🌉 PSA: if you're only posting on Mastodon/Fediverse, but you'd like your posts to be seen on #Bluesky too using the Bridgy bridge, all you need to do is follow the bridge account here: @bsky.brid.gy - and all your posts will be mirrored to Bluesky/ATProto, and people from there can interact with you if their accounts are bridged too. Let's build a connected meta-fediverse (lowercase m) 😄
My Bluesky account is visible here: @mackuba.eu@bsky.brid.gy
Jack Dorsey leaves the board of Bluesky, DMs have arrived, and much more.
The News
Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky. The unexpected announcement came after a question on Twitter if he was still on the board, which he answered with a simple ‘no’. At that point, no announcement had been made yet, which came soon after. Dorsey says that he left the board because according to him, Bluesky ‘went in the wrong direction’. He had not been actively involved with Bluesky for a while, as an indication of his noninvolvement, developer Paul Frazee said he has never met with him. Shortly after, Dorsey gave an extensive interview where he discussed his thoughts on Bluesky more. He has been more involved in Nostr, and in the recent shareholder letter of Block, where Dorsey is CEO, Block says they are working on integrating Nostr into more of their products (with TIDAL announcing a first small integration recently). For some more analysis:
Bluesky has published a new roadmap for what can people can expect of the app in the near future. The most important new features include DMs (since delivered), video, improvements to custom feeds, better anti-harassment features, and OAuth. The improvements for custom feeds show that Bluesky is leaning more and more into algorithmic choice for their users. What stands out to me is how similar some of the proposed features are to how Farcaster has build their custom feeds (as Michael Foster from Newsmast also discovered). The current era of competing open protocols for social networks show a rapid iteration and dissemination of good ideas, and I’m excited to see how Bluesky will expand their custom feeds.
The Bluesky company also published a roadmap for atproto. In another step towards open federation, new PDS’es do not require approval anymore, but their is still an account limit per PDS that can be lifted manually (such as for the fediverse<->Bluesky bridge). There is also more work being done on security, with major work on supporting OAuth, as well as more basic MFA for the current transition period. Bluesky also mentions that some requested features are on the roadmap, but will likely not be implemented in 2024: E2EE DMs, private posts and post editing are all things that Bluesky will work on, but will take a while to complete.
Bluesky also mentions that they originally planned to start a formal process to submit atproto to a standards body in summer 2024, but that they are delaying this process until there are more new applications being build on top of atproto. Bluesky notes that most developer activity has revolved around the microblogging app Bluesky, but that until recently it has been difficult for developers to build completely new applications on top of atproto.
The first feature of Bluesky’s product roadmap already shipped: DMs! Due to the high demand for DMs and how it helps with user retention, DMs are a simple implementation that is not build on top of atproto (which is planned for later), nor is it end to end encrypted. It is a bare-bones chatting service that currently does not even have the ability to send images or group chats (which are planned soon). Third party developers do have the ability to also implement chats into their clients, which some people already managed to do before the feature officially got launched.
Newsletter The Pragmatic Engineer has a deep dive into Bluesky’s Engineering culture that is worth reading. It lists everyone working on the product (plus 20 unnamed people working in moderation), which is a helpful overview to understand how the company works. What also stood out to me is the answer on how Bluesky plans to make money: it only lists selling custom domains as a way to make money. In two interviews with The Verge in February and March 2024, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also listed a variety of other plans to make money, which are not mentioned here: managed hosting via a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm, and marketplaces for moderation and custom feeds. It is unclear what the status of these ideas is.
The developer of atproto-based blogging platform WhiteWind has written a blog about his experience of developing on atproto. They write: “[WhiteWind] looked no different from existing services on Bluesky, so I could say that atproto did not contribute to enhancing the competitiveness of my service. Users could switch their service to another similar one anytime thanks to atproto, but since there are no such services, the benefit is virtually none.” This is a signal that is worth paying attention to, as the Bluesky company is explicitly saying that they need more developers building new applications. Meanwhile, WhiteWind is the only application so far that meets that definition, and the developer is not clear what the benefits are to building on top of atproto. In the meantime, two Japanese web clients, Klearsky and Hagoromo, have starting to support WhiteWind, by showing blog articles at the top of people’s profile.
The bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky has been used to spam Bluesky with pro-Trump messaging, with the spam originating from Nostr. The spam was created on Nostr, which bridges to the fediverse with the Momostr.pink bridge, which in turn can be bridged to Bluesky. While all the networks have many places of easy, open signups, spam tends to happen were signups can easily happen in bulk, and the protocol design of Nostr makes it especially easy to create new accounts.
A closer look at Japanese developers building on atproto
I took a closer look at three products build on top of atproto: video with Bluemotion, audio with Bluecast, and WhiteWind.
Ændra has been running the XBlock labeler, that labels screenshots from other social networks. She has written up some of her thoughts here about the experience of running a labeler.
Two updates to WhiteWind, including a new homepage that shows recent and popular articles, and the ability to create article drafts.
Bluesky has handed out micro-grants to three labeling services: XBlock, Aegis and News Detective.
Xblock published a roadmap on the work on the labeler.
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky, or subscribe to my newsletter below. You’ll get a weekly update on the fediverse in your inbox, and a monthly update on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.
I logged into my Bluesky account this morning to see what was going on with the platform (and to post a blog link). Most of the people who I follow haven’t posted in months, others have deleted their accounts completely.
I've updated my #Bluesky stats page with a 7-day moving average line on the daily activity charts, and a new weekly activity chart: https://blue.mackuba.eu/stats/
I've also looked at the language stats from the last week (not on the site yet):
This is from posting pretty much solely on #MECFS , #LongCovid and related conditions and to a lesser extent chronic illness in general, which shows it is possible to build up followings on them, in case people either gave up on them or never tried.
@tomkindlon@longcovid@mecfs As someone with #fibromyalgia I find that we're mostly forgotten in the chronic illness community. While I would love to connect more, I have stopped talking about it because it's considered the "hysteria" of the modern era. I have some unique theories on what caused mine. But there is a much larger community around some illnesses than others.
Getting a larger number of followers is helpful when you're trying to provide information about an illness (ME/CFS, myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome) that affects millions of people but is still not very well known. ME/CFS is often is not even taught in medical schools.
An #MEAction advocacy campaign called "Teach M.E., Treat M.E." is trying to correct this problem:
Are there alternative implementations of #ATprotocol beyond #BlueSky? if so, can they talk to each other without #BlueSky being involved at all? Is it all just not as decentralized as they want us to think it is? thanks.
I have a question about BlueSky :blobfoxthinkgoogly:
So the point of BlueSky is to try to simulate a centralized social media platform with decentralized hardware, right? So, like, what's the incentive to hosting your own BlueSky servers? I can see having a single-user repository for your own data, but there's no reason to host anyone else's personal data, right? :confused_dog:
With Mastodon, the incentive to host a server comes from the fact that servers are smaller, tighter-knit communities, so hosting your server comes with building a community. What's the incentive on BlueSky?
@Rusty I’m not sure, I honestly thought we’d get customizations like we have here on Mastodon, but it looks like that’s not the case.
Maybe we just don’t have the full picture yet, atproto is still being developed so maybe it’ll become clearer as more applications are spun up using the standard.
I think the federation is more for that use case, like people could make tumblr clones or run their blog off the atproto and people could follow those updates within BSKY
J’ai jeté un œil à Bluesky (vu qu’apparemment c’est trop woke pour Jack)
Alors oui c’est super simple (centralisation oblige) et y’a des bonnes idées :
personnaliser l’ordre d’affichage des réponses (chrono ou anté chrono)
bloquer par défaut les players externes (youtube, spotify…)
masquer son compte aux gens non connectés
MAIS.
Ben c’est vide. Au moins autant qu’ici. La seule diff c’est que quand t’arrives l’algo te pousse du contenu. Alors qu’ici ta TL principale est VRAIMENT vide.
Je me dis que si c’est un des freins à l’adoption (en plus du choix de serveur) il suffirait de charger la TL locale voire la fédérée par défaut à la création d’un compte.
Ou mieux peut-être, un message qui dit “votre home est vide pour le moment, mais viendez dehors c’est animé”
@thisismissem Well, with the added feature that you can't accidentally add someone to the conversation by mentioning them in a private message, like in Mastodon's mentioned people only posts ;)
@josh@thisismissem They definitely want to use some existing solution (they've mentioned MLS), but it will take a lot of time to research and implement and test properly, and they wanted to have something in the meantime because a lot of people want it and they want it now
@Rathmox Le but c'est de l'intégrer à AT protocol et d'utiliser le même protocole pour faire les comptes privés. Je pense que s'ils avaient choisi XMPP ils l'auraient déjà implémenté :)
