our “family” identities where we share cat pics, and kid pics, and family updates with grandparents and cousins. In his talk, Blaine also included that a person might have anonymous activist identities for political action.
I know a lot of people who carry around multiple phones. You might still need to.
1 PDS per Identity
But, before you go making new accounts everywhere….
Most of us probably don’t need multiple PDSs to start with. (In Bluesky for example you can add “App Passwords” that will let you sign into other @proto apps with your bsky.social account (PDS) without needing to make a whole new one on every app.)
The “Clone Wars” have entered the chat
- Bluesky is the first of the clones, a Twitter clone built on top of ATproto (the open protocol “engine”)
- Skylight is a TikTok clone built on top of Bluesky,
- On Skylight you are watching and posting Bluesky videos but in a TikTok-look-alike app, instead of a Twitter-look-alike.
- Both Skylight & Bluesky share the same definition of a “short video” so sharing from either app will show on both apps.
- Spark is another *TikTok *clone, but Spark is built on ATproto, and has its own definition of “short videos”
- Spark videos don’t play on Bluesky or Skylight.
- There aren’t as many Spark users making spark videos yet, but they can have diff(better) video features than Bluesky videos, for example allowing longer videos.
*Fediversereport has already written a great detailed explainer about the differences between Skylight and Spark, so I’m not going to go into that here, but they have very different approaches. *
Skylight is the first of the @proto Tiktok clones to be available for iOS and Android in the US. Spark is coming soon, and is accepting sign ups for their beta.
Give me your Attention
Bluesky started as a Twitter clone for a reason. You don’t need to understand what a PDS is to use something that looks like Twitter (used to look). The word for this is skeuomorphism, but that’s an awfully big word.
💬 Short text posts are just a content format that users already understand.
Skylight is something new, an “unbannable TikTok” built on top of Bluesky. Thus taking advantage of Bluesky’s open ATproto foundations and 30+million and growing user base.
The reason I 😍Skylight and Spark, but never trusted TikTok
When content creators are just publishing to their PDSs, as a content consumer this means that I can control and customize my subscription feeds, and that no app can take that control away from me.
Bluesky already does this by allowing custom feeds that users subscribe to that were also created and curated by other users. Imagine custom designing your own feed algorithm, and sharing, and monetizing them.
But off of Bluesky, the @proto data in your PDS is mostly public, so Bluesky can’t keep it in a walled garden.
The ATmosphere is born
Because “follower/followee” is happening below the app level, at the PDS level, I’m not tied down to only following an @identity on any one app. I automatically follow them on every other @proto app too.
Your Followers can truly follow you
Content creators won’t need to manage a ton of separate app post schedules because the content consumers will be in control of our feeds. Creators can just make content and post it, and the consumers will give it their attention when they are ready to consume it.
So even tho, Bluesky looks like Twitter and Skylight looks like Tiktok, when @immber shares a “short form video” from my PDS, my followers can decide which app they want to watch it on because both apps feed you the same “short form video” format.
Browsers vs Walled Gardens
Old people like myself might remember back when AOL only worked to show you other AOL sites. But then browsers happened, we could go anywhere on the internet we wanted.
This is what the walled gardens have been doing to us, where Instagram only shows me Instagram posts. If the ATmosphere takes off, it will make our social identities as open and accessible as the internet itself.
The future is better app experiences
Some apps will share formats and some won’t. This won’t stop at TikTok clones.
But really what this means is that users are going to get to pick their favorite app experiences, and that will be what decides what apps we use in the future. You can never be “locked in” to an app experience on the ATmosphere.
Opening up
If you don’t like watching shorts on Bluesky, you can try Skylight and still get access to the same content. 🤯
Since @proto is open, there’s also nothing stopping YouTube or TikTok from eventually making their content open to the ATmosphere either. Except for profiting off of hoarding our attention.
The ATmosphere is my new “cloud”
This is why I’m so damn excited about this new protocol and these new TikTok clones.
Even an introverted not-the-best-content-creator user like myself can now have the best of both worlds.
Onward 🚀
And yes, I plan to be on both of them… just as soon as I get around to making some videos.
