Bluesky Report – #121Media discourse about how Bluesky is dying, a new type of moderation relay by Blacksky, and backing up your ATProto account with bsky.storage.
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The News
US and UK media outlets (1, 2, 3, 4) have published various opinion articles these weeks about how Bluesky is dying, a narrative well-supported by the fact US Vice President JD Vance has joined Bluesky this week. The opinion pieces, as well as Vance joining Bluesky, illustrates that Bluesky has grown to the point where it is both part of mainstream culture, as well as one of the new battlegrounds for the culture wars. Bluesky does have an issue with retention rates, with the monthly active user numbers dropping by around 30% in the last three months. While this drop in user numbers is held up as the reason for the ‘Bluesky is dying’ discourse, the main frustration in the articles is about Bluesky, culture and audience. Sarah Perez wrote a response for TechCrunch, arguing that the main point of Bluesky is the open network and technology that it enables. While the protocol indeed matters, the main conflict is about the social capital and culture that Bluesky is creating, and who has influence over it. The impact on current culture and politics that Bluesky is having is illustrated by Wired’s coverage of the Tesla Takedown protest, documenting how a single post on Bluesky had led to widespread continuing protests.
Blacksky has build a moderation relay, which takes all moderation actions by all labelers on the network, and bundles them into a single relay output. As Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser explains: “With this update, folks building custom feeds can leverage moderation actions from the whole network more easily in their algorithms. 🤖 Wanna exclude twitter screenshots, transphobia, AND anti-blackness from your feed? rsky-relay is now a one-stop-shop for all of those labels.”
Blacksky also has reached their fundraising goal, and they will launch a Blacksky app. Some of the features for the Blacksky app will be the ability to set defaults for the Blacksky community, such as using the Blacksky moderation labeler by default and having the Blacksky Trending feed as default. Blacksky is also requesting feedback from the community on what they want from the app.
Bsky.storage is a new service that allows people to store an hourly backup of their ATProto PDS. It also can generate a recovery key that allows people to take back control over their account even when they have lost access to that account or Bluesky becomes unavailable. Bsky.storage is made by Storacha, which stores the data on a decentralised storage network with IPFS and Filecoin. ATProto gives people the ability to take full control over their account’s PDS, and it feels like the design space that this allows has only just starting to be explored. Bsky.storage is such an example, the ability to always take back control of your account even when the service provider goes offline or becomes adversarial, is something genuinely new for the space of social networks.
Publishing platform Leaflet has added the ability subscribe to publications via ATProto. Writers can create Bluesky posts with every new post, and when the audience subscribes to a publication, Leaflet generates a custom Bluesky feed for them that contains only the posts from all Leaflet publications they subscribed to. Leaflet is further exploring how to use the social graph for more ways to keep up to date with Leaflet. They are also working on email subscriptions, placing it in closer competition with other newsletter platforms such as Substack and Ghost.
On the topic of email subscriptions, subs.blue is a new tool to create email notifications on ATProto. It allows people to create an email channel. When other people subscribe to that channel, they get email notifications for posts in that channel, on the email address that they registered their ATProto account with.
OAuth remains one of the more challenging technical parts of ATProto to implement. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy posted an article that explains some of the design considerations that the team has made in their OAuth implementation design. Bluesky PBC also shared some of the improvements to OAuth that they are making. Relevant for non-developers: the time it takes before you need to log in again to a client is now two weeks, where it used to be one week. For developers that do use OAuth, check out the entire post.
UFOs is a new dashboard and API for exploring the ATmosphere, measuring the activity of all the lexicons on the network. In practical terms, this gives visibility into which apps are used on the network, and how often. It shows unusual activity (such as blocks on Bluesky being up 100% day over day), as well as giving insight into what other apps are used. It shows how incredible dominant Bluesky is over the ATmosphere, and how much of a hard time other apps have getting traction. UFOs also gives an indication of how mass adoption of the open social web has some interesting side effects as well, such as that statistics about user behaviour becomes publicly visible for everyone. UFOs also has an API, and it is part of microcosm, a larger collection of projects by developer @phil that build on the aggregate data of the ATProto firehose.
Smol.life is a new fork of the Bluesky web client, that has additional integrations with other ATProto apps. It has a section for games, where you can play Skyrdle and at://2048. These are two web-based games that have ATProto integrations, where you can keep track of your scores on your own PDS. Smol.life also has an integration with linkat.blue, a Linktree-clone on ATProto. This allows you to see someone’s linkat links while viewing their Bluesky profile on smol.life.
atproto-os is a virtual desktop that runs in your web browser, where the current state of your desktop (which applications are you currently running, etc) is stored on ATProto in your PDS. It uses Open Web Desktop, a larger project for running desktops on the web. As the project says: “Each window with its metadata can eventually be broadcast via #atproto Jetstream to update real-time data about whoever is on your desktop”. What a use case would be for broadcasting your current desktop applications to the entire public internet is somewhat less clear to me however.
The Links
- Custom feed creator platform BlueskyFeeds.com is winding down due to the complexity of maintaining the project.
- ATProto-powered publishing platform Leaflet writes about their tech stack.
- Featureparity.blue keeps an overview of feature parity between Bluesky and X.
- Git collaboration platform Tangled now has a commit tracker.
- Bluesky will now warn users when they click on links that are known to be malicious.
- Film review app Popsky can now automatically sync with your Letterboxd account.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
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https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-121/
