The News
Bluesky PBC has published their new Terms of Service (ToS) for the platform, as well as a new proposed Community Guidelines.The new ToS takes effect September 15h, and the updates mainly focus on clarifying compliance with various regulations for social platforms around the world, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act. The other update to the ToS concerns the dispute process, where Bluesky now commits to a phone call for an informal dispute resolution before proceeding to any formal dispute process.
The proposed changes to the Community Guidelines include a complete overhaul of the structure, the guidelines now are organised around four principles: Safety First, Respect Others, Be Authentic, and Follow the Rules, and each principle has has further clarifications of allowed and prohibited content. The rules on what content is forbidden also features multiple categories of exceptions, for example relating to artistic expression and journalism.
I also got curious about the community’s responses to Bluesky’s request for feedback on the proposed Community Guidelines. After reading through all the replies and quote posts (yes I also question my own choices sometimes), a few things stand out to me:
- The actual amount of feedback on content of the Community Guidelines is fairly low, with positive notes on the addition of banning the sharing of private messages without consent. Concerns are on how kink art can still be censored.
- A lot of people are using the opportunity to voice their disapproval of how Bluesky handles the execution of certain moderation policies, especially regarding fundraiser posts.
- There is a real fear of people that Bluesky will ban queer and NSFW content, as illustrated by some of these popular posts (1, 2, 3, 4). The new proposed version of the Community Guidelines explicitly allow this, and added under section 5B that consensual adult content is explicitly allowed, and that educational and advocacy content around sexual misconduct is also explicitly allowed. The worry that people have in these posts about Bluesky banning adult content should be seen not so much as a response to the actual guidelines themselves, but as a response to the wider changes that are happening on the internet, where more and more sites and marketplaces are banning adult and queer content.
It’s also worth noting that the ToS and Community Guidelines only apply to people using Bluesky Social (that is: the bsky.app website and the Bluesky iOS and Android Apps created by Bluesky PBC). This means that people who use a different client (like Flashes, deck.blue or Anisota, for example) are not bound to these rules, and instead are only bound to the terms of service of those other apps instead. For example, tech writer Cory Doctorow is worried about the arbitration clause in Bluesky’s new ToS, and he decided to set up his own “whole stack” of “Bluesky servers” to be able to use the Bluesky network without agreeing to Bluesky PBC’s ToS. While it is commendable for Doctorow to self-host the ATProto infrastructure to such an extend, for other people who share Doctorow’s concerns there is a simpler option of using a different client to interact with the network.
Anisota is a new Bluesky client, by independent ATProto developer Dame. It is a highly opinionated client, themed around (and named after) moths, which takes social media microblogging feeds in a very different direction. For anyone interested in what sort of creativity open protocols allows, I highly recommend checking out Anisota, as it is unlike any other microblogging client I’ve seen. I personally enjoy the aesthetic of Anisota, and how it adds calming nature sounds fits with the vibe that the client is going for. Some of the features and what makes Anisota different:
- Instead of a feed, Anisota presents posts as cards that you swipe through.
- There is a stamina system to prevent excessive usage, and after your stamina runs out you cannot browse any new posts.
- Anisota contains a game to collect moths, which you will encounter while browsing, as well as to collect items.
- You can create lists of posts, as a curated collection of interesting posts that you can share.
- Post engagement statistics do not show exact numbers, instead posts are rated rarity.
Anisota is a Progressive Web App, and it is designed for mobile usage with swiping, although it also works well on the desktop. Anisota is free for everyone to use, but that only gets access to the ‘following’ feed. Other features, such as browsing through custom feeds, is behind a $7/month membership. Some early other impressions from Anisota here.
Blacksky is taking further steps towards their own community platform within the ATmosphere, and have started inviting community members on their own Blacksky PDS servers. Blacksky has their own PDS migration tooling, Tektike, to help users transfer their account to a new PDS. Within the two weeks that Blacksky has slowly started inviting people, the number of active ATProto users that use a non-Bluesky-owned PDS has grown by 50%. To help with PDS migration, multiple video tutorials (1, 2) have been made.
Blacksky also has been using their new People’s Assembly platform for community deliberation, and the voting numbers of almost a thousand votes show that Blacksky has build up a significant community of people that not only wants to use the software, but is also actively engaged with the governance of their community.
Semble is a newly announced social knowledge network for researchers, that will be build on ATProto. The Cosmik Network organisation has received a $1M grant from Open Philanthropy and the Astera Institute to develop the platform. The network focuses on knowledge sharing for researchers, and describes itself as a combination of bookmarking platform are.na and Goodreads. Early screenshots show scientific papers as collections, and people can discuss the papers, as well as see other posts on Bluesky that talk about the paper.
A new paper also finds that “Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky“, as an illustration of Semble’s point that ATProto is a good fit for researchers.
Independent ATProto developer Kuba Suder wrote a very extensive guide to ATProto. It is a developer perspective on how the protocol actually functions, and how all the various pieces of the architecture fit together. New developers who are just starting out with building on ATProto often miss the nuance and some of the complexity of the protocol (not supporting non-Bluesky PDSes is a common miss, for example), and Suder’s guide provide an excellent in-depth resource for developers new to the protocol.
Some updates from microcosm, the collection of self-hostable ATProto building blocks: A new addition is Slingshot, which “pre-caches content and identities from the firehose to an edge near you, for fast access and high availability, closing the UX gap for client-first ATProto apps”. Developer @phil also wrote up an overview of 6 months of microcosm, and all the software and infrastructure that they have build under the project. Some notable takeaways: as marginally few people want to actually self-host infrastructure, even when it can be done on a Raspberry Pi, the microcosm project has moved towards becoming community infrastructure. As developer interest is largely in building frontends and not backends, microcosm’s variety of projects have moved in the direction of better supporting developers in building their own custom apps, while microcosm’s APIs can handle significant parts of the backend. And while many people have talked about independent ATProto relays, actual usage of such relays as offered by microcosm is low.
My personal take and reflection on six months of microcosm is that its biggest strength is also its weakness. Microcosm is an incredible collection of software projects, and the fact that Constellation can index the entire network while running on a simple Raspberry Pi is mind-blowing to me. The various utilities that are part of microcosm point towards that a social network running on an an open protocol expands the possibility space, which in turn alters the dynamics of how platforms and apps are run on these networks in ways that we only just starting to see play out. The challenge however is that microcosm is so far on the bleeding edge of technology that explaining what all these utilities do and why they matter becomes challenging. Beyond needing significant knowledge of how ATProto functions, there are no easy equivalents to help explain these new tools. This challenge goes for the wider ATProto ecosystem, where there is still a lot to be gained with more developer outreach and explanations.
Software News
- Git collaboration platform Tangled has added a variety of new features, including support for Continuous Integration, as well as a new pastebin service called strings. Tangled also has taken another step to being a platform that is fully independent from Bluesky by hosting their own PDS and offering open signups. This means that people can now easily use Tangled without any interaction with Bluesky.
- Custom feed builder Graze has released a new simple custom feed design tool, in addition to their full editor with complex features.
- Acudo is a new tool by Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines, which connects ticketing software Tito with ATProto. When customers purchase a ticket with the existing Tito infrastructure, Acudo generates a signed attestation that verifies their registration for the event.
- A new custom For You feed has gained popularity recently, as an alternative to the Discover feed. This feed “finds people who liked the same posts as you and then shows you what else these “curators” liked.” Bluesky also has been working on improving the quality of the Discover feed.
- PDSMoover is a PDS account migration tool in your web browser.
- SkyTube is a Bluesky web client specifically for videos, with an interface that is inspired by the YouTube web interface.
- Skywell is a tool that allows you to easily host arbitrary data on your own PDS for sharing.
- Himmel is a Bluesky client with offline reading capabilities, for Android and iOS.
- Bibliome is a new ATProto platform for sharing book reading lists.
- A new OAuth client SDK in Go.
- XRay Social provides realtime sentiment analysis of popular topics on Bluesky.
Tech Links
- An update on the Auth Scopes Implementation by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold.
- How Streamplace Works: No Microservices – Eli Mallon/Streamplace
- A guide on setting up your own PDS server: Spinning Up Your Own Corner of the ATmosphere
- A guide on OAuth implementation: Building OAuth Authentication for Bluesky: A Complete Guide for Web and iOS Apps
- Dynamic Client Registration is the Missing Piece for Mobile and CLI Applications – Nick Gerakines/Smoke Signal Blog
- Creating a did-method-web Identity for ATProtocol – Nick Gerakines/Smoke Signal Blog
