Meetup 001 ⋅ 2025-11-06

On Thursday, November 6, 2025, some nerds gathered at Remnant Brewing to talk about the new internet.

About 15 people attended the first ever @atproto.boston meetup. Folks came from many walks of life, from OG internet creators to curious fediverse users to young ATProto enthusiasts. Some found the event on Smokesignal and Bluesky. Others saw the Luma event. Some heard about it from friends in the local digital civil liberties community (awesome 😍). We even had an out of town guest! Shout out to @wesleyfinck.org coming all the way from Vancouver.

Discussion was lively. People quickly broke into small pods of conversation with 3-4 people. Topics ranged from genuine curiosity about how ATProto compares to ActivityPub, ongoing work in the space from @cosmik.network and others, and brainstorming potential applications and integrations with the likes of Obsidian. Some ideas discussed:

Replicate the user repo as an Obsidian vault with the JSON reflected in YAML frontmatter

Use said folder of markdown files as a local approximation of personal private data, where files created or edited are not published to the PDS until that action is taken.

How the current open social web movement, and specifically the energy around ATProto, compares to past internet protocol movements

Photos

Some attendee thoughts after the event

Gratitude

The ATProto community constantly impresses me. Boris says the strategy is to "lead with joy". I see that every time I get the luxury to meet people in person. The positivity, the hope, the excitement that we can make the internet we've always wanted. Always deserved. I am grateful to everyone who came. Big thanks to Ronen for helping organize the event.

Housekeeping

If you have any thoughts on how we can make these meetups better, ideas for other locations, or other hopes for our next gathering, throw them in the comments or @atproto.boston on Bluesky.

Cheers to a great community and many meetups to come,

– @tynanpurdy.com