🇪🇺🌐 The future of social media may be decided in Europe

A survey of European AT Protocol projects, including 4 mini case-studies

Welcome new readers! New_ Public is a nonprofit product studio focused on reimagining community, connection, and conversation online. Our projects include Roundabout and Public Spaces Incubator.

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Sovereignty is in the news. President Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland has put a renewed spotlight on issues of territorial control, independence, and colonialism.

As Canadian PM Mark Carney points out, sovereignty isn’t just about what flag is waving over your land, it’s about having a choice besides what’s offered by hegemonic superpowers. This is true in international diplomacy, and also in technology.

Sure, you can leave Big Tech social media platforms… but where would you go?

In recent years, the promise of sovereignty has been leading people to create communities on open social media protocols like ActivityPub (powering Mastodon) and AT Protocol (powering Bluesky). In theory, decentralization offers communities a way to connect to a larger social network, but on their own terms.

We’ve seen this with Blacksky, a community centering Black voices, and Gander, a platform in development for Canadians — both on AT Protocol. Could this approach work for all of Europe?

Our friends at the brand new Modal Foundation are focused on this through their project Eurosky, which aims to build out the infrastructure that would allow over 450 million people in the EU to experience the social internet outside of Silicon Valley apps. Ivan Sigal, Modal’s Executive Chair, says:

Social media today is critical infrastructure for publics, and it needs to work for people, not exploit and mislead them. Social tech alternatives can’t just be a throwback to old versions of existing Big Tech platforms; they need to offer better user experiences, information integrity, and more algorithmic choice.

This vision for European digital infrastructure has been in the works for some time, and we think it’s connected to New_ Public’s larger mission of bringing digital public spaces within everyone’s reach.

To get a better sense of the current challenges and opportunities, we enlisted Dutch data analyst Laurens Hof to survey the field. He reviewed data from 204 projects and analyzed the state of AT Protocol, or ATProto for short. Laurens also zooms into four case-studies of European projects built on this infrastructure. (We haven’t forgotten ActivityPub, which Laurens is working on now. We’ll be sure to share that when it’s ready.)

Here are a few events on this topic to keep on your radar:

• Join New_ Public Principal Software Engineer for Roundabout, Blaine Cook, at this DWeb virtual meetup, where he’ll be presenting about Roundabout!

• We’re thrilled to announce that New_ Public is supporting the upcoming ATmosphere conference, March 26-29 in Vancouver, BC. Join us!

• Also, you can submit an idea for FediForum’s Un-Workshop on growing the open social web before February 15, and attend virtually on March 2.

– Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

French President Macron made a speech on German Unity Day in October 2025, in which he made a passionate call for Europeans to take back control of their democracies in digital infrastructure. He said:

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.

To take Macron’s call seriously means that Europe needs to build its own digital democratic places, its own social networks that are controlled by Europeans, not by a few American and Chinese companies and oligarchs. While it is debatable whether it is even desirable to have a European version of Meta, it is clear that there is no will within Europe to do such a thing. For the people who want to take Macron’s call for European social networking seriously, that leaves working with open social networking protocols as the only feasible path forward.

ATProto represents one of the most concrete opportunities for Europe to create their own social networking infrastructure, because of a number of factors described below. ATProto provides an excellent base for public society to claim sovereign ownership over the social networking infrastructure, without it resulting in social media that is operated by governments.

The state of ATProto

ATProto has moved beyond the experimental stage. The protocol is mature enough to be credible, as the technical architecture works, more than 41 million people already use it, developers are already building, and there are multiple other companies (beyond Bluesky, the original platform and team responsible for creating the protocol) with million-dollar-funding starting to build on top of it. At the same time, the network is still young enough that small funding interventions can shape its trajectory.

This time period will likely not last, as patterns and habits will get settled around how the new startups currently building on ATProto shape the network. This current state of the ecosystem points to challenges where intervention can meaningfully shift the development of the ecosystem.

The main obstacles for European projects are funding and regulation. Developers have shown that it is possible to build independent platforms on ATProto, yet suitable funding mechanisms are largely absent. Venture capital is not suited to open infrastructure, and existing European funds for open protocols have so far focused elsewhere, such as AI and data management. Regulatory frameworks written for centralised platforms also fail to account for distributed architectures like ATProto.

How these challenges are met can meaningfully shape how ATProto develops. Patterns of governance, funding, and infrastructure are still in formation.

Opportunities for ATProto in Europe

ATProto allows for modular unbundling: Projects like Microcosm (indexing the entire network for backlink databases on a Raspberry Pi), and Graze (feed builder and ad marketplace) are disaggregating traditional social media functions into independent services. This validates ATProto’s core thesis but creates a strategic challenge, which is most notably with ads. The value of advertising normally accrues to the platform operators, which use the profits to fund the cost of moderation and other vital services. In a modular system, with functions being spun out into separate services, it is unclear how to pay for everything.

Client-to-Platform migration as a viable growth path: Multiple successful projects (Flashes with 50K users, Skylight with over 100k videos uploaded) started as Bluesky clients and are now evolving into independent platforms. This gradual shift allows a project to start small, as a client reliant on Bluesky for services, content, and more, and over time become more and more platform-like, with their own infrastructure and services. This is enabled by ATProto’s modularity, which lowers technical barriers to entry and allows projects to build traction before making infrastructure investments. This pattern is unique compared to other open protocols like ActivityPub or Nostr.

Infrastructure innovation outpaces user adoption: The most technologically impressive projects, like Microcosm, or alternative software implementations for relays and AppViews, showcase the technological strength of ATProto. However, most user-facing platforms struggle to gain users outside of the developer community. A good example of that is Frontpage, a Hacker News-like platform that is well-designed and over a year old, but has minimal usage, indicating that adoption requires more than good engineering and an open protocol.

Digital sovereignty as international value proposition: Gander‘s explicit positioning as a “sovereign Canadian social network” represents international interest in ATProto as a path to social media sovereignty. However, their development roadmap, including building a sovereign social cloud for Canadian institutions over time, reveals that this dream is still a long way out. No similar platform is being developed for the EU market. The sovereign nation-state use case is aspirational but far from ready yet.

Case studies: Promising European ATProto projects

Interviews with four EU-based development teams show promising projects with real traction that operate at hobbyist scale.

Roomy 🇪🇺
Location: EU
Category: Platform
Status: Alpha
Scale: Commercial
Funding: self-funded with a one-time small grant from Skyseed
Team: Three developers

Roomy is a group chatting platform that has integrations with ATProto. The project is in an alpha stage, with demos available for testing. It takes some inspiration from Discord and other group chatting platforms like Matrix, but adds its own spin to it. Roomy places more priority on separate “threads” in the conversation.

Flashes 🇩🇪
Location: Germany
Category: Client
Status: Production
Scale: Commercial (100,000 downloads)
Funding: self-funded
Team: one core iOS developer, two Android developers

Flashes is an iOS client for Bluesky with an Instagram-like design. It is one of the most popular Bluesky clients, meaning that one can interact with existing photos and videos on Bluesky. There is significant interest from its user base in an Android version as well, which is now in development.

Sill 🇳🇱
Location: Netherlands
Category: Client
Status: Production
Scale: Commercial (1,000-10,000 users)
Funding: self-funded
Team size: one

Sill is a reader client that monitors your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to find the most popular links in your network, especially links that have been shared by multiple people you follow. It then groups these links together to get an easy overview of what's currently popular. Sill monitors accounts on both ActivityPub and ATProto and aggregates the data in the frontend.

Wafrn 🇪🇸
Location: Spain
Category: Platform
Status: Production
Scale: Open source (1,000-10,000 users)
Funding: self-funded
Team size: one core developer, two major contributors

Wafrn is a Tumblr-like platform that started development using ActivityPub. Over time, it also has gained full support for ATProto. It is the first and only platform that fully integrates both protocols. The project has a strong vibe of casual, internet-first users.

Main recommendations

These case studies offer specific, actionable priorities for institutions and organizations that care about building open, sovereign social infrastructure in Europe. Here are where I believe investments could be leveraged to make the most difference.

Fund application developers directly: Supporting developers building consumer-facing applications represents the highest-impact opportunity. Funding in the €25,000 to €100,000 range matches actual needs and would enable multiple projects to move from hobbyist to professional operation.

Focus on European developers addresses their specific funding gap while building the developer community that European social infrastructure requires. Project selection should prioritise platforms where users get immediate value without requiring large existing communities, and those serving specific niche audiences rather than competing directly with Big Tech platforms.

Support infrastructure development: ATProto creates a separation of functions, but there is still significant room for even more decentralisation of the infrastructure. Some parts of the ATProto infrastructure (such as the app backend) can be quite technically demanding. Some projects are working to split up the function of network components even more, allowing for greater resilience and decentralisation.

This fundamental work improves the ecosystem but there are few commercial incentives to build such a system, and it is mostly done from personal convictions. Similar funding levels, in the range of €25-100,000, would enable focused work on components that lower barriers for other developers.

Digital sovereignty has become a central priority for European institutions, and the need for alternatives to US-controlled social media platforms is increasingly urgent given current geopolitical developments. ATProto represents one of the few technically serious approaches available that can support independent European infrastructure while maintaining global interoperability. The protocol’s modular architecture is particularly well-suited to European needs, by allowing regional control over data storage, content moderation, and platform features while users remain connected to a global network.

European developers are already building on this protocol and demonstrating its viability, but they operate without appropriate support structures. Strategic investments in this ecosystem directly advance sovereignty goals by establishing independent European capacity in social infrastructure, reducing reliance on US platforms, and creating models that other European organisations can build upon.

Supporting early European operators such as Eurosky offers a strategic opportunity. By investing in specific modules such as moderation or hosting, Europe can incrementally build sovereign capacity within an open global network, ensuring that European standards and values are embedded in the foundations of future social infrastructure.

– Laurens Hof

Thanks Laurens!

Bracing for a lot of snow,

–Josh