Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again on Bluesky and it’s surrounding ecosystem of media apps.The News Constellation is a project that recently released that provides a database of all backlinks in the entire network. Constellation now has a database of over 1.2 billion links, and an accompanying website with statistics to slice through. The Constellation API is now also getting integrated into multiple PDS browsers, both PDSls and atp.tools show backlinks to the ATProto records now. This puts PDS browsers more into their own specific place on the network: not a full AppView, but more than just a way to view the content of a PDS. Bluesky PBC has put out a new proposal for ATProto, Sync 1.1. The proposed update concerns the relays, and the validation work they do. As part of the Authenticated Transfer, which ATProto is named after, relays validate every event on the firehose. This validation process currently requires a relay to store the entire repo, which can take up a lot of space. This is one of the aspects that make hosting a relay more expensive. The proposed update changes the way validation works, which allows a relay to validate the integrity of all the data going through the firehose without having to store the entire repo. Bluesky engineer Devin Ivy provides an explainer thread on how this works here. This update makes it much more feasible for people to self-host relays. Another proposal by Bluesky PBC is for moderation routing report. The new feature allows labelers to select which type of report they want to receive. A common problem that labelers currently face is that users tend to receive reports that are not relevant for their specific labeling service, which causes them unnecessary extra work, as well as getting unnecessarily exposed to awful content. The new proposed update allows labelers to opt-out of specific reporting categories. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold says Bluesky PBC is currently working on implementing the feature, aiming to ship it soon.In Other News Bluesky has posted some new job vacancies, and they are now hiring a System Integrity Engineer, Product Designer and Senior Trust and Safety Lead. Both the System Integrity Engineer and Trust and Safety Lead indicate that Bluesky is expanding their Trust and Safety work: both of these jobs are newly created positions, with the engineering position explicitly focused on moderation systems and regulatory compliance. Some podcasting news: two podcasting apps, Transistor and TrueFans, both added support for displaying Bluesky comments on the podcast episode page. TrueFans also supports fediverse comments, so that a podcast episode page can display comments and reactions from both networks. Bluesky engineer Jaz wrote an article about ‘lossy’ timelines. The summary is that to maintain performance, the home timelines of accounts that follow more than 4k accounts will not always see all posts on the timeline. Upcoming ATProto short-form video platform Spark shared their outline on some of the limits they’ll set. Spark aims to allow videos of 300 MB or 3 minutes long (compared to Bluesky’s 50MB or 1 minute), and 12 files for image posts (5MB each). This is part of the reason why Spark is not using Bluesky’s lexicon, instead developing their own. Setting these limits higher will also require Sparks to provide their own PDSes, as the file size limit is set by the Bluesky PDS. Hosting video is expensive, and it is not yet clear how Spark will finance this. A short tutorial on how to publish lexicon verification. The first verified lexicons are now starting to show up on lexidex. Roomy has posted a deep dive on their tech stack, how they are combining ATProto and Automerge to build public chatrooms. Web browser Opera adds Bluesky integration, allowing you to more easily doom scroll in the sidebar of the browser. Bluesky video client Skylight is now available in beta on Android, after Skylight had trouble with Google to get the Android beta approved. Some events: Feed builder Graze will hold a meetup in New York this Friday the 28th, and at SXSW (March 10th, Austin) there will be Bluesky meetup.The Links An interview with Game Industry Labeler developer Trazy on how builds a community of thousands of game devopers on Bluesky. A guide (in Japanese) on how to upload videos using Bluesky API (XRPC) An interview with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at Knight Media Forum. A podcast interview with the developer of the ATProto art platform Pinksea That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all the articles of this week, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

fediversereport.com

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.d

Welcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: &#8220...

Fediverse Report #105 While the news in the world is louder and intenser than ever, the fediverse has had one of it’s most quiet news weeks in a long time. But as compensation I’ll have another article out tomorrow, that I did not manage to finish for today.The News Some updates for GoToSocial: GoToSocial published the documentation that would also allow other fediverse platforms to implement their Interaction Policies. And Slurp is a new CLI tool to import your posts from other fediverse servers into GoToSocial. A guide to import your Pixelfed posts into GoToSocial with Slurp is available here. Last week I wrote extensively about Mastodon’s plan to implement quote post. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed in a follow-up that Mastodon will not display quote posts if they are made using another implementation than Mastodon proposes. This means in practice that even when Mastodon has added support for quote posts, it will not display quote posts made by Misskey, unless Misskey also implements Mastodon’s new proposed system for quote posts. Elgg is an old-school open source social network that started in 2004. It added a plugin for ActivityPub this week. John Oliver discussed content moderation on Last Week Tonight, quickly promoting Mastodon, Pixelfed, Bluesky and Signal as alternatives. The Identity Graph Explorer is a simple tool to find out how “identifiers on the Fediverse / Social Web are connected to one another”. The Hexbear Lemmy community recently lost control of their domain, leading to a bidding war for the domain name for thousands of dollars. The admins now report that they have gotten back control of their domain.The Links IFTAS is In a Funding Crisis – WeDistribute GoToSocial empowers you to have your own home on the Fediverse – with unique controls – Elena Rossini How to Launch Your Own Fediverse Community Server – WeDistribute Website League update for February Managing Mastodon Storage – FediHost Lemmy biweekly development update. This week’s fediverse software updates. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below: Subscribe to our newsletter!

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report #105

A variety of smaller news updates this week.

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.c Social platforms are not, and can not, be neutral in a context authoritarianism, and Bluesky cannot avoid this dynamic either. On a lighter note, many experiments with building image and video clients for Bluesky are ongoing, more insight in how ATProto can scale down, and more.Bluesky is political The US continues its rapid decline into authoritarianism. Authoritarian states tend not to be particularly great fans of places where the opposition can gather and freely talk. American politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries or Illinois governor JB Pritzker all use the platform to put out messages explicitly against the US Government. Authoritarian states also tend to put great propaganda effort into being seen and understood as representing “the people”. In that context it stands out to me how high-profile Americans like Mark Cuban present Bluesky as being an “app of the people“. It shows the value that Bluesky has, but also how the network is quickly becoming a relevant political actor. Considering this context it remains prudent to keep the possibility in mind that Trump and Musk might crack down on social networks such as Bluesky, and prepare for such situations accordingly. Free Our Feeds shared a first update on their project to build independent ATProto infrastructure. The organisation says that their first priority is getting an independent archival relay up and running in Europe. For this, they are targeting a 4 million USD fund raise over the next 8 weeks. Currently, Free Our Feeds has raised almost 100k USD. The big question here seems to be if large institutions have an appetite for bigger donations. Personally, I think the challenge here is that only having an ATProto relay that is not under US jurisdiction is a good step in the right direction, but not sufficient to make the Bluesky network resilient against US government interference. For that, the Bluesky app (AppView, in ATProto terms) needs to be in a different place as well. And running a different app on ATProto means doing content moderation, which is both expensive and the type of nitty-gritty work that is harder to get funding for. Speaking of funding for content moderation: the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative is a new collaborative effort by various large tech companies to build open source moderation tools. Bluesky is partnering with Roost by co-developing various modular tools. Smaller social media organisations often lack the tools needed to do proper content moderation at scale, and Roost is aimed at helping that by making these tools open source and available for everyone. The organisation is also thinking about how they can help Bluesky third-party labelers with their tools. Still, the announcement led to quite some outrage in the community, which is strongly tied to people’s distrust of AI tools, as well as earlier grievances regarding Bluesky’s moderation choices. While the outrage had little connection to what the collaboration between ROOST and Bluesky actually entails, it does provide a good indication of why content moderation can be a barrier to build other products on ATProto.The Media apps Some updates from the various image and video Bluesky clients that people are building: TechCrunch covered various apps that are building Instagram competitors: Flashes, Pinksy and Skygram, as well as the ActivityPub-based Pixelfed. Flashes is taking some steps towards building their own Lexicon with a new portfolio feature, which allows people to select some of the images they have posted on Bluesky to be highlighted as their portfolio. Flashes is currently available for beta testing, with the release planned on February 25. Flashes developer Sebastian Vogelsang said that the main reason why Flashes is a client for Bluesky, and not a standalone ATProto app with it’s own Lexicon, is that this means having to do your own moderation. This is a problem that all other apps that are build on ATProto face: doing moderation is the hardest and most expensive part of building a standalone product. Flashes is currently only available on iOS, and Vogelsang said that making Flashes available on Android will only happen with either external funding or if subscriptions bring in enough funding. Video app Skylight is struggling to the beta approved on the Google Play Store. Pinksky is another Instagram-like app for Bluesky, and it is now available on Android. TechCrunch has taken a closer look at Pinksky as well. Gridsky is a new web client for Bluesky that aims to bring “the Instagram experience to Bluesky”, with both a design of the feed as well as user profile that is similar to that of Instagram. Upcoming ATProto video app Reelo (previously also known as Tik and Flicky) has renamed itself to Spark. Spark is the only media app for ATProto that takes a different direction by not leaning on Bluesky, instead building its own Lexicon. This allows spark to build new features such as a music and audio library for videos. Spark will not only show videos, but images as well, as seen on a preview. Spark has set itself up as a Public Benefit Company as well, and plans to launch late March.In Other News For the people who are interesting the technical side of Bluesky and ATProto, I highly recommend reading this blog about how ATProto and Bluesky can scale down. For the non-technical people, the short of it is that it shows that Bluesky can indeed be self-hosted for a low cost. It shows that the cost of running the Bluesky AppView is in that 31 million people use the AppView, and that the cost is not in processing the data that these 31 million accounts generate. This is done by building a new separate component in the ATProto infrastructure, that creates an index of all links on the entire network. This database can be used by others as well, making the entire network more modular. Cred.blue is a newly launched project that generates Bluesky credibility scores. It looks at the public data footprint of ATProto accounts to “establish their credibility and authority”. It looks at a variety of factors, such as alt-text usage, if accounts use more of ATProto than just Bluesky, activity, profile completeness and more. Ranking people on credibility scores is a sensitive subject, and not something that everyone agrees with. Cred.blue describes itself as “one experiment among many that is attempting to help people understand which social media accounts are more (or less) trustworthy.” Bluesky has made some more updates to their app, including the ability to limit replies to people who follow you. The new setting can also be combined with the (already present) option to limit replies to people who you follow to limit replies to only mutuals. There is also a new developer mode setting, which gives some extra options related to ATProto, such as easily copying someone’s DID. Bluesky is now using Crowdin for translations for the app. Crowdin is a platform for apps to manage translations, which allows other people to contribute with translations as well. Some American sports news: the NBA and MLB have set up official accounts on Bluesky, although they have not started posting yet. This is in contrast with the NFL, where NFL teams are not allowed to have a Bluesky account because it is not an “approved platform”. Fans are now suing the NFL for not allowing teams to have a Bluesky account. ATmosphereConf, the volunteer conference about Bluesky and ATProto, has shared more information about some of the talks Bluesky members will give. CTO Paul Frazee will talk about Bluesky’s history and future, Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren about the principles underlying ATProto. The conference will be held on March 22nd and 23rd in Seattle, USA. The conference is also looking for people to make designs for swag for the conference. Dazzle is a new site for trending topics on Bluesky, using their own algorithms separate from Bluesky’s trending topics. It shows various trending topics, sorted into some 20+ categories, with a short AI-generated summary and some of the more popular posts the trending topic it is based on.In the media Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in) – Kristina Bravo/Mozilla What Makes Bluesky the New ‘It’ Space for Urbanists – Planning Magazine The Fork Around and Find Out podcast talked with Bluesky engineer Jaz about what it’s like to scale Bluesky from 100k users to >30M. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

fediversereport.com

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.c

Social platforms are not, and can not, be neutral in a context of authoritarianism, and Bluesky cannot avoid this dynamic either. On a lighter note...

Fediverse Report – #104 Mastodon has announced it will add quote posts to the platform, and some more news.The News Mastodon has announced it is adding quote posts to the platform, a long-awaited feature. Mastodon got a grant by NLnet in 2024 to add quote posts, and they are now sharing an update on their work. Mastodon is adding a variety of features to quote posts, such as giving people the ability to opt out of being quote posted. They will publish the technical work to support quote posts as Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, and Mastodon is currently in the process of writing these proposals. The organisation does not say when quote posts will be added, only noting that it ‘will still take more time to develop.’ For a long time, Mastodon had not implemented quote posts because CEO Eugen Rochko saw them as bad. His main concern is that quote posts lead to ‘dunking’ and toxic behaviour. Dunking refers to the behaviour where people use quote posts to ‘dunk’ on other people’s post, often with the intent that this mocking will lead to their followers to also mock and harass the original poster. Dunking was a visible part of Twitter’s culture, and in popular belief dunking and toxicity became linked together. Research showed a more complicated picture. Hilda Bastian analysed over 30 studies on quote tweeting, and concludes: “There’s conflicting evidence on whether QTs [quote Tweets] increase or decrease incivility, and whatever effect there is, it doesn’t seem to be major.“ In 2023 Mastodon changed their opinion, and first started saying that the organisation was open to implementing quote posts. Still, toxic behaviour via dunking continued to be a main concern. This is visible in the accompanying design research that Mastodon has done in their work on quote posts. Mastodon’s view seems to be that quote posts are toxic at it’s core, saying that “the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused.” Mastodon takes a technical approach to dealing to the purported problem of toxicity of quote posts, and the blog posts lists three features to mitigate it: people can choose if their posts are able to be quoted, people get notified if they are quoted, and there will be the ability to withdraw your post from the quoted context. Bluesky also has these features for quote posts, and they’re generally received well. What I find missing here is a take by Mastodon on the effect of these features on Bluesky. Mastodon sees quote posts as being dangerous, and that is why they will implement some features to mitigate the risk. But do they think that quote posts are being used well on Bluesky? Is Bluesky’s behaviour and culture around quote posts something that Mastodon is striving towards? I’m not clear to me what Mastodon’s answer is here. Mastodon’s design research also says that they will display quotes in a different way to ‘steer away from dunk culture”‘, a feature not mentioned in Mastodon’s announcement blog post. Mastodon is planning to display a quote post by first showing the quote, and showing the reply below it. This is similar to how Tumblr does quote posts. But it differs from how all other platforms that interoperate with Mastodon display quote posts: fediverse native platforms like Misskey, Akkoma and Streams, as well as connected networks like Bluesky and Threads, all display quote posts by showing the reply at the top, and the quoted post below. Mastodon’s position is that quote posts are a risky feature invite misuse, and thus need a variety of safety features. But Mastodon is not an isolated platform, it is connected to various other platforms that all have their own ideas about quote posts. If displaying quote posts Tumblr-style (quote above, comment below) is preferred over displaying them Twitter-style (comment above, quote below), what is the expectation on how other platforms should interact with Mastodon quotes? Is Misskey expected to display Mastodon’s quote post differently? Meanwhile, Mastodon is planning to display quotes that originate from Misskey not in the way that Misskey does (Twitter-style), but in their own manner (Tumblr-style), saying that it has “very little impact on the semantics”. I find these statements hard to square: on the one hand, Mastodon says it how quote posts are displayed has little impact on the semantics of a post, but at the same time it is assumed to have enough of an impact in that it can reduce “dunking culture”. But if the manner a quote post is displayed can impact people’s behaviour, it automatically follows that the manner a quote post is displayed impacts its semantics, as otherwise there would be no impact on people’s behaviour either. But if the semantics of a post are altered by using a different display method for quote posts, than it means that Mastodon is taking an active decision to alter the semantics of posts made on other networks like Misskey and Bluesky. Mastodon’s choice to use a different way of displaying quote posts than the other platforms in their network opens up a new interesting avenue for federated diplomacy. We’ve seen both ways of displaying quote posts be successful, the way posts are quoted is a significant part of how conversations flow on Tumblr. But what is new here is Mastodon is part of a federated network, and that means that their decisions impact other players, and their decisions have impact on Mastodon as well. This interaction between different display types of quote posts is something we have not really seen before, leading to some interesting new types of negotiations: how Mastodon expect Misskey to display Mastodon quote posts on Misskey? How does Threads feel about having their quote posts being displayed differently on Mastodon? What is the expected behaviour of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with Mastodon? All those questions are still open, and I’m curious what the answer will turn out to be. Tumblr is still planning to join the fediverse. I reported this recently, and now TechCrunch got a followup and a confirmation from Automattic, saying that ‘Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far “exciting.”’ The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has announced they are now a formal member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C tends to favour institutional membership, but the W3C Social Community Group that concerns itself with ActivityPub is open to everyone. The SWF is working on various improvements to ActivityPub, such as adding end-to-end encryption and supporting data portability. Event Federation is a WordPress plugin that extends the ActivityPub support plugin for WordPress by adding support for WordPress events. The plugin is now officially released as a 1.0 version. Hexbear is a controversial Lemmy server that let domain expire. The Hexbear domain is now for sale, and an avid bidding war has driven up the price for the domain to over 2300 dollar at time of writing. ForgeFed is an ActivityPub extension that adds federation support to software forges such as Forgejo. It has gotten a new NLnet grant, with the project now focusing on user research and documentation. A few weeks ago, Fedidb removed fediverse platfrom GoToSocial from the database after refusing to honor robots.txt, and the GoToSocial developer spoofed data as retaliation. Fedidb developer Daniel Supernault later decided to properly add support for robots.txt, but stopped crawling for the entire fediverse in the meantime while it was implemented. Supernault now confirms that Fedidb honors robots.txt and has added GoToSocial back to the data set. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has set up their own Mastodon server for all community members, including students. The Links An experiment with social media handles – Doctor Popular Micro Social is a new third-party app for Micro.Blog A podcast by The Conversation about how decentralised social media platforms work, interviewing Robert Gehl Five Confusing Fediverse Things – FediHost Podcast ActivityPods shared their presentation from FOSDEM, about how the project compares to ATProto and their work with NextGraph. Another FOSDEM presentation that was uploaded recently was by Davide Eynard, about ‘Building your own Timeline Algorithm’. This week’s fediverse software updates. WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform – Alex Kirk

fediversereport.com

Fediverse Report – #104

Mastodon has announced it will add quote posts to the platform, and some other news.

Last Week in Fediverse #103 This week I’m zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they’ll run out of funding soon, indicating the challenges with funding Trust & Safety in the network.On bridging and fediverse culture Erin Kissane wrote an excellent article this week, about ‘bridging’ (connecting separate networks), fediverse culture, and why this regularly leads to drama and blowups. Kissane gives three explanations as to why this type of drama keeps happening, of which I want to highlight one: ‘Conflicting models of what the fediverse “really” is’. Kissane focuses on two different cultures on the fediverse regarding how connections between different places on the fediverse should be made, and how they should deal with consent. I agree with Kissane’s observation, both that these competing models exist, as well as that a lack of acceptance that there are different models leads to conflict. Just last week I wrote about two separate cases of drama between various people about fediverse software that deals with these conflicting models on what the fediverse really is. In general I think that it is highly important to have a good understanding of what the fediverse truly is, and not only what people want the fediverse to be. This Sunday was the NFL Superbowl, with the halftime show by Kendrick Lamar. Lamar made some powerful visual statements in his show, such as a flag of America that consists entirely of Black men. Browsing both the fediverse and Bluesky this Monday morning served as a good indication of how different the cultures of these two networks are. On Bluesky, 20 of the most liked 25 posts of the entire network 1 discussed the Superbowl, and of those 20, 12 were specifically about Lamar’s halftime show. Shortly after the end of the show, network traffic spiked to almost double the traffic for a short period as people logged in to talk about the show. On the fediverse, I had a hard time finding any posts discussing the Superbowl. I saw one post on the trending page of mastodon.social. Browsing through all posts made with the hashtag #superbowl gave me more than five times as much superb pictures of owls as it gave me posts about the halftime show.2 There is a long tradition of posting pictures of owls with the tag SuperbOwl, that far predates the fediverse. It shows two social networks with very different cultures: one as a place to discuss mainstream cultural events, and one as a place for counterculture and the subversion of mainstream culture. I do not think this difference is an anomaly either, in general I see significantly less conversations about pop culture on the fediverse. This specific example with the Superbowl halftime show is just a clear example of a larger trend To be clear here: this is not a criticism of the fediverse, nor is it a call for the fediverse to change and suddenly start posting about Lamar. The reason I’m highlighting these difference is to show what the fediverse actually is. There is a significant group of people that have an interest in the fediverse for the potential that it can be. This group frames the fediverse as an alternative to platforms like X, as a way to build social media platforms that are welcoming for everybody. This is a laudable goal to strive for. The ongoing coup in the US illustrates the urgent need for social platforms that are not owned by the oligarchy. But I also think that working towards such goals requires a good understanding what the fediverse currently actually is. That is why I’m placing this observation in the context of Kissane’s post, who notes that people having ‘conflicting model of what the fediverse “really” is’ leads to conflict, and hampers potential for change in the fediverse. To me, how the fediverse responded to the Superbowl is a good illustration of the current culture of the network. What the fediverse currently is, is a countercultural network with little interest in mainstream pop culture. This is an absolutely fine identity to have! But for the people who are working to bringing the fediverse into the mainstream, it is important to realise that this countercultural identity clashes with with bringing a mainstream cultural identity to the fediverse. The News IFTAS has announced that they are running out of funding, and that barring new funding sources that will come through this month, the organisation will have to scale down their activities significantly. IFTAS says that they are currently focused on getting funding for their Content Classification Service (CCS). CCS is an opt-in system which helps fediverse server admins with CSAM detection and reporting. Running a social networking server comes with a fair amount of requirements regarding reporting CSAM, which are difficult to do for fediverse admins. CCS is intended to help with that, but IFTAS describes it as an “a ridiculously expensive undertaking, far beyond what the community can support with individual donations”. If IFTAS cannot secure funding by the end of the month, they will have to suspend the operation of CCS and its CSAM detection service. Other work that IFTAS will have to halt if no funding comes through is giving policy guidance, like their recent work for server admins on how to navigate the new UK Online Safety Act. Funding Trust & Safety has been a major challenge for the fediverse. Recently, Mastodon tried a fundraiser for a new Trust & Safety lead, where Mastodon only managed to raise 13k of the aimed 75k. It is a concerning situation for the fediverse. One of the selling points of the network is that it can be a safer place for vulnerable people. But it turns out that actually funding the work that can make the fediverse a safer place is a lot harder than it should be. Tapestry is a new iOS app by Iconfactory, who once made the popular Twitter client Twitterific. Tapestry is a combination of a news reader and a social media site. It allows you to combine many feeds into a single timeline. Tapestry supports social feeds like Mastodon, Bluesky and Tumblr, as well as RSS, YouTube, and more. The app was funded via Kickstarter last year. In a review, David Pierce from The Verge describes Tapestry as a ‘timeline app’, in a similar category as apps like feeeed and Surf. In his review, Pierce describes how timeline apps are about consuming information and new in a different way, and help manage the information overload that social media feeds present us with. I think that is also why I find these types of apps interesting, as they also frame the fediverse in a different way. Most popular fediverse software like Mastodon and Pixelfed are wired around social interaction. However, they follow the same patterns as the Twitters and Instagrams that came before, and over the last 15 years society has reshaped itself so that platforms like Twitter became not only used for talking, but also as a way to distribute news. So far, the fediverse is repeating this structure; Mastodon is used both for organisations that just want to send out a link to their news article as well as for people to chat with their friends. Timeline apps like Tapestry help split out these use cases, and allow people to take one part of the interaction pattern of Mastodon (following news and updates) without the other pattern (chatting with friends). The Links Some more videos of fediverse presentations that happened at FOSDEM last week were published online: Fediscovery – Improving Search and Discovery on the Fediverse – David Roetzel (Mastodon) Castopod & Web Monetization on the Social Web – Benjamin Bellamy (Castopod) & Jeremiah Lee (Web Monetization) Presenting ActivityBot at FOSDEM – Terence Eden Fediverse Fighters – The Role of Public Institutions – Melanie Bartos The Brazilian Institute for Museums, a Brazilian government agency, is hiring two people to expand their integration with ActivityPub. Flipboard has published more information and a schedule for Fediverse House, a conference about the social web. It will be held in Austin, Texas, on Sunday March 9th and Monday March 10th. And some more links: Trunk & Tidbits, January 2025, Mastodon Engineering’s monthly update. A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship – Robert W. Gehl Pixelfed Crowdfunds More Open Source Social Alternatives for the Fediverse – David Cassel/The New Stack Release candidate 0.18 for GoToSocial with a wide variety of new features. Lemmy is working towards a 1.0 release with breaking changes in their API. This week’s fediverse software updates. That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!I checked at 6am PST, and looked at the past 12 hours. ↩︎Also checked on 6am PST, and checked all posts made with that hashtag as visible from the mastodon.social server. I saw 61 pictures of owls, and less than 10 pictures by non-automated accounts of the show by Lamar. I’m saying less then 10 here because there were some automated bot accounts in there who mirror posts from news websites. Due to the size difference in userbase between Bluesky and Mastodon I’m less interested in the absolute numbers as in the relative difference between them. ↩︎ #superbowl

fediversereport.com

Last Week in Fediverse #103

This week I'm zooming in on the culture of the fediverse, prompted by the Superbowl halftime show. IFTAS announces they'll run out of fun...

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.a Bluesky’s public launch was one year ago today, and here you can see how the network has grown and changed over this first year. In that year, Bluesky has managed to find a serious role in the larger media ecosystem. The media ecosystem itself has shifted rapidly as well: outlets like Wired and 404 Media, and independent reporters like Marisa Kabas and Nathan Tankus at the forefront of reporting what is happening in the US. I do not think it is an accident that they are all active on Bluesky Note: I’ve been sick for the past few days, so this edition is a bit shorter and a day late, apologies. Next week’s edition will be focused again on the more technical side of AT Protocol (ATProto).Credible exit One of the core concepts why Bluesky is build on the open ATProto is to give users ‘credible exit’. The Bluesky company (Bluesky PBC) is mindful of how companies turn bad over time, and CTO Paul Frazee explicitly talks about how he sees his own company as a ‘future adversary‘. The idea is that in a future where Bluesky has become an adversary to its users, people can have a ‘credible exit’ away from Bluesky towards another microblogging app. People can take their digital identity (the DID, in ATProto terms), social graph and posts with them, and seamlessly continue microblogging on ATProto using another app. Such another competitor microblogging app on ATProto currently does not exist, and an important factor in that is the incentives to build such an app currently are not there. Bluesky is currently not an adversary, has a well-designed app and some significant funding, and it is hard to compete with that. Still, the assumption made by Bluesky PBC is that over the years, Bluesky PBC will gradually turn ‘bad’ in some way, and at some point the incentives are such that another company will build a microblogging competitor on ATProto, and people will have the option to have a credible exit. The ongoing coup in America changes the dynamic however. Autocratic regimes are not particularly compatible with platforms that allow for free speech by people that oppose the regime. This creates a possibility that either the Musk or the US government will force Bluesky to censor speech or ban accounts that they don’t like, or that either party will come after Bluesky directly. Musk has called Bluesky ‘pedosky’ multiple times, indicating his feelings of contempt for the network that rivals his X platform. Such actions would likely be wildly illegal and should be fought in court, but in a world where an unelected private citizen can decide to shut down entire US government departments, it is prudent to account for the possibility that other illegal stuff might happen as well. This new political environment changes the understanding of Bluesky having a credible exit as well. So far, Bluesky PBC frames credible exit as a way for people to move to a different app on the same network when the company becomes an ‘adversary’. But in the current political climate, it might just be that the US government becomes an adversary which prompts a need for a credible exit.Bluesky clients Bluescreen is the latest video app for Bluesky, made by the creator of the popular Bluesky client Skeets. It is similar to apps like Skylight and Videos for Bluesky, all three apps provide a TikTok-like interface to watch videos that are posted on Bluesky. Over at TechCrunch, Sarah Perez wrote an overview of all the video apps for ATProto that are currently being developed. Now that I’ve gotten to play around with all three video apps for Bluesky, I am not convinced that Bluesky video clients are the way forward to build a ‘TikTok for Bluesky’. Bluesky’s recent update for video feeds have turned the official Bluesky app into a suitable video client as well, and I find that the video watching experience on the official Bluesky app is better than on any of these three apps. Part of it is that the competitor client apps are all still early in development, and this may change over time. But more importantly, videos on Bluesky get posted in an environment where there are lots of non-video content as well. If I watch a video on Bluesky and I want to see that account’s profile, I’m want to be able to see all of their posts, not just their videos. I can do this with the official Bluesky app, but not with any of the Bluesky video-focused clients. There are now multiple image-focused Bluesky clients as well. Pinksky was recently released with an interface that is heavily inspired by Instagram. Bluescreen also now has a Bluesky client specifically for photo-sharing, Flashes, that entered open beta this week. Atlas is a Bluesky client for images that has collections similar to Pinboard. These image-focused Bluesky clients all bring something to the table that the official Bluesky client does not have, by restructuring the interface around images. But just with video, I’m wondering if it is enough to build a steady user base.The Links Two RSS readers added Bluesky support this week: Feedly and Inoreader. handles.net allows for large-scale managing of Bluesky handles, similar to other services like Aviary. Another way to add bookmarks to Bluesky, this time with a separate app. Automating a dynamic avatar for Bluesky. Bluesky is now also using labelers for more casual use-cases, advertising a labeler for people to support their team during the Super Bowl. In the media: Bluesky’s science takeover: 70% of Nature poll respondents use platform – Celeste Biever/Nature Custom feed builder Graze is building a business on Bluesky, and investors are paying attention – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch Seizing social media for the people – Kate Lindsay/Embedded Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness – Mike Masnick/Techdirt Selling followers where the skies are blue – Conspirador Norteno/Conspirator0 Bluesky’s AT Protocol is the real “everything app” – Scott Polhemus That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online. #bluesky

fediversereport.com

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.a

The ongoing coup in America shifts the framing of 'credible exit' on ATProto. More video and images apps for Bluesky.