The Still Water — Day 3: The Conditions for a Living Space

[JP Ver is here]

A four-day conference in Vancouver. A Monday-night meetup in a Tokyo office building. The size is different. The question is the same: what makes a space feel alive?

ATmosphereConf 2026 lasted four days. People left feeling they had found their place. They felt seen. They felt they belonged. Day 1 of this series described that feeling and its absence in the Japanese-language zone. Day 2 described the trap that holds Bluesky’s parent company in place: decentralize or survive, choose one.

Day 3 asks: what keeps a space alive — not for four days, but for good?

The Meetup as Proof

On April 13, about 100 people came to Findy’s office in Ōsaki, Tokyo, for Bluesky Meetup in Tokyo Vol.4. Three years since the first one. I went as a regular attendee. I helped a bit at the door, sat through the talks, and chatted with people over pizza.

One thing hit me right away. Meeting someone in person carries far more than text. On a timeline, a person is a small picture and some words. In a room, they have a voice, a way of standing, a face that reacts. What takes weeks to learn through text — who this person is, what they care about, whether they mean what they say — becomes clear in seconds when you stand next to them.

This is what a conference does. It packs shared experience into a short time. You know who you are in this room. You feel that your being here matters. Something is happening right now, right in front of you.

Then the event ends. The lights go off. Everyone goes home.

Temporary Density, Lasting Density

I have been working on a framework called Three Densities. It separates three layers.

Graph density (D₁) is the actual structure — how many people are connected, how much they post, how many are in the room. Perceived density (D₃) is how the space feels — whether it feels alive, whether you feel noticed, whether you expect something to happen next. Feed density (D₂) sits between them — what the algorithm or the feed puts in front of your eyes.

A conference pushes all three up at once. D₁ is high: everyone is in the same place. D₂ is at its strongest: you cannot escape the buzz; it fills the air. D₃ rises fast: you feel known, useful, and excited all at once.

But conferences end. D₁ drops the moment people leave the building. D₂ goes back to whatever your timeline shows. D₃? D₃ stays a while. You carry the feeling for days, maybe weeks. Then it fades.

This gap — where D₁ has already fallen but D₃ has not caught up yet — is what I call density hysteresis. The space is no longer active, but it still feels alive. It is running on leftover energy. A previous essay laid this out as Proposition 4 of the Three Densities model. This essay asks the next question: what turns temporary density into lasting density? What keeps the leftover energy from running out?

The Spectrum

The answer is not “hold more events.” Running one event after another is not the same as building something that lasts. Each event is a single spike. Between spikes, the space goes cold.

What keeps density alive is a structure I call the spectrum.

At the outer edge sits the whole network. The global timeline. Everyone. This is where the sense of size comes from — the feeling that somewhere out there, something is happening. You do not need to see every post. You need to believe that the network goes further than you can see.

At the inner edge sits your own space. Private notes. Thinking alone. Talking to a wall when nobody is listening. No audience. No show. No one keeping score. This space is not social. It is where ideas take shape before they are ready for anyone else.

Between these two edges lies everything that matters: the middle. Groups of thirty. Study circles of five. A pair working on something together. A chat room where everyone knows everyone. A small feed that only a few people follow. These are the spaces where you actually feel like yourself. You know who you are in a group of thirty. What you do changes how a room of five feels. On a timeline of forty thousand, you are just one more voice in the crowd.

The spectrum is not three neat layers. It is a sliding scale. The lines are fuzzy. One person can exist at many points at once — posting on the global timeline, talking in a small chat, writing in a private notebook. The health of a network depends on how rich this scale is. Not on how big any single part of it grows.

What X Gets Wrong

X has two layers: you and everyone. Nothing in between.

Lists are there. Communities were added. But neither one is part of the main experience. The whole system pushes every user into one single ladder — one ranking, one attention game, one pyramid. Who you are gets reduced to a follower count. What you do gets reduced to how many likes it gets. The drive to check back comes from the algorithm, which is built to get reactions, not to share context.

This is what I call pyramid integration. Everyone plays in the same arena. The rules of the biggest layer — impressions, going viral, climbing the ranks — take over the smallest layer too. Your private thoughts turn into content. Your friendships turn into audience numbers. The middle, where you could actually be yourself at a human scale, does not exist.

The problem with X is not that it is big. The problem is that X has no middle.

What Bluesky Could Get Right

Bluesky has the building blocks for a middle layer. Custom feeds. Labelers. The choice of where to store your data. Starter packs. The protocol itself allows for separation: your data lives in your own space, and different services can show different views of the same network.

But building blocks are not a building. As Dan Abramov pointed out, community tools are not yet part of the everyday experience. The standard Bluesky app gives you a global timeline and a list of people you follow. The middle layer is something you have to go looking for. It is not built into the front door.

Day 1 of this series called the Japanese-language zone still water. In the language of the spectrum: what the Japanese-language zone lacks is not people. It lacks middle-layer spaces. A handful of developers work on their own. A few organizers run events on personal effort. The people exist. The threads between them do not.

Bringing more users to the outer layer does not fix this. A timeline of four hundred thousand is no friendlier to identity and role than a timeline of forty thousand. What fixes it is the growth of middle-layer spaces — small enough that you are known, connected enough that you feel the wider network is real.

Connection, Not Merger

When middle-layer spaces are few, there is a pull to build one big one. Combine the chat servers. Make a single hub. Bring everyone together.

This is a trap. The moment you merge small spaces into one large space, you have built a new outer layer. The same pyramid takes shape. The same flattening of identity. The same race for attention.

The right idea is connection, not merger. Middle-layer spaces should stay small. What ties them together is not shared membership but shared edges — the sense that other groups exist, that people move between them, that what happens in one place sends ripples to another. You do not need to see everything. You need to trust that there is more out there than what you see.

A conference does this by accident. For four days, the edges become the center. You meet people from groups you never knew about. You go home knowing that the network is bigger than your view of it. That knowledge is what keeps anticipation alive.

The question is how to do this without a conference. How to make the edges visible without crushing them into a center.

The Meetup, Revisited

Back in Ōsaki. One hundred people. Pizza. Stickers. A mascot named Chiitan posing for photos.

The meetup did something no timeline can do. It proved the community is real. A community on a timeline is an idea. You believe it exists because you see posts. But believing is not the same as seeing with your own eyes. For that, you need a body in a room, a voice in the air, a handshake or a nod.

The meetup was a refueling stop. For one evening, D₃ spiked. People went home feeling the network is real, that it stretches beyond their feed, that something might happen next. How long that feeling lasts depends on whether middle-layer spaces are there to hold it.

If they are — if the people who came go back to small groups where they are known, where what they do matters, where they hear news of what others are doing — the feeling stays. Anticipation lives on between events.

If they are not — if those people go back to a flat timeline where they are just faces in a stream — the feeling fades. The leftover energy runs out. The water goes still.

Three Conditions, Placed on the Spectrum

Day 1 named three conditions for a living space: identity, role, sustained anticipation. Day 3 places each one on the spectrum.

Identity lives in the middle layer. You cannot feel like yourself in a crowd of forty thousand. You can feel like yourself in a room of thirty. Identity needs a space small enough that others know you as a specific person who brings something specific.

Role lives in the middle layer. Your being there has to change how the space feels. In the outer layer, no one person’s coming or going changes anything. In a five-person group, every absence is felt.

Sustained anticipation starts in the outer layer but reaches you through the middle. The feeling that something is happening beyond your sight comes from the size of the network. But it gets to you through middle-layer paths — a friend in another group talks about a project, a feed shows a post from a space you had not seen. Without the middle layer carrying it, the outer layer is just noise. With it, the noise becomes a signal.

The conditions for a living space, then, do not belong to a platform. They belong to a spectrum. A platform that helps many small spaces grow, stay loosely linked, and keep their doors open will feel alive. A platform that crushes the spectrum down to two layers — you and everyone — will feel dead, no matter how many people use it.

What Stays Open

What is the smallest group that works? How few people can a middle-layer space have before identity and role stop working? Is there an upper limit, a size beyond which the group turns into another outer layer? Besides size, what else matters — shared interests, regular contact, things built together?

Can middle-layer spaces be made on purpose, or do they only appear on their own? The English-speaking ATProto community grew its middle layer through conferences and shared projects, without a plan. The Japanese-language zone has not. Can careful design bring about what natural growth has not? Or does the middle layer need a certain number of people before any design will work?

The line between your private space and the middle layer is not stable. A private thought, once shared, becomes part of a group. But sharing changes the thought. The freedom of being alone and the richness of being connected may pull against each other. Whether they can both survive — and how — is a question this essay does not try to answer.

The water is still. But stillness is not a final answer. It is a description of how things are now. The conditions have been named. What is left is to build.

The Still Water is a three-part series on the state of the Bluesky ecosystem. Day 1 described the stagnation of the Japanese-language zone. Day 2 described the double bind inside Bluesky PBC. Day 3 describes the conditions under which a space stays alive.

Nighthaven is a remote observer of the ATProto ecosystem. Published on Leaflet .