News about Bluesky
Bluesky has been working on making the network more suitable for sports communities, such as with a recent NBA playoffs feature recently. That work seems to be paying off, with Bluesky saying that there have been more sports-related posts in June than ever before, and engagement rate has tripled for sports content. For active members of the sports community the experience can seem more of a mixed bag however. One of the main problems is that the Discover feed tends to bring people outside of the sports communities into posts about sports, a dynamic explained well here by Erin Kissane.
On a related note, the quality and impact of the Discover feed has been a long-standing point of contention. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee gives some thoughts and responses to it here, and notes that the team is currently hiring for a Feed Algorithmics Engineer.
Kat Abughazaleh is running for US Congress, and has made Bluesky a central part of her campaign. This week, Abughazaleh shared that her campaign raises the most money from Bluesky. “Bluesky outperforms YouTube, Threads, and our social media ads by about 2:1 per site. And I think a huge part of that is because it doesn’t suppress links, moderates toxic content, and is transparent.” Abughazaleh said.
News I’m watching
A new ruling by the Supreme Court of Brazil holds social media companies accountable for posts made by users on their platforms. While the reporting is mainly focused on the Big Tech platforms, my understanding is that this ruling also applies to Bluesky. (Note that my understanding is based on janky machine translations and zero legal background, any additional input much appreciated.) Rest of World explains: “If a platform becomes aware of illegal content and fails to act with due diligence, especially in serious cases like hate speech, deepfakes, or fraud, it will be subject to a fine.” The main question for me here is: will Bluesky use the geo-based labeler system again to remove content that’s illegal in Brazil? Brazil’s ruling encourages social media platforms to be overly aggressive with enforcement of rules. When there is content that skirts Bluesky’s ToS in a way that’s not specific to Brazil’s laws, and it is not immediately clear if the content should be taken down or stayed up, what will Bluesky do in such a case? Will Bluesky remove this type of borderline content globally? Will it only block it in Brazil using geo-labeling? Or will it only remove content when rule violations are clear, increasing a risk of pushback from Brazil? And will the Brazil Supreme Court see the use of geo-labeling as a way to take down content only in Brazil as an acceptable way for Bluesky to comply with the law? I don’t know what the answers to any of these questions will be, but it’s something I’m paying attention to.
News about the Bluesky ecosystem
atproto.at is a new PDS browser, with a wide feature set. It allows you to browse and explore the content of every PDS on the network in various formats, as well as downloading blobs (images) or the entire repo itself. The domain name of atproto.at makes it that it can easily be used in combination with any at:// link (the canonical link of ATProto data): by simply putting atproto. in front of the at:// link to visit it directly in the atproto.at PDS browser.
ATProto Wallet Linker is a new tool that allows people to link their ATProto account with their Ethereum wallet. By signing a message both on your PDS as well as a Sign In With Ethereum message from the wallet, it proves that the ATProto account and Ethereum wallet are linked to each other. This tool can be used as a building block for further integration between ATProto and crypto, such as transferring crypto between ATProto accounts.
Independent ATProto developer Kuba Suder has build various analysis features for Bluesky recently. Posting Statistics looks at your Bluesky timeline and makes an analysis of how much each person on the timeline posts. This is great to see which accounts might be too noisy and take over your timeline. Like Statistics gives an overview of which accounts like your posts the most, and which accounts you like the most posts of. Timeline Search takes a scan of your Following timeline, and lets you search within that, which is helpful if you want to find a post that you know you saw recently on your timeline.
The latest update for ATProto-powered streaming platform Streamplace gives users the option to livestream directly from the iOS and Android apps. Streamplace is now also available to add livestreaming to your own platform. This fits with Streamplace’s vision of not building the one streaming app destination (as in: Twitch), but to function as streaming infrastructure for other apps and platforms.
Bluesky video client Skylight is planning on a 2.0 release of the app, explaining it as a new kind of product. The new version of Skylight will feature livestreaming with Streamplace as well. Skylight CTO Reed Harmeyer says that the new version will be different, because the current version “isn’t working”.
Red Dwarf is a client for Bluesky that takes a different approach on a technical level: it does not use the Bluesky AppView, instead it uses Constellation to track all the references, and requests the data from all the PDSes directly. While such an approach might not scale well, it does show what is possible to build using the Constellation database of tracking all the links in the network.
Repsky is a browser extension that lets you post to Bluesky in the context of any web page. When other people view that same page they can see what other people have posted in response on Bluesky. It effectively creates a Bluesky comment section for every web page this way. Because it is using the Bluesky lexicon, replies with Repsky are also automatically posted to Bluesky itself.
Blogging platform micro.blog is considering how to better integrate into the ATProto ecosystem, with both support for the Leaflet lexicon as well as experimenting with embedding longer text into Bluesky posts.
The Links
- Some general life advice: don’t post on Bluesky that you want to assassinate Donald Trump.
- Alternate Bluesky AppView Zeppelin has some updates and now properly supports video.
- Bluesky’s Not the Limit: Hacking Stuff with ATProto – talk by Edmund Edgar at Dappcon Berlin.
- Everything you need to know about Flashes, the Bluesky-based Instagram alternative – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch
