The News
Bluesky crosses the mark for 38M accounts signed up for the platform. Growth has slowed down significantly compared to late last year, and there are a new set of articles to point this out (1, 2). One of the challenges here is that until now, growth of the new social networks has largely been a function of people looking for an alternative to X. While there is not a lack of people who will say they disapprove of Musk outing himself as a nazi, the number of people who will take action on their opinions and look for alternative platforms seem to be capped at around 50 million people total. For Bluesky this means searching for new avenues of growing the network, and they have been working on various partnerships, from collaborations with the NBA to working with a new soccer media platform. That focus on sports seems to have some effect: The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel announced that they are building a social platform for sports site SB Nation, that will have native connections to Bluesky in the future. Patel cites Bluesky’s larger sports community as a reason why their new project will likely prioritise ATProto for integration over other protocols.
When articles from news outlets state that Bluesky’s lack of growth is an issue, the post sometimes goes viral as people give their own personal take, This often centers around the value that Bluesky currently already brings with high-quality pro-social conversations, and why they do not want Bluesky to act as another Big Tech company focused on exponential growth. Bluesky has taken multiple rounds of VC funding, and not yet a clear path to profitability, which indicates some diverging preferences between Bluesky the company and the Bluesky community. The community seems to prefer this version of the network with high quality conversations, but it is unclear how long the company can sustain itself without a clear revenue stream or new funding rounds. Both articles also mention the decline in post volume, which seems noteworthy, especially in the context where fundraising links are exploding in numbers, to the point where last Saturday 1% of all posts on the network where fundraising links.
Conversations about growth of Bluesky also tend to miss the larger picture of building an ecosystem on open protocols, and the opportunities that this brings. Building a healthy infrastructure for the social web requires there to be multiple organisations that are partaking, with not everything depending on one single company. This remains a challenge on ATProto: while there is no lack of new apps, projects and organisations (see the archives of this newsletter about the wide variety of applications that people have build on ATProto), the large discrepancy in size between Bluesky and the other projects leads to people automatically equivocate Bluesky with the ATProto network. Bluesky might have its challenges with a slowdown of the signup rate, but the bigger challenge is in increasing the activity in the rest of the ATProto ecosystem
ATProto-powered streaming software Streamplace has a new blog post in which they explain more of the technical architecture of Streamplace. The intro of the blog post spells out clearly one of the problems that Streamplace is trying to solve: on video platforms it is common to create videos which consist largely of other videos, whether that are stitches, duets or reaction videos. These videos get largely get treated as new content, without provenance to the original video. Streamplace’s solution is to embed a cryptographic signature into every second of video, so that the source and authorship can be verified. Streamplace also announced that they are working with Hypha Worker Co-operative to help design the user experience of this provenance, and with iroh.computer for further distribution of Streamplace data.
Newsletter publishing platform Ghost’s officially launches their ActivityPub integration, allowing all publications to be distributed to the fediverse. For more details, see this week’s Fediverse Report. Ghost announcement heavily features Bluesky as a connected platform as well, mentioning it before Mastodon even. However, their connection with Bluesky is not a native integration, but uses Bridgy Fed as connector software. WordPress blogs can also be connected to ActivityPub via a plugin, and the developers of this plugin also made it work with Bridgy Fed. In their latest blog update, the WordPress ActivityPub team explains how you can connect a WordPress blog to Bluesky.
Some early Bluesky Lore: in a recent podcast episode of the revolution.social podcast by Evan Henshaw-Plath (a.k.a @rabble) they talk about how there was an “active discussion whether Bluesky should be a joint venture between Twitter and Reddit”.
ATProto projects news and updates
- Video app Skylight will soon launch a collaboration with Streamplace to add live streaming to the platform.
- Blacksky is rolling out their People’s Assembly, a tool for gathering feedback and deliberation by the community.
- Siftree is an analytics platform which shows topics that are trending on Bluesky and how they are shifting over time, as well as sentiment analysis.
- at://giveaways allows you to create a giveaway from a post and choose winners based on comments, likes or reposts.
- The Bluesky Dictionary tracks if Bluesky can say every word in the English dictionary, and after 2 days around 38% of words in the dictionary are mentioned on the network.
- Two blog posts added a comment section using Bluesky, both explaining (1, 2) how they did it.
- Linkat.blue is a linktree-like for ATProto, and Linkat Directory is a new third-party front-end for the platform.
- SkyArt is an art-sharing platform that originally started as a Bluesky project, and now has moved to their own lexicons.
- Publishing platform Leaflet now has the ability to share quotes and highlights on Bluesky, and a thread to demonstrate how this works.
- Book review platform Bookhive.buzz now shows book updates from people you follow on Bluesky.
- Book Explorer is an alternate front-end for Bookhive.buzz that allows for easier bulk editing.
- Openvibe, a cross-network client for Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr and Threads, now also supports RSS.
- Pop review app Popfeed (renamed from Popsky) now has an ATmosphere page that shows content from other ATProto platforms.
The Links
- Last weekend was the fediverse-focused FediCon in Vancouver, where Boris Mann, who among other projects runs the atprotocol.dev community, held a presentation on what’s happening in the ATmosphere and what projects and products people are building on ATProto. Recording here, slides here.
- Talking about the revolution.social podcast, they recently had an episode with Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, and Sarah Perez at TechCrunch has an article with some of the main thoughts of the episode and how it relates to the challenges of moderation on decentralised social networks.
- A New Social, the organisation behind the connector software between ATProto and ActivityPub Bridgy Fed, has a blog post explaining the difference between bridging and cross-posting.
- The Lexicon Community, which talks about shared usage of ATProto lexicons, among other things, now has set up their own Discourse forum for conversations.
- The Graze newsletter has a conversation with Ændra, who’s build various ATProto project such as XBlock and Moji.blue, about her experiences working on the custom News Feed for Bluesky and monetisation.
- An explanation (in Japanese) how ATProto Dashboard works, a dashboard that tracks usage of non-Bluesky lexicons. It is similar to the UFOs dashboard, but with a dataset that goes back longer in time, back to January 2025.
And finally, Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has been on a blogging roll this week, with three technical blog posts:
- On the design considerations when implementing ATProto, and when to use embedded data directly and when to use strong references.
- On adding off-protocol data to ATProto.
- And on on-demand record hydration for privacy-sensitive data.
