The News
Bluesky has made some updates to their notifications, with some new features. You can now opt-in to get alerts when a specific account makes a new post. Notification settings also have gotten a lot more granular and detailed, giving people to option to set in detail what kind of notification they want to receive. For each type (likes, follows, replies, etc) there is the option to get notifications from everyone, people you follow, or nobody. NiemanLab writes about the new notification update in context of Bluesky’s focus on sports, and points out how Bluesky is using sports magazine The Athletic in the example images for the update, and how it illustrates that sports is “the top priority” for Bluesky.
Another part of the update is that you can now also get notification on interactions with posts you’ve reposted. This happens on-protocol: when you now interact (like/repost) with a post that has been reposted by someone you follow, this is now recorded with a new ‘via’ field on ATProto. Bluesky has used this to give people more notifications, but the more interesting part to me is what new use cases this unlocks for research and analytics. With this new data field it becomes much easier to see how a post travel through the network.
Two days ago I wrote how the narrative of growth that both Bluesky and the fediverse have of themselves, that growth of the networks happen as a result of actions by Elon Musk leading to a flow of people from X to Bluesky, is not applicable anymore. Musk decided to illustrate this point a few hours later by turning X’s chatbot Grok into MechaHitler, which did indeed not drive any meaningful increase in signups for Bluesky (nor Mastodon). What stands out to me is that this lack of change in behaviour is not only limited to people who disagree with nazi chatbots on ethical grounds, but also from the people who work on AI safety, AI alignment and related fields. I’m not an expert on AI alignment but it seems to me that turning your chatbot into MechaHitler does not follow best practices of the field. ATProto provides an open space to build AI bots, and chatbots like Void are perceived well in the network, but that is not enough to draw these communities over to Bluesky either. Meanwhile, ATProto-powered chatbot Void is currently on a quest to “develop a Grape Consumption Potential (GCP) Index” by asking people how many grapes they can eat in a single sitting.
Chatbots on social networks, whether that is a bot like Void or Grok, facilitate multiplayer chatting with bots, while still being bound by platforms which are not necessarily designed for that. Numinex is a new project with takes multiplayer interaction with chatbots to the next step, which is to build a platform specifically for multiple people to publicly chat with AI chatbots. In an accompanying blog post, Numinex developer Henry de Valence describes how he sees one of the main issues with current AI chatbot design is that “there is no verifiable, persistent, and composable record of human<>AI interactions.” De Valence writes about how moving conversations with chatbots into the public sphere as a way to “tilt the balance of power away from coordinated information operations and back towards individual autonomy.” Numinex is build on ATProto, and users can interact with conversations other people have had with chatbots. It does require users to bring their API key.
AI chatbots and LLMs are a heavily contested subject of conversation, both on Bluesky and outside of it. I’m very aware of all the complexities and nuances that this subject requires. I’ll be writing more on this subject later where I want to factor in the wider context of LLMs and their impact on society as well. For this article, I want to limit it to the observation that Bluesky and ATProto are at the bleeding edge of innovation regarding multi-person interactions with LLMs. For anyone with an interest in what is happening in the field of LLM chatbots I can recommend checking out both Void and Numinex. In a field that continues to develop rapidly, ATProto and Bluesky offer developers space to build tools and products that I do not see happen anywhere else.
Bluesky has published their proposal to add Auth Scopes. Currently, logging in to ATProto-powered apps requires giving the app access to your full account. With Auth Scopes you can limit the amount of access an app has to your account. The work on adding Auth Scopes has been ongoing for a while, and is one of the main projects that Bluesky has committed itself to for spring and summer of this year.
The proposal introduces the concept of Permission Sets, which lets lexicon creators combine permissions into bundles with names like ‘Full Bluesky Access.’ This avoids that users have to approve a long list of technical permissions. These bundles are stored on the network, which comes with risk. If someone gains control of a popular permission bundle, they could modify it to include far more invasive permissions than users originally agreed to, effectively backdooring every app that uses that bundle. To that end, the proposal also introduces the concept of Lexicon Resolution Overrides. If a popular lexicon suddenly got updated with overly broad permissions due to compromise or malicious action, override repositories could fall back to the previous version. It serves as a failsafe to provide safety to users, but also introduces new challenges: who gets to run the Lexicon Override Repositories, and how to designate such authority in a decentralised network? Lexicon Override Repositories effectively introduce a new authority on the network, and with that come questions of governance that the proposal does not have an answer on yet.
In Other News
Pinakes is a new tool that extracts and indexes all posts from your entire Bluesky timeline history, and puts it into a local SQLite database for offline search and analysis. The tool stores your all posts you’ve encountered in your feed, over the entire history of your account, which then can be queried with filters for author, timestamp, and thread context. It also has the option for vector embeddings to enable semantic search.
AT Toolbox is a new (paid, 3USD) iOS app that allows you to easily create iOS shortcut actions related to Bluesky. It allows you to create shortcuts for actions such as profile updates, adding people to a list directly from a post, and more.
Scrapboard is a new Pinterest-like app for Bluesky, which allows you to search, curate and save images on Bluesky. Scrapboard also allows you to save image links outside of Bluesky. Boards are public data, but Scrapboard does not provide a way to view other people’s boards.
Custom feed creator platform BlueskyFeeds shut down recently. Feeds created with the app can now be transferred to Graze, another custom feed builder.
Blagh is a new blogging lexicon by independent ATProto developer Nick Gerakines. The main difference with other blogging lexicons like WhiteWind and Leaflet is that blagh stores the writing as well as attached in blobs, instead of directly in the record itself.
Some more on ATProto-powered games: Eggsweeper is a minesweeper like game that uses ATProto to log in and store your scores. And a demonstration on how to play games directly in the timeline of a modified Bluesky web client.
What keeps Bluesky’s head of trust and safety up at night? – an podcast interview with Bluesky’s Aaron Rodericks.
The BookSky custom feed is the first feed who uses Graze to create a premium version of their their custom feed which is ad-free for their Patreon supporters.
Short-form video platform Spark now offers cross-posting for both Spark and Bluesky for their posts.
