Ulrike Hahn
Ulrike Hahn boosted the activity
"We analyse the migration of 300,000 academic users from Twitter/X to Bluesky between 2023 and early 2025, combining rich bibliometric data, longitudinal social-media activity, and a novel cross-platform identity-matching pipeline. We show that 18% of scholars in our sample transitioned, with transition rates varying sharply by discipline, political expression, and Twitter engagement but not by traditional academic metrics. Using time-varying Cox models and a matched-pairs design, we isolate genuine peer influence from homophily. We uncover a striking asymmetry whereby information sources drive migration far more powerfully than audience, with this influence decaying exponentially within a week. We further develop an ego-level contagion classifier, revealing that simple contagion drives two-thirds of all exits, shock-driven bursts account for 16%, and complex contagion plays a marginal role. Finally, we show that scholars who rebuild a higher fraction of their former Twitter networks on Bluesky remain significantly more active and engaged. Our findings provide new insights onto theories of network externalities, directional influence, and platform migration, highlighting information sources’ central role in overcoming switching costs."

https://arxiv.org/html/2505.24801v1

#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#Twitter#Bluesky#Academia#Universities#HigherEd

Bluesky Report – #117

Bluesky begins rolling out support for livestreaming on other platforms, Leaflet is a blogging and publishing platform that has added ATProto integration, easier bridging between ATProto and other protocols, and a whole lot more.

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The News

Bluesky is starting to roll out a new feature where people can add their Twitch and YouTube livestreams to their account, and the Bluesky app will display an indicator on your profile that you are live. Bluesky is rolling out the feature slowly, with only a select few accounts being able to go live so far. It is mainly focused on sports communities so far, with the NBA being one of the first partners. Bluesky is taking it slow with this feature, CTO Paul Frazee said that major effort is in verifying if the linked account on the streaming platform is the same person as the Bluesky account. Another concern is moderation, Bluesky is only linking to Twitch and YouTube, as these are platforms with a well-established moderation infrastructure. For example Bluesky wants ATProto streaming platform Streamplace to have solid moderation in place before it is considered to be added as a potential source of livestreams. Similar to how Bluesky has rolled out verification, some core pieces of how going live works as only accessible on ATProto, and available for others to use. Bluesky client TOKIMEKI already added the ability for any user to go live. However, same as with verification, this is only visible to other people who also use TOKIMEKI. The real impact of a livestreaming integration will likely come when the feature becomes more widely available, but for now it is already a good demonstration of Bluesky’s willingness to send traffic outside of their app. While Big Tech platforms are taking greater and greater efforts to stop people from leaving their app, Bluesky is taking the opposite approach, by adding features which make people switch to another app.

Leaflet is a publishing platform where anyone can easily create and publish their own documents, posts and pages. These documents can be shared as simple web pages, with a lot of features for customisation. Leaflet’s latest update is Leaflet Publications, which adds ATProto integration. They describe the update as Leaflet becoming as a social publishing platform. With the update, you can now create a ‘publication’, which is a collection of documents and posts. For this you log into Leaflet with your ATProto (Bluesky) account, so that the data is stored on ATProto on your PDS. This makes Leaflet an ATProto blogging platform similar to WhiteWind. Future plans include for more social integration, such as subscribing, commenting, following and more. The organisation says that the key goals is to build social publishing, and to support creators, with paid subscriptions being “a high priority and on our roadmap”.

A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed, has launched a dedicated page to for people to manage their account bridging. Bridgy Fed is a piece of software that allows people to ‘bridge’ their account across multiple protocols. This allows people on Mastodon (using the ActivityPub protocol) to interact with people on Bluesky (using AT Protocol). For this, people need to manually opt-in their accounts to be bridged to other networks (largely due to cultural reasons from the fediverse communities). Up until now, doing so was a fairly confusing process that involved manually following other accounts. With the new update, people can log in to Bridgy Fed with the account they want to bridge, and simply turn it on or off. It also has an easier option to update the handles for Mastodon accounts that are bridged to Bluesky: for example, by default my Mastodon account on Bluesky can be found at @laurenshof.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy, which is a fairly cumbersome handle, to put it mildly. At the settings page I can now change it to any handle I want, similar to how any Bluesky account can change their handle. A New Social is also launching a Patreon as they are working towards financial sustainability, with plans to launch merch soon as well.

Custom feed builder Graze has released an integration with Patreon. This integration gives feed creators two new options. Feed creators can now give members of their Patreon the ability to see their custom feeds without sponsored content. They can also limit access to their custom feed to only members of their Patreon. Custom feeds present a large amount of new design space to explore, and they can be used for a wide variety of purposes. One of those is using custom feeds as a form of community, as Blacksky is doing, for example. Restricting access to a a custom feed to only members of a Patreon is another step in the direction of ‘feeds as communities’.

Grain Social is a new photo sharing app build on ATProto. The app is for creating and sharing galleries of photos. The app uses it’s own lexicon, giving people a space to upload and share photos that do not automatically end up on Bluesky. The app has some simple features right now: a timeline that shows all the galleries and photo’s that are created on the platform, and the ability for people to upload photos and create galleries.

Germ Network is an end-2-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app that is currently in development. The app has announced that they are working on ATProto integration, where people can use Germ Network with their ATProto account. The actual E2EE messaging happens off-protocol. Germ Network says that they are hoping for a common on-protocol implementation in the future, where Germ Network and other ATProto messaging apps can interoperate. A thread by Germ Network CEO Tessa Brown also illustrates why platforms are interested in integrating with ATProto: getting a new social platform off the ground without an existing social graph is incredibly hard. ATProto provides the possibility for other platforms to tap into an existing social graph. This observation is not new, Bluesky PBC has been explicit that this is one of the advantages and design goals of ATProto. We are now starting to see this play out, with new apps that are starting to come out that use ATProto to bootstrap a social graph.

The developers for Bluesky client Flashes said they are working on the concept of a PDS that runs on mobile phones. The Flashes developers are interested in working together with others on this, and have started a Working Group where they have shared their proposed design.

One of the core ideas of ATProto is that the network is effectively one giant pool of data, where a variety of apps and tools can access the same data and process and present that data in a way that fits them best. A Bluesky post can be viewed in the Bluesky Social app for regular doomscrollingmicroblogging, but the same post can also be opened in a PDS browser tool like PDSls or atp.tools, viewed in Skythread for a threading view, or more. Switching between apps to view the same post in different context is quite cumbersome. at://wormhole is a tool to make this easier, it is an Apple Shortcut that allows easy switching between apps. You can view the same content, using the different context that each app provides. As the ecosystem develops, I’m expecting to see more experimentation and development in this direction.

Two new ATProto meetups by community members: in Nashville, USA, on June 1st, and in London, UK, on June 19th.

Software and Platform Updates

  • An update for moderation software Ozone (it can now display, issue, and revoke, verification) as well as a new proposal by Bluesky PBC to expand the set of reporting reasons available to users and labelers.
  • Streamplace has launched a new tool for OAuth, OATProxy, which helps prevent users being logged out of their apps every few days.
  • Streamplace redesigned the homepage, and made their first hire after their funding round.
  • Popsky is a media review app on ATProto, and the app is now available for testing on Android as well as iOS. Popsky also supports Goodreads imports now.
  • BookHive is another media review platform that added support for Goodreads imports this week.
  • Jetrelay is a custom designed relay that is intended to serve a large number of clients with high efficiency.

In the Media

Wired has an extensive interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, and Graber answers a wide variety of questions on the network. Some quotes that stood out to me:

  • Graber says that Bluesky is great at sending traffic to news organisations. Wired themselves confirm this, saying that “The platform has become a top traffic driver and source of new subscribers“. Washington Times reporter Drew Harwell also agrees that Bluesky has become a great drive of referral traffic.
  • Wired boils down questions of moderation to its core, by asking: “Would you welcome President Trump?” Graber is clear that Bluesky will, saying: “Yeah—Bluesky’s for everyone, and we think that over time, the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol. That lets people choose their own moderation preferences. We think that it’s flexible enough to serve every use case and everyone.” The follow-up questions on how Graber relates this to free speech being under thread is worth reading as well.
  • On growing the team: “In November, during our growth spurt, we were around 20. Now we’re at 25, and we’ll probably pass 30 soon. We’re growing at a pace that’s sustainable to us.”
  • Graber talks about an upcoming ‘communities’ feature that’s scheduled for the end of the year: “A lot of people don’t realize that Bluesky is a bit like Reddit and Twitter at the same time, because you can build feeds that are essentially communities—the science feed is run by scientists, is moderated by scientists, and has its own rules.” The ability to build custom feeds is also planned to come to within the Bluesky app.
  • On making money, Graber reiterates the current plans: “Subscriptions are coming soon. The next steps are to look into what market­places can span these different applications.”

And some more media coverage:

The Links

Some interesting and fun experiments in building on ATProto that caught my eye this week:

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.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-117/

Ulrike Hahn
Ulrike Hahn boosted the activity
My collection of verified accounts of news organizations, that can be followed from #Mastodon (& anywhere else in the #Fediverse) contains now:

564 federated by @Flipboard
404 on @Mastodon
45 federated by @threads
20 bridged thanks to @snarfed.org
3 federated by @index (#Ghost)
1 on @peertube &
1 on @sharkey

https://fingolas.eu/fediverse/overview.html

Who's missing?

#SocialMedia#News#Press#Media#Threads#BridgyFed#Peertube#Sharkey#Bluesky#Flipboard

Decentralisation as a shifting mental framework

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As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

A network like the fediverse has an architecture that is easy to recognise as being decentralised: there are multiple independent servers that are all talking to each other, without one central entity. But there are other ways to create social networks that are decentralised, using a different architecture. Nostr is a good example of a decentralised social network that operates in a significantly different way, while also being clearly decentralised.

For the fediverse community, the mental model of decentralised networks such as the fediverse itself, but also email, became more dominant. There was less space to consider other ways to design a social network that is also decentralised. The size difference between the fediverse and the much smaller Nostr network made other alternatives easy to brush aside. But the growth of Bluesky and the ATmosphere network changed this dynamic.

The goal of Bluesky and ATProto is to create a decentralised social network, but with different characteristics and goals than the fediverse and ActivityPub have. For people on the fediverse, decentralisation became the main way how they analysed this competing network. As Bluesky is by far the largest app on the ATProto network, by multiple orders of magnitude, Bluesky not actually being decentralised became a common criticism. I made a similar argument in fall 2024, about how Bluesky has not meaningfully distributed power due to how clustered the people are around a single app. However, that is something different than the technological network architecture being (de)centralised. These criticisms became intertwined with each other, especially from the fediverse side.

In recent weeks, people have made some significant progress in using Bluesky (in technical terms: engaging with posts with Bluesky’s lexicon) with infrastructure that is entirely independent from the Bluesky company. This demonstrates the network being decentralised in a meaningful way. But as the term ‘decentralisation’ has become so intertwined with other meanings, both regarding other network architecture as well as the spread of the user base, that conversations around these developments became hopelessly confusing. The achievement of using Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC became solely analysed through the frame of “is the network decentralised”.

In all this discourse, it has become lost that decentralisation is a description of a network topology, and not an intrinsic Good. People do not actually care about decentralisation itself. Decentralisation is valuable because it enables other properties, such as network resilience, and are more resistant to capture by oligarchs.

Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore. Instead, other descriptors should be used, to consider specific features that the network enables. While the community seems largely in agreement that decentralisation has lost a lot of its usefulness as a way to analyse the network, there is less consensus on what other factors the network should be judged on.

As an observer of both networks this makes the current situation particularly interesting. One developer community seems to come to an agreement that one mental framework has lost some of its use, while the other developer community has not done so. Furthermore, it is not clear yet what framework should take its place instead. Is it a framework of analysing a network by its possible failure modes, or something else entirely?

#fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/decentralisation-as-a-shifting-mental-framework/

@LaurensHof
> Within the ATProto developer community, the discourse that essentialised decentralisation led to a counter reaction, where decentralisation is not seen as a useful term anymore

#BlueSky Stans: BS is decentralised.

Fedi Veterans: Not even vaguely.

BS: OK, true, but ATProto is.

FV: Close, but it can't distribute power beyond a handful of giant orgs. Web 2.0 showed us how that plays out.

BS: OK, true, but decentralisation isn't a useful term anymore.

Moving goalposts much?

@Nelfan@bsky.app@pfrazee.com @mike @dot_social but you've already in a conversation right now that has participation from people across other protocols. I don't think it makes any sense to define the fediverse in terms of the protocols that it contains. If you can communicate with someone bidirectional and exchange replies and reactions/likes then you are part of the fediverse. But of course we don't actually get to decide what the fediverse "means" as usage grows
@liaizon @Nelfan@bsky.app@pfrazee.com @mike @dot_social

Haven't watched the video yet, but will. Generally, the problem with this expanded definition of Fediverse to include #Bluesky and everone who interacts via 'decentralized' social media is that, while Fediverse has not always meant just ActivityPub, it has come to be pretty synonymous in general usage. And, lots of the literature and marketing descriptions of the Fediverse assume this meaning.

more...

To be part of the Fediverse, those sofwares must have been conceived in order to allow the decentralisation.
So, #Threads is not in the Fediverse.

#BlueSky may become interoperable with the Fediverse and may be considered with gentleness but it will never become a part of the Fediverse.
@bsky.app@pfrazee.com @mike @dot_social @liaizon

wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂ boosted the activity
I've got my own Bluesky relay now too 😄 https://relay.feeds.blue

Ok, technically it's a not a full-network one - I added ~2000 known self-hosted PDSes there, but *without* Bluesky-run ones. Which means it has like 2 orders of magnitude less traffic than a full one… But if you're self-hosting a PDS, you should see your records streaming through there, if you either send a requestCrawl there or my PDS indexer has found you.

#bluesky #atproto

I've got my own Bluesky relay now too 😄 https://relay.feeds.blue

Ok, technically it's a not a full-network one - I added ~2000 known self-hosted PDSes there, but *without* Bluesky-run ones. Which means it has like 2 orders of magnitude less traffic than a full one… But if you're self-hosting a PDS, you should see your records streaming through there, if you either send a requestCrawl there or my PDS indexer has found you.

#bluesky #atproto

You could set up something like AppViewLite https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite feeding from my relay as the input, and then people on two different self-hosted PDSes would be able to see and comment on each other's posts, bypassing Bluesky infra almost completely (except plc.directory).

Note, this currently uses ~200 kbit/s traffic and ~200 MB disk space, Munin stats here: https://relay.feeds.blue/munin/

#bluesky #atproto

@strypey my feeling is we haven't yet begun to see what a fully developed #fediverse looks like (including in this definition #atproto, decentral/distributed protocols but also forgotten "low-tech": anything that can be interoperable)

The current adoption landscape ( #rss, #bluesky, #mastodon) highlights various technical possibilities but doesnt span whats possible, nor what is needed.

These three datapoints define a plane of possibilities but the actual space is probably much bigger.