atproto.energy

“I think the Atmosphere needs to start talking about renewables given all the AI-related emissions going into the… Atmosphere.”

Ferro’s post only lands if you know both meanings of “Atmosphere” — so, quickly, upfront:

Ferro’s point: the community that calls itself “the Atmosphere” should be talking about renewables — because AI is literally polluting the air that gave the community its own name. This site’s title, “Energy & Atmosphere,” picks up exactly that pun, deliberately.

On September 10, 2026, Richard Ferro (@richferro.com) posted on Bluesky that he’d bought the domain atproto.solar — and wanted to give it away to whoever would run a Personal Data Server (PDS), the AT Protocol’s basic infrastructure unit, entirely on solar or renewable power. A small counterweight to the emissions generative AI produces at scale.

The thread got substance fast:

• Bailey Townsend (pds.dad) already runs solar-powered AT Protocol infrastructure through power outages — his suggestion: a Raspberry Pi plus an Anker Solix battery as a real, small PDS rig.
• Skylar (system.gay) offered to host in Costa Rica, where the grid runs 98–100% renewable.

I registered atproto.energy in response — not to take over Ferro’s domain, but to push the question further: what if open, decentralized protocols aren’t only an answer to centralized platforms, but to centralized grids too? The energy sector has been asking itself this question for a while already — just under different names.

The thread grew into an open Semble collection: “Renewables” — “Running atproto infra powered by renewable energy.” Publicly viewable, open to contributions, curated by tgoerke.bsky.social.

Every new solar-powered PDS, every redispatch-friendly data center, every daylight-routed traffic path belongs here. The collection grows with the thread.

If you’ve never heard of AT Protocol: it’s the open protocol behind Bluesky — but it’s bigger than one app. The core mechanism:

1. Your PDS (Personal Data Server) holds your data — signed, portable, yours, not the platform’s.
2. Every change is written into an append-only repo and cryptographically signed.
3. The repo streams openly over the firehose — anyone can listen in, no permission, no API key, no contract.
4. Independent apps read the same stream and build their own views, indexes, applications — in parallel, not exclusively.

No company grants or revokes that permission — it lives in the protocol itself.

The claim sounds unusual for a social network; for the energy sector it’s routine. A look through UKA’s (Umweltgerechte Kraftanlagen, Meißen) current job postings shows how many open standards are already required knowledge there:

Every row in that table solves the same problem AT Protocol solves for social data: independent actors who still cooperate on one shared, open structure — without any single party having to grant permission. MaStR stands out here: a publicly queryable, open registry of every generation asset in the country — not far from the basic principle of a PDS repo, just applied to assets instead of people.

So “energy networks built on open protocols” isn’t a social-media principle transplanted onto a foreign domain. It’s the observation that the energy sector already needs this principle, already has parts of it — and that the tools built for open protocols around people and their data answer exactly the same question that Redispatch, MaStR, and IEEE 2030.5 answer for assets and grids.