MOJALAND ／ 02
Bluesky is the largest bird in a sky called the Atmosphere. It is not the only one. Under the same sky there are photos, blogs, podcasts, maps, git and Lego.
Almost all of it is written in English. Read only Japanese and the sky looks like it holds one bird. It is not absent. It is unseen.
This was written for Japanese readers, as a field guide to what lies on the other side of that wall. In English it reads differently: it is a list of what a Japanese reader could not see, which is most of what you built.
The year on each entry is the year that service created an account on the Atmosphere, or the year its public repository appeared. Not a launch date, but something checkable. 2023 and 2024 entries are shown in the darker colour. In this sky that is already old.
WHY IT IS UNSEEN
There are clear reasons why almost none of this reaches Japanese.
One. Announcements happen in English. A new service is announced in an English post, an English blog, an English Discord. By the time a Japanese write-up exists the next wave has arrived.
Two. It is too fast. New arrivals keep appearing at roughly ten a week. Without someone tracking them, nothing accumulates into a shape.
Three. Only the name arrived. What reached Japan was the name of an app, Bluesky, not the name of the sky it flies in. Material explaining what "Atmosphere" means in Japanese can still be counted on one hand.
So the Bluesky visible in Japanese is one entrance among several. Change the entrance and your account still works. That is what the first piece is about.
SIZE
around 1,000
In August 2026 Bluesky's CEO gave that number in an interview. What was counted is not stated. Counting prototypes and weekend builds, it is reachable.
This much is solid. For the past year, roughly ten new services a week have been introduced without a break. What follows is the subset that could be described in Japanese. It is not exhaustive.
Same account, different screen. This is where "moving" is easiest to feel. Four of these are Japanese-made, which is not an accident: Japanese search and rendering get more care from Japanese authors.
Feature-rich mobile client. Long-running, and the default recommendation.
A fork of the official app for people who want the switches exposed.
Japanese-made web client. Careful with Japanese text.
Also Japanese-made. Hides nothing; every feature is on screen.
Japanese-made. Hides every number: likes, followers, all of it. By baisony. Reading without counting, built as a feature rather than a resolution. iOS and Android.
By holybea, who also made TOKIMEKI. Built as a shelter for when Bluesky is down. The clearest demonstration of why splitting the four roles matters.
The client Eurosky is building, on European infrastructure.
iPhone. Drafts sync across devices.
Where Instagram and TikTok sit. The most crowded block, with several builders aiming at the same spot. Photos land in the same repository as your posts, so nothing is lost by switching app.
Photo-first, by a Berlin developer. First into this block.
Photo and video, iOS and Android. Renamed from Pinksky.
Short vertical video, aimed where TikTok is.
Live streaming. Carried the Atmosphere conference.
Two-tone black and white only. Game Boy Camera aesthetics.
Collects and arranges images quietly. The block keeps growing.
Somewhere to put images and use them from other apps.
The best piece of collaboration in the Atmosphere so far. Three competing blog platforms sat down and agreed a common shape for a post. Write anywhere and any of them can read it. The opposite of enclosure.
The common shape itself. Built by three companies together, and now rendered in the Bluesky timeline.
Longform and newsletters. One of the three.
Also one of the three. Personal-blog shaped.
The third. Newsletters, essays, serial fiction, criticism. Keeps the writer's relationship with the reader on the writer's side.
Markdown blogging. An old hand, used in Japanese too.
Another blog. One more place to write.
Reads posts written in the common shape, across authors.
Subscribing and writing. Reader-side tools are appearing too.
Scrobbling, podcasts, live audio. Easy to enter from Japanese, because much of it needs no language.
Live audio and podcasts, built by the Japanese engineer So Asano. Japanese-language shows broadcast here.
Scrobbles what you listen to; existing Last.fm tools work. The site is unreliable, so the Bluesky account is linked instead.
The song you have on repeat.
Somewhere to put the music itself. For producers and DJs, with terms attached to stems. Sign in with your Bluesky account.
The things not shaped like a social network. This is the most interesting block. The same account gets you into a git repository and an event RSVP. No new signup. And it is not large companies doing it: people like flo-bit in Berlin, shipping small tools one after another, are what makes this block thick.
Collaborative source hosting, built as a replacement for GitHub. Your Bluesky account gets you in.
A link board with votes. Where Reddit and Hacker News sit.
Events and RSVPs. Ran the Atmosphere conference.
Group chat, aiming where Discord is.
Assemble your own page out of blocks. By flo-bit, above.
One inbox for notifications arriving from scattered apps. Each app asks permission; revoke any time. Same author.
Build your own feed without writing code.
Who has blocked whom. The standard for looking at the numbers.
The heaviest block here. Rather than building an app, these groups are building the ground that does not depend on Bluesky the company. Their own storage, their own relay, their own view. They are doing the part the first piece describes as promise rather than practice.
Began as a place for Black users. It started with building its own ordering of posts and did not stop there: it stood up its own relay, and made it usable by others. The stack was rewritten from scratch in Rust.
What matters is that this is the first case where leaving if you want to was actually done. Not in theory. It runs.
blackskyweb.xyzThe motivation is European sovereignty. Data on European servers, under European law. Not one app but ground that European builders can stand on. Its first job was a moderation commons that small builders can share.
Whether a region can hold its own sky. That experiment is running now.
eurosky.techEverything held inside Canada. It states up front that it will not push an algorithm at you and will not run surveillance for advertising. Posting requires passing a one-time human check, currently available only from inside Canada. More than 2,500 investors funded it.
It sits on the same ground as Bluesky, so interoperation is assumed. That is what separates it from building a closed national network.
gander.socialNone of the three left in anger. They fly the same sky and keep their own nest. The design is what allows it.
Unclassifiable. The weekly roundups are thickest here. People not trying to build a social network are building their hobbies on top of a social network's foundation. If you want to know whether this sky is really widening, look here. The years in this block are the year each was introduced in Japanese, not the year it was made.
A Minecraft server wired into the Atmosphere.
See a bird, log the bird.
Logging trees. After birds, trees.
An open network of personal weather stations.
Perfume reviews.
Every roller coaster you have ridden.
Multiplayer 3D brick building.
Recipes.
Japanese practice: fast recognition of kana and grammar.
Stamp collecting for places you have been.
Reading lists, wired to library availability.
Logging tea sessions.
One-touch racing in space, flown as your own account.
Collecting memes and copypasta.
A decentralised imageboard.
Japanese-made group chat, already using the new permissioned-data mechanism.
CROSSING
Most of what is listed here was gathered from Japanese coverage rather than found directly. The wall is not solid. Several planks are laid across it.
"This week's links" (#ATプロトーク) @yamarten.bsky.social posts a weekly roundup. Nearly every newer service here came from it. For following the Atmosphere in Japanese it is, effectively, the primary source.
The Bluecast broadcast The same person talks through the week live, in Japanese, every week. Faster than reading.
Japanese meetups Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka and elsewhere, running in series. Announcements appear on connpass.
Japanese-made clients TOKIMEKI, Klearsky, Ucho-ten, tomarigi. Four native entrances is, by the standards of this sky, unusually well served.
NOW
In August 2026 an alpha shipped for data that is not public. Until now what could be placed in this sky was, as a rule, readable by anyone. If that changes, private notes and limited conversations sit on the same account as everything else.
It is an alpha. The specification moves weekly. Production is expected next year.
Which means what is visible here is a middle state. The "around 1,000" will be a different number by then.