There's a naming problem sitting at the centre of the AT Protocol ecosystem, and the more the network grows, the more it matters (but maybe only to a pedant like me).
Right now, "Bluesky" refers to (at least) four distinct things: Bluesky PBC, the company; bsky.app, the microblogging app they make; bsky.social, the account provider they operate; and—most slippery of all—the conversational space where people meet. The first three are at least technically coherent.
It's the fourth that breaks easily.
The sticking point for me is that we can participate fully in that conversational space without touching anything operated by the Bluesky company. Your account can be hosted by providers like Eurosky, Blacksky or Northsky. You can read and post through any number of independent clients like Mu, Blacksky, Pinkleap, Witchsky, Tokimeki. Bluesky PBC is just one actor among many in a space their protocol enabled but they don't strictly own.
So when someone says "I'm on Bluesky", what do they actually mean? That they use bsky.app? That their account is hosted on bsky.social? Or simply that they talk in this specific conversational space (breathe in... where microblog posts governed by shared lexicon formats flow between independently operated clients and account providers, ... aaaand breathe out)?
All three are currently valid readings. None of them fully agree with each other.
Why yes you certainly can post on Bluesky even when your account isn’t on bsky.social and you’re not using bsky.app why are you crying?!
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One alternative is "the Atmosphere" (shorthand for the AT Protocol ecosystem of products and services) but this has the opposite problem. The Atmosphere is too broad. ATproto is an open protocol for building any decentralised social internet application. Microblogging is just one of many use cases. The Atmosphere will eventually encompass apps for long-form publishing, vertical video, group messaging, collaborative coding, social games, and anything and everything you can imagine.
Calling the microblogging space "the Atmosphere" conflates the transport layer with one specific thing running on top of it. A bit like calling email "the Internet".
So we're stuck somewhere. But where?
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This isn't (just) semantic tidiness. Names shapes what people understand. Where they are. Who it belongs to. What they can do.
If the space is called "Bluesky", the implicit assumption is that the Bluesky company is the centre of gravity. The authority, the arbiter, the thing that could disappear and take everything with it. That framing runs directly counter to the democracy and decentralisation that AT Protocol is purporting to offer. The whole point is social spaces that can outlast any single actor (including its originators).
This question is already showing up in how people explain the network to newcomers, how app developers describe their products, how journalists cover it, and how the community talks about product features, social connections, governance and accountability.
@sebastian.eurosky.social @sherif.eurosky.social Given the multiplatform use of app.bsky.graph.follow, what's your ideal eurosky equivalent of Bluesky followers / Blacksky followers? Would it be Eurosky followers? mu followers?
Just ask a friend to post his research "on bluesky" too, sending him a link of eurosky/atproto.fr and mu.social. That was confusing to say the least. Surely "taking back ownership" means a steepest learning curve at some point, but we can probably do better.
Each time someone says "Bluesky" and means one specific thing—or all four things at once—the conceptual fog thickens. We need to agree on clear simple mutually-exclusive naming because if we get them wrong, people will continue to imagine and understand the wrong things.