I don't know whether this is good or bad. I'm sure some "simple" people will be vying for your attention because of it. You can still proceed in the Fediverse as before.
«Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed»
— by @TechCrunch
🧵 …erst jetzt einen deutschen Artikel zum obigen Thema bezüglich Fediverse gesehen:
»Das Fediverse wächst – Nach Threads auch Bluesky mit Mastodon verknüpfbar:
Erste Threads-Accounts können für Mastodon geöffnet werden, nun geht das – sogar in beide Richtungen – auch mit Bluesky. Das ermöglicht interessante Szenarien.«
People on ActivityPub-powered platforms like Mastodon, and Bluesky, which uses the AT Protocol, can now follow each other, see posts, like, reply, and repost them, thanks to the work of @snarfed.org@snarfed.org, creator of Bridgy Fed. @Sarahp interviewed him for Tech Crunch about the future of bridging networks, how to bridge your account from the fediverse to Bluesky, and what to expect when you do.
Gli utenti delle applicazioni alimentate dal protocollo ActivityPub - come #Mastodon, per l'appunto - e quelli delle app alimentate dal protocollo AT di #Bluesky possono interagire tra loro in modo semplice e pratico, vedendo i contenuti condivisi su una piattaforma o su un'altra, mettendo like, rispondendo ai post e/o ricondividendoli.
Ogni account deve però attivare manualmente la federazione con bluesky.
(I wasn't checking it waiting for a round number, I swear!)
Btw, I'm planning to add some kind of bidirectional contact search there, so you can look up which of your Mastodon/Bluesky friends are available on the other side.
🌉 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.
There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future. It’s a powerful concept that’s been kicking around for a long time, but now it feels closer to reality than ever before. You’ve heard us talk about it a lot on Decoder: the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
There are quite some reasons that leave me very cautious about Bluesky, one being for sure the fact there's one commercial entity currently backing this service / protocol, especially one that has risen from the same ecosystem that caused a lot of the trouble we do experience with current social media platforms. But, I've then and now been at odds with ActivityPub as a protocol, which gets worse the more I dig into it, and from that perspective, it seems the AT crowd gets a lot of things right, considered a lot of things that don't just seem obvious at least in the 2010s but actually surprising to see them missing from ActivityPub, a spec that has been established at roughly the same time: Full account portability (the idea of comparing personal data, conversations, comments, posts, ... to a github repository which "of course" you want to easily be able to take, backup, move around, ... seems both stunning and painfully trivial), support of custom domains for users (which Tumblr has already been supporting for years now), distributed curation and moderation (because most obviously community structures will be different to server or domain structures and not necessarily live on one instance exclusively) - in a way I really do hope they "show don't tell" by submitting that protocol to some standardization body anytime soon. Maybe this, too, could provide a good option for the "open" fediverse to counter the problems that might arise the very moment platforms like Meta / Threads fully embrace ActivityPub. (I also found it rather interesting to listen to what she had to say about why Meta might be more into ActivityPub than AT - being "server-centric" rather than "user-centric" - but that might just be a loose end of things.)
#BridgyFed ist eine Brücke, mit der echtes Interagieren zwischen #Fediverse-Accounts und #Bluesky-Accounts möglich wird. Allerdings nur zwischen Accounts, die da aktiv mitmachen. Wie's geht?
Das Fediverse-Profil, dem ihr als Fediverse-User folgen müsst, damit Bluesky-User euch hier folgen und mit euch interagieren können: @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy
Das ist ein #Bot. Nachdem man ihm folgt, folgt er zurück und richtet ein Bluesky-Handle namens @DeinFediverseHandle.Deine.Instanz.ap.brid.gy ein. Dieses Handle ist dann bei Bluesky auffindbar, und Bluesky-User können ihm folgen. Damit folgen sie dann euch hier und können eure Beiträge auch liken, boosten und kommentieren.
Umgekehrt müssen Bluesky-User folgendem Bluesky-Profil folgen, damit ihr ihnen von hier aus folgen und mit ihnen interagieren könnt: @ap.brid.gy
Auch das ist ein Bot. Auch er folgt dort auf Bluesky zurück. Und er richtet ein Fediverse-Handle namens @BlueskyUserHandle.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ein. Das ist dann hier auffindbar, und man kann ihm folgen. Auch so herum kann man dann hier Beiträge von dort liken, boosten, kommentieren.
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):
I'm not exactly sure how it's happened, but it's pretty cool I can see Bluesky accounts talking on here.
It seems a shared interest in the misfortunes of the Nazi Bar has bridged the technical divide somewhere. #Twitter#Mastodon#Bluesky
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.
Exploring Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, I walk a lot even though it is very hot and the humidity is exhausting.
Especially the old streets are pure eye-candy when it comes to architecture and details. Nowadays I only take photos with my phone, I sold the Nikon. Sometimes I miss my DSLR.
Photo: Parroquia Santa Ana, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico
Bisher habe ich nur Beiträge inkludiert, die 'rp24' im Text enthielten. Für diesen Post habe ich alles gezählt, was in der jeweiligen Suche auftaucht. Dadurch steigen vor allem die Zahlen von #Bluesky (+230), weil der dortige rp24-Feed mehrere #rp24 Suchbegriffe enthält. Bei #XCorp kommen ein paar (+28) false positives über Matches in Usernames dazu. #Threads ist jetzt auch dabei und überholt Bluesky knapp.