The number of daily active users on Bluesky went from a peak of 550k during its public opening to a recent low of 168k, behind its October 2023 numbers when it was an invite-only social media (a peak of 183k)
Why am I telling you this? Because I think the only way for them to have a future is to join the Fediverse, their UI and customization of algorithms would appeal to some
PS: I think Tumblr, BeReal and Lemon8 should join too
@SakuraHime Also, Bluesky isn't sustainable either. They say they make money from domain names, but I don't think that will bring in that much money. They plan to make commission money off paid feed and moderation services, but then again, who would pay for that kind of stuff as people are not willing to pay for social media.
At some point, Bluesky will have to enshittify and eventually put ads on their services and putting features behind paywalls. Right now, they are burning VC money.
The same goes for Cohost, that thing isn't sustainable at all, but somehow survives at the last minute by the thread, but I don't think they can be sustainable. Not in this economic enviroment with high interest rates with no more "free VC money" to burn.
I really am trying hard to not let these self righteous busy bodies run me off this platform and back to #MuskyTwitter or #Spoutible#BlueSky#post#linkedIn just a random thought from today.
Testing out my GIF reactions.
Giphy.com/NoireSTEMinist
also I can get sensitive about my work when it is my mission and life's passion, I'm not over here playing. #NoireSTEMinist#MySTEMIsForTheStreets
📞 Introducing voice & video call for the Fediverse ✨
Sora is a futuristic Fediverse client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey, Pleroma all in one. Comes with local ML to curate posts and the For You timeline.
In the next update V10, Sora allows you to have a Peer-to-Peer call using Fediverse credentials.
February was a extremely eventful month for Bluesky, with the network opening up. While things have been less hectic in March, there have been significant additions to the ATmosphere: stackable moderation and third party labelers, blogging on ATproto and more. Let’s dive in.
Stackable moderation and labelers
One of the core design parts of Bluesky and the AT Proto network is a focus on individual choice, for both curation (via custom feeds) as well as moderation. With this month’s release of open-source moderation tools and third party labeling services, Bluesky has put their view on what they call ‘Stackable Moderation’ in practice. The idea of stackable moderation (in earlier writings Bluesky called it composable moderation) is that the Bluesky organisation provides a ‘base layer’ of moderation services, and individuals can decide to ‘stack’ additional moderation services on top of the services already provided by Bluesky.
To enable this, Bluesky released ‘Ozone’ as open-source software, which is the moderation tool that the Bluesky organisation uses in-house for their moderation services. They also implemented third party ‘labelers’, allowing other people to run a moderation service that labels posts and accounts. People who subscribe to that labeling service can decide to hide posts that have that specific label. Bluesky posted a short video to demonstrate this here.
Some examples of these new labelers are Aegis, XBlock Screenshot Labeler and AI Moderation Service. The XBlock labeler automatically labels screenshots from all the other social networks, and is a great option for people who are not interested in seeing every post by Elon Musk being dunked on. AI Moderation Service labels posts that are made with AI. Aegis focuses on safety, especially for the queer communities on Bluesky, and has grown out of the lists that were maintained by Kairi, known as the Contraption. Her postmortem analysis of running these denylists for the last 10 months is excellent and worth reading, as it indicates how being placed on a widely adopted moderation list is a highly effective way to starve bad actors of oxygen.
Blogging on AT Protocol
WhiteWind is a new blogging platform that runs on AT Protocol, and allows anyone with a Bluesky account to create their own blog for free. One of the core ideas of building the AT Protocol out in the open is that other people can build different apps on top of it as well, that are not microblogging. The launch of WhiteWind shows that this is indeed possible, and that AT Protocol can be used to build different applications.
Using WhiteWind is as simple as logging in with your Bluesky handle and app password, hit the ‘plus’ button in the bottom right, and start typing. WhiteWind uses Markdown, and for more information there is a basic explanation page.
For the people interested in protocol stuff: WhiteWind is an AppView, that indexes posts with a different ‘lexicon’ than the standard microblogging. Your WhiteWind blogs however are stored on the same PDS, so Bluesky probably hosts your blogs, even though the official Bluesky app will not show the blog posts.
Graber on how Bluesky plans to make money
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber was on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel to talk about Bluesky and Federation. There are lots of interesting discussions in there, and the episode is worth listening to (or reading, transcript available). What stood out to me is Graber’s answer regarding Bluesky’s plans to make money, where she says: “We’ve been building marketplaces within the app, essentially. So, we’ve got information marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we’re going to lean into.”
In February, after Bluesky dropped the need for invite codes, The Verge also spoke with Graber, and also asked the question about ways to make money: “the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”
It is striking to me to how different these answers are: moderation marketplaces is new, and paid additional app features as well as a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm are not mentioned.
In other news – Bluesky
Bluesky has announced a 10k USD microgrants program, to help foster and grow the developer ecosystem, with grants between 500USD and 2000 USD per project. No recipients of the grants have been announced yet.
Last month, Bluesky hired Aaron Rodericks as head of Trust and Safety. This news led to Elon Musk changing the name of X’s Trust and Safety team to ‘Safety’ instead.
The Links
Indie developer Kuba Suder has build a variety of projects for Bluesky and ATproto, and gave an overview of all the projects he has made. Suder has build a way to show all quote posts of a post, a handles directory, a way to cross-post from Bluesky to Mastodon, and more.
Enable comments on your website with Bluesky. This implementation mixes both fediverse interactions with Bluesky interactions together.
Bluesky Feed Creator does exactly what it says on the tin, allowing anyone to create their own custom feed with no coding required. They announced recently that they dropped the waiting list.
Mike Masnick wrote about ‘Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far’.
An experiment in using Bluesky’s DID:PLC with ActivityPub.
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. If you are interested in the world of decentralised social networks, you can subscribe to my newsletter where you get a weekly update on all that is happening.
Deleted my Bluesky account that was for my anime blog. I see no point in Bluesky since it won'r get any engagement there anyway. Not to mention, there is no tools to autoshare that works reliably.
@chikorita157@Aknorals
Japanese microblogging behavior is just amazing. :neocat_confused:
I'd expect users to abandon an app if they don't get any interaction/likes. Japanese users, based on stats, just like to vent..? I'm not sure if this behavior has been studied.
But when it comes to #Bluesky, it's especially infuriating that Bluesky is often presented as the platform of "Jack Dorsey".
It is not. From day one, Bluesky has been led by Jay Graber, one of the very few women in a position of power in tech.
On top of being inherently harmful, this disinformation on Bluesky is also fundamentally sexist. Once again, it attributes the work of a talented woman to a (mediocre, in my opinion) man.
@stupidjim I… I don't even know where to start. What are you talking about? Are you implying that all US companies are the same one company somehow? Or that all US companies are secretly controlled by US government?
I just did a post on #Bluesky pointing out that the #A11y issues that impact screen reader users it’s had since Day One and the message we're getting from their developers is we aren't welcome there. This is particularly interesting as more and more accounts from Twitter, all of which concerned with human rights in some way, are going over there. Blind people may be slowly bweing left in the dark, particularly for info surrounding #BIPOC, #LGBTQIA! and #PopCulture matters. (1/2)
@changeling have you tried any of the third-party apps available for #Bluesky? I'm using Skeets on iOS, the dev's been very responsive to any #Accessibility concerns I've brought up. But yes, the official site and app could really use some work and it's disappointing the folks behind them aren't making that a priority.
Wir haben dann mal unseren Wonderlink geupdated.
Ganz ehrlich: Wir wären fast gegangen, als unsere Mutuals zurück zu X und/oder zu Bluesky sind.
Wir dachten auch, #bluesky wäre the "Next Big Thing", inzwischen ist "der Himmel" eher "die Hölle" und X angenehmer.
Danke an alle, die das #Fediverse so angenehm und gerade was Ratschläge betrifft, auch so hilfreich machen. ♥️♥️♥️ #fedilove
O Manual do Usuário e o Órbita estão de volta às redes sociais e aplicativos de mensagens. O experimento de março foi bom, mas os lembretes periódicos em plataformas externas fizeram falta.
Made a post on #BlueSky yesterday which went viral and now my smartphone explodes getting hundreds of notifications :blobcatgooglyholdingitsheadinitshands:
@mackuba I get it if people prefer BlueSky, I get if people prefer the Fediverse.
Both have there pros and cons.
Met a lot of great folks on both sites and here it's more of a personal feeling, but if I want to discuss #Film topics I get definitely more interaction there.
Four months ago, I created a Bluesky account to play around this the API and managed to create a simple node script to post a status to it. I wasn’t able to figure out how to get it to work with IFTTT, though. This week, I spun up a Pipedream workflow to try to post an announcement when a new blog post goes up.
Is there a documented, credible source for why Jack Dorsey has distanced himself from #BlueSky?
I know the narrative is that he now doesn't have as much power and influence over the platform and protocol. But what is that based on? The fact that he deleted his BlueSky account and now hangs on Nostr?
@fromjason@yulian@proximacentauri He doesn't own it, and she was the CEO from the very beginning, so any kind of difference in opinions or vision that appeared which led to him losing some interest has happened long after she became the CEO
On the question of “What’s the plan to make money?”, #bluesky CEO Jay Graeber says:
“We’ve been building marketplaces within the app, essentially. So, we’ve got information marketplaces, moderation marketplaces..”
How can that produce enough revenue to make the VCs happy? Just what kind of information marketplaces might she be thinking of that can produce those results?
The two current ones are completely broken: you either sell or exploit users’ data (as legacy social media do), or you rely on donations but then you don’t have enough resources to scale (as repeatedly shown by Mastodon).
I’m not saying Bluesky will be profitable. Nobody knows. But exploring a third way that generates enough money while avoid mining personal data is interesting.
@o_simardcasanova Other models are certainly needed and any experiments are to be welcomed. But they need to have a chance to produce enough revenue, and I cannot see that paid moderation can do that.
