The News
Zeppelin is a new AppView for Bluesky, allowing people to access the Bluesky network without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. Zeppelin is the first ‘full-network’ AppView for Bluesky, and creating it has been a significant undertaking by developer @futur. An AppView processes the information of the network so it can be presented to the user in the client. For that to work, the AppView needs to index the data. AppViewLite is another Bluesky AppView, which focuses on low resource usage, and thus selectively stores only limited data. Zeppelin has taken the approach of storing the data of the entire network, including the history, in the AppView, to make it as close of a copy of the AppView by Bluesky PBC as possible. Storing the history of the network takes around 16 TB of storage, but can be done for a cost of around 200 USD/month for all the hardware. Developer @futur makes it clear in his writeup that the main challenge of setting up a full-network AppView is in getting it ‘back-filled’, meaning to import the history of the network into the AppView. Zeppelin comes with its own front-end as well, a fork of the Bluesky client. This gives users some additional flexibility, such as removing the nuclear block and threadgates.
The ATProto network is still in a state of discovery of understanding what it means to build an open social network on an open protocol, and how to get to a state of decentralisation. For all its technical capabilities, projects like UFOs show the extent to which the network is dependent on infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC. Networks like the fediverse, which follow a more familiar pathway when it comes to decentralisation have a clearer framework for what it means to be a decentralised social network: have more people run more servers with more software variety. For Bluesky and ATProto this direction is still much more open, although projects like Blacksky provide some indication of what a decentralised ATmosphere can look like. Even Zeppelin, which does demonstrate that the Bluesky network can indeed be decentralised, struggles to formulate a purpose, with developer @futur writing: “My goal starting out with this project was really just to say, now what?” Still, the demonstration that running full-network Bluesky AppViews is technologically feasible on an affordable budget is valuable in itself, and it is a technological achievement to show that Bluesky is indeed decentralised from a technological architecture perspective. Now the next step is to make the network decentralised from the perspective of user behaviour: what will it take to get a significant number of people to use Bluesky without using infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC?
ATProto-connected chatting platform Roomy has gotten another update to their alpha, and they shared a blog post for their technical design considerations. Roomy has been dancing with various backends for their product, and they switched again to another backend for this release. For more of the details I recommend the blog post, but the high-level takeaway: There is significant overlap between the concepts behind ATProto and the local-first app development paradigm. As Meri Leeworthy explains in a blog post about some technical choices for Roomy: “It’s about shifting control: from remote servers and top-down central authorities deciding how data, workflows, and communities operate, to individuals and communities reclaiming that control and gaining autonomy”. However, both ATProto and some of the technologies related to local-first software, such as CRDTs, are so bleeding-edge that integrations such as Roomy’s implementation run into practical issues because the technology is not ready yet.
One of the selling points of ATProto is that it has build a large network of decentralised identities, that can be reused by other non-ATProto services. ATProtocol Identity Provider (AIP) is an OAuth server that serves this need, and with the latest update it can now integrate with existing OpenID Connect platforms. For the less technically inclined people: in practice this means that platforms that support OpenID Connect now can add support for logging in with your ATProto account. Nick Gerakines, who developed both AIP as well as event planning platform Smoke Signals, showed what this looks like on the Discourse forum for Smoke Signal. It allows users to log in and create an account on the Discourse forum using their ATProto credentials. Logging in with OpenID Connect refers to the ATProto login details, and based on that an account is created.
In Other News
- Photo sharing platform Grain has some updates, with gallery comments, discoverability via tags and more.
- Custom Feed builder platform Graze now has some additional capabilities for tracking of links during advertisement campaigns that are made on Graze. Graze also reports to now have delivered feeds to 5 million people..
- Another front-end for blogging platform WhiteWind. As WhiteWind is not being developed anymore, there is space for other software to fill the gap, either by building other platforms such as Leaflet, or creating alternate front-ends for the WhiteWind lexicon.
- An ATProto MCP server has been published. There are now multiple MCP servers available for Bluesky and ATProto.
- Recently I linked to research on the impact that Starter Packs have had on the growth of Bluesky, and this article of Lancaster University pays some more attention to it as well.
- Nimbus is a new Bluesky client for Apple’s VisionOS.
- Smol is a client for Bluesky, based on the client made by Bluesky PBC, with additional features such as games. Smol published a blog post about what they’re building here.
- Smoke Signal developer Gerakines also recently released a Gnosco, a tool for badges and attestations on ATProto. Related to that, Gerakines also published a stand-alone signing service.
- Publishing platform Leaflet shared some of their ideas for publication discovery.
And some links:
- Community And Choice Are Not Bubbles – Mike Masnick/TechDirt
- Tech leaders ready launch of Canadian social-media platform Gander to buck U.S. dominance – Pippa Norman and Sean Silcof/The Globe and Mail
