A Growing Open Social Web Community

We just ran our third atproto Vienna Meetup this past Monday and what an experience it was. The community grows with every step and it's exciting to see that participants enjoy our sessions so much they then bring friends along for the next one. We roughly doubled the number of attendees compared to our second one (we were 17!!!), and the Metalab room we reserved was growing so crowded, samvie had to sit in the window and I'm sad I missed the opportunity to snap that picture. 😉

It is a privilege to get to meet so many new enthusiastic folk with every iteration and from all walks of life. A friend mentioned "not having any clear expectations on the event, other than expecting the crowd to be a bunch of developers" and being surprised that we bring together scientists, authors, journalists, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, open-source maintainers/contributors/enthusiasts and more, and that the technical backgrounds are not relevant, it's about common ideals and goals, namely a more Open Social Web.

Talks

This week, JYC started us off with a presentation on what the atmosphere is, what the different components look like and gave us a nice example of a new feature coming soon(™️) to the Svelte website, leveraging an atmosphere account's PDS to store playground projects.

Emily Hunt presented Aster ID, a project by ATProto Science and supported via funding by the Modal Foundation which aims to give researchers a permanent host on the atmosphere that confirms their status as researchers and provides "a place where you build and own your identify, website, data and connections".

samvie gave a lightning talk on Berlin Fediday 2026 which took place in September and whose streams are up on their site. She also shared the ABC of openness as a resource for discussing paths towards greater access, democratic participation and justice. The leaflet is to my knowledge only available in German currently, but absolutely worth a read.

It doesn't end there

While we try to keep our presentation time short to not overload the meetups, good discussions stem from them and continue on afterwards, so if you ever join us for a meetup, we welcome you to hang around afterwards for food and drinks.

Our next meetup(s)

We've already posted links to our next 2 meetups and we aim to continue planning them 2 months in advance to allow participants to plan ahead. You can find both below:

Join our chats

If you want to follow our community's discussions, find our next meetups and agendas, you can find us on Roomy and/or on Colibri.

Website

We're working on getting the atproto.wien website up, stay tuned!

P.S. Sorry we missed the post-meetup notes for the second meetup which took place on the 31st of August. We'll try our best to keep these posts coming regularly for every upcoming meetup and shortly after they take place.

P.P.S

Paul Fuxjäger offered us some curry for the next meetup and the last one he made for the IETF was delicious, so more reasons to join us 😉

~ 🦦