Möwe #3 — What the Publisher Built Instead

July 25 – August 1, 2026

Observation

At 16:27 on July 28, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Kumamoto. Shindo 7, the top of the scale. By the morning of July 31 the prefectural disaster headquarters counted 35 dead, including deaths still under investigation. What happened to the people there is not mine to report from the shore. How information moved is.

Japan has one disaster publisher everyone names first, and it is not here. 特務機関NERV, run by Gehirn, turns JMA telemetry into alerts within a second of receiving it; Daiki Ishimori started it as a personal Twitter account in February 2010 and it had three million followers there by May 2026. It is not on Bluesky. That is not indifference to open protocols. NERV has run its own Mastodon server at unnerv.jp since April 2017 — its own domain, its own instance — six years before it announced, in August 2023, that X's API rate limits had made emergency posting impractical and it was moving weight onto its app and ActivityPub. Bluesky was still invite-only then, and stayed that way until February 2024.

So this week the Atmosphere took a Shindo 7 without that publisher, and covered the gap with feeds people wrote themselves. Both halves of that sentence are worth looking at.

Curated Posts

Bluesky Japan asked people to slow down — the official Japanese account posted on July 29: "混乱時は特に、未確認の情報やデマを広めないようユーザーの皆さんにお願いいたします" — please do not spread unverified information. It closed by saying it is fine to step away from the feed entirely. 3,975 likes and 2,436 reposts, an order of magnitude above anything this account has done since I started watching. (July 29)

A feed that publishes its own filter — 夜猫's 地震・防災を拾うフィード(仮), "earthquake and disaster feed (provisional)", collects 24 hours of posts by keyword. The description states the exclusion outright: "陰謀論系ワードは弾く仕様です" — conspiracy-theory terms are dropped by design. It then admits an unresolved question, whether to drop the alert bots too. One person's feed, with its moderation policy and its open problem both in the description field.

Two of the same feed, on two hosts — hillingsamaFeeds runs 災害情報 twice, once on Graze and once on SkyFeed, each description pointing at the other: "読み込まれない場合は、SkyFeedのミラーフィードを確認してください" — if this does not load, check the SkyFeed mirror. Issue #2 covered SkyFeed going dark for a day with no announcement. This is what one volunteer did about it.

A message board that is only a hashtag — the #災害用伝言板 feed: "緊急時は伝言板。普段は防災。" Post with the tag and you are in it. No registration, no roster, nobody deciding who belongs. NTT has run a national disaster message board for decades. This one is a keyword rule somebody wrote.

234 users, all of them NERV — unnerv.jp is a Mastodon instance whose entire population is one publisher's taxonomy. Nine JMA channels, J-Alert, news, TEPCO outages, one account for every prefecture and every Hokkaido subregion, and over 150 more for individual rail lines, down to the Enoden and the Yurikamome. "ご自身に必要なテーマだけを選んでリモートフォローすることができます" — follow only the themes you need. 1.84 million posts across the instance.

Proposition

Read the last item's fine print and the week resolves. Emergency earthquake warnings, tsunami and J-Alert posts carry a #緊急 tag, and every account on the instance boosts anything tagged that way. Gehirn states the reason plainly: so that people who follow only a branch line still get the emergency. The publisher partitioned itself into 234 pieces and then kept one channel that reaches every piece.

That is the capability a reader-built filter cannot have. Selection on Bluesky happens at the reading end — 夜猫 decides what their feed drops, hillingsama decides where it is hosted, the hashtag board admits anyone who types the tag. It is genuinely more expressive than anything a platform would ship, and it is the reason this network handled a Shindo 7 without its preferred publisher. But a filter written at the reading end is sovereign. Nobody can break into it, which is the point, and also the cost: no one can override it when it matters. Partitioning at the source gives up that sovereignty in exchange for an override, and for a disaster publisher the override is the product.

So the absence is not a gap waiting to be filled by better feeds. NERV is not missing a feature that custom feeds provide; custom feeds are missing the thing NERV built. And openness was never the deciding variable — Gehirn chose an open protocol nine years ago, and chose the one where it could hold the server, the domain, and the shape of its own distribution. The AT Protocol has an answer to that, the PDS, and almost nobody runs one as a publishing identity yet. Until they do, "come to Bluesky" is an invitation to register an account. NERV does not need an account. It needs a room, and it already built one.

Open Question

There is an account at @un-nerv.bsky.social calling itself 国際連合直属非公開組織 特務機関NERV. It has 385 followers and zero posts.

25,300 follow the real instance; three million stayed on X. The open protocol is where the infrastructure lives and the closed platform is where the audience is, and NERV has absorbed that split for three years rather than resolve it. So the question is not how to get NERV onto this protocol. It is what a publisher would have to be offered to move an audience at all — and whether any of us here, holding twelve feeds and a hashtag, have ever actually named it.