The capital plans to attract business guests by focusing on BRICS-level events, developing congress infrastructure and providing digital services for the convenience of work trips
Resilient relays, a web interface to manage your ATProto account directly on your PDS, and a new upcoming ATProto platform with Speakeasy.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
Relays, Free Our Feeds and IndieSky
Free Our Feeds, the campaign to build independent infrastructure for ATProto, has provided IndieSky with 50k USD funding. IndieSky is a working group that arose from within the ATProto developer community, at the Seattle ATmosphereConf and Hamburg’s Ahoy! conferences.
As phil, an independent ATProto developer who runs three separate relays, points out, there is little value in using an alternative relay. They are commoditised by design, and the important part of relays is that they are it is easy for apps to switch to another relay if the relay that is used by Bluesky PBC becomes unreliable. With relay costs now solidly under 50USD/month (as acknowledged by Free Our Feeds), people speed-running the setup in minutes, and multiple other independent relays that have popped up in recent weeks the relay part of the ATProto network is at this point resilient. Free Our Feeds switching their focus away from relays makes sense in that context.
That does not mean however that all parts of ATProto are as resilient as relays are, nor that other parts will be able to scale down to such low costs as relays can. AppViews and moderation remain costly in a way that scales with the amount of users. Relays have gotten an overly large amount of attention due to various cultural and historical reason. Relays are smartly designed part of the system, and it is impressive that passing through the network traffic of tens of millions of accounts can be done for such little amount of money. But not all parts of the network will scale that way.
Free Our Feeds goes into the question of why they want to raise 30M USD, saying: “We are supporting the development of fully independent infrastructure that enables the development and running of social apps that can serve tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. […] We think this is a fraction of the money that will be needed to remake the social web from where it is today – with the dominance of Big Tech – to a future where billions of internet users control their online lives. We need many more initiatives – public, non-profit and private to make this happen.”
Taken all the news together, of Free Our Feeds taking a broader approach to support independent infrastructure, a multiple independent public relays being available, and people collaboration on independent infrastructure with the IndieSky working group, makes it feel the network is getting to a new phase in the road towards full independence. Over the last year the conversation around network decentralisation has been overly dominated by relays, more than it fully deserved. Now that the relay part of the network can now be seen as sufficiently resilient, more focus can be put on other, more challenging, parts of the network.
The next meeting of the IndieSky working group will be on May 22nd, 9am PST / 12pm EST / 1800 CEST.
In Other News
Bluesky has updated their PDS reference implementation, and it now has a web interface to manage and create accounts directly on the PDS themselves. ATProto apps that use the OAuth for login did not have a way to get new users to create an account yet. The work-around up until now was to refer people to the Bluesky app to login. This is not a great user experience, and also gives Bluesky PBC an outsized role in the ecosystem. With the latest update, apps can now create accounts directly on a PDS, even a PDS owned by Bluesky PBC if so desired. The web interface (for accounts on a Bluesky PDS, accessible at https://bsky.social/account/), gives people some basic account management options, such as the ability to sign out of specific devices or revoke access of connected apps. For this web interface Bluesky PBC expects more features to be implemented here in the future. These features are related to account management that are not tied to a specific app, such as email updates and password changes. Bluesky PBC is encouraging other PDS implementations to innovate and differentiate with new features as well, speculating that PDS hosting could be bundled with other hosted networking services.
Speakeasy is an upcoming social media platform build on ATProto, and is compatible with Bluesky. An early version of Speakeasy can already be accessed, and it is a fork of the Bluesky web client. Speakeasy is building private posts as a distinguishing feature. Founder Chris Jensen says that private messages are stored outside of the network for now, and that he believes that private posts are an urgent needed feature for the network. Jensen also says that once Bluesky PBC has an official implementation for private data, they will merge their implementation.
Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has created a local developer environment for ATProto. It gives developers the option to run a local PDS and PLC that can resolve DNS handles. Gerakines describes it as a “turnkey dev stack with full ATProtocol flows, HTTPS everywhere, and DNS-backed handle resolution—without needing to expose anything publicly.”
Flashes, a client app for Bluesky that focuses on images, has received funding from Skyseed. The funding will be used to build an Android version, as well as further infrastructure in Europe to make the app more independent from Bluesky PBC. Creator Sebastian Vogelsang says that they have begone designing a mobile PDS.
Two independent ATProto developers are taking a stab at guestbooks: Ms Boba has been livestreaming her development of a guestbook on ATProto that can be embedded on websites. Dame has an approach of creating welcome messages for people who view their PDS on a PDS viewing tool like PDSls or atp.tools.
ATProto Audio room platform Bluecast now has a public mode for live streams, so that audio streams can be listened to without logging in.
One of the challenges for ATProto app developers is that users are regularly asked to log back into their client. Graze recently released a tool that helps with this, in collaboration with Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines. Skylight is now implementing this tool to prevent this pain point.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee held a talk about Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech at the The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, which can be viewed here.
A three-part article series exploring how ATProto can be combined with local-first software (1, 2, 3)
Block Party now has support for Bluesky. Block Party became well-known as a tool for Twitter that offers advanced safety tools. With changes to Twitter’s API, Block Party became a “browser extension that helps users update their privacy and security settings and clean up their content across 12+ platforms, including Bluesky.”
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 this week’s articles, 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.
A lot has happened since our last update in February: loads of activity in the ATProto ecosystem and, of course looking at the bigger picture, the Trump administration’s policies have upended geopolitical relations.
Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!
Independent Infrastructure news
Over the last week, the effort towards decentralisation and running independent pieces of ATProto infrastructure has sped up significantly. There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client.
Some of the updates regarding relays:
Blacksky has built their own relay, using their own custom implementation. This relay is publicly accessible, meaning that other people can use this relay instead of the relay that Bluesky PBC uses.
A writeup on how to set up your own relay by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, for some 34 USD/month.
Making relays cheaper has been due to the Sync 1.1 update, Bluesky PBC goes into more detail in a blog post what this entails.
And the updates regarding clients and AppViews:
Two clients now support the ability for users to set their own AppView, Deer and TOKIMEKI.
AppViewLite is another AppView for Bluesky that has been around for a while, that focuses on being cheap to run. It also heavily optimises for network data storage, with creator Alnkq running AppViewLite that contains full network data on a cheap 10 year old machine. So far, AppViewLite only worked with a custom frontend. An update this week now make it possible to use AppViewLite in combination with other clients.
Some further thoughts:
The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay.
For building features in a Bluesky client that Bluesky itself does not have, a different AppView is needed. Now that these are starting to become available, there is new space to experiment with clients that have features that Bluesky does not have. Deer has already started going in this direction by allowing people to set any account as a trusted verifier, for example.
There has been skepticism around Bluesky PBC’s claims regarding decentralisation, especially from people within the ActivityPub community. Part of this distrust has come from people applying a mental framework of how ActivityPub works to how ATProto works. In this framework, Bluesky being decentralised would mean that there are other software platforms that are interoperable with the Bluesky lexicon. I’ll be writing more about those different mental frameworks, and how that relates to decentralisation later. But for now these developments strengthen the claims of Bluesky PBC around decentralisation and building a network that is ‘billionaire-proof’.
In Other News
at://2048 is the game of 2048, integrated with ATProto. 2048 is a sliding tile puzzle game where players combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile, that has gotten popularity years ago and has been reimplemented a number of times. What makes the at://2048 version stand out is that the scores of the game are stored on your ATProto PDS. This creates new features and challenges: it gives the game a more social element, with features like leaderboards. It also creates a new challenge, of how to verify that a score on someone’s PDS is actually legit. at://2048 is experimenting with verified badges to authenticate if a score is legit. Integrating games with ATProto is one of the areas that is under-explored, and this reimplementation of 2048 is worth watching to get a sense of how the integration of games with ATProto will further develop.
Bluesky differs from other social networks in one significant way, namely that users blocking each other is public information. This creates new dynamics, from people being able to see who have blocked them, to leaderboards of the most blocked accounts on the network. A new paper, ‘Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky‘, takes advantages of data on blocks being public to study user behaviour. Some of their findings: “users who receive a high number of blocks exhibit distinctive behavioral traits that set them apart from the general user population. These patterns are not necessarily linked to toxicity or misinformation, indicating that block-worthy behavior is more nuanced and complex than traditional moderation markers might suggest. Second, these distinctive traits can be effectively encoded and leveraged by machine learning models, suggesting the feasibility of early-warning or flagging systems able to assist moderation teams by surfacing potentially problematic users even before issues escalate.”
Custom feed builder Graze is giving out 5 grants of 1k USD for other projects in the ATProto ecosystem. Explaining why the startup is giving out grants, Graze says: “First, we want to help accelerate growth in the ATProto / Bluesky ecosystem. Projects that help *others* are vital. Second, we want to empower communities to sustain themselves. Third, we want to help give people & orgs direct access to their audiences. Broadly, those are *our* goals as an org.”
Bluesky in the media
Time Magazine talks with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang after they both got recognised as rising leaders in the Asian Pacific Community by Gold House. On monetisation, Graber says “she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.”
Wired published an article on how digital archivists are racing to save Black History while the Trump administration is trying to erase it. Wired talks with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser, who describes “Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years”.
The two developers behind Git collaboration platform Tangled, the brothers Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, gave an interview on the devtools.fm podcast about Tangled. The platform also got various feature updates this week, and customisable profiles.
WhiteBreeze is a self-hostable frontend for WhiteWind, allowing people to build their own blog on ATProto.
ATProto Migrator is a tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS. It does so via a web application, without people having to touch the Command Line Interface (CLI). This makes account migration more accessible, as other tools until now (such as goat by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold) require people to use the CLI.
Flashes is a Bluesky client focused on images, and they are experimenting with some new ways to deal with the limitations that come from using Bluesky’s data. A Bluesky post can contain a maximum of 4 images and 300 characters. Flashes has upgraded that limit to 900 characters and 12 images. It works by actually creating 3 separate Bluesky posts in a thread, and displaying this as a single post in the Flashes app.
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 this week’s articles, 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.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation transforms aid into a militarized governance model sidelining principles of oversight, independence and accountability.
Jon Elmer, contributing editor, covers the latest resistance news from Gaza and analyzes the Qassam Brigades' "Gates of Hell" series of ambushes in the southern Rafah area.
This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada's livestream on day 587 of the Gaza genocide. Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer and Asa Winstanley were joined by Asem Alnabih live from the Gaza Strip, as well as former and current employees of tech giant Microsoft. You can watch the full show here: youtube.com/live/atF2UwUPbuo
Your gift supports The Electronic Intifada's independent journalism on Palestine: • Donate by credit card, ApplePay, PayPal, Venmo or US bank account via Kindful: bit.ly/EIKindful
Gifts are welcome from anywhere and are tax-deductible for US taxpayers as allowed by law.
An independent online news publication and educational resource focusing on Palestine, its people, politics, culture and place in the world.
Radio stations are free to use our audio with attribution.
Walter Einenkel reveals unsettling insights about Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok. This chatbot has alarmingly fixated on the concept of "white genocide," diverting innocent discussions into extremist rhetoric. An example surfaced when Grok responded to a benign puppy post, showcasing its disturbing tendency. Discover more about Grok's controversial implications and behaviors. Read the full article here: crooksandliars.com/2025/05/lol… #ElonMusk #Grok #ArtificialIntelligence #WhiteGenocide #Chatbot #Technology #RightWingExtremism
Quattro tappe di avvicinamento alla partenza del Giro Illustrati alla banchina Fucile la serie di eventi organizzati per coinvolgere tutta la città nella partenza della tappa del Giro d'Italia prevista mercoledì 21 alle 12:00 dalla Darsena.
Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Vorsichtiger Optimismus vor Ukraine-Verhandlungen ++
Sicherheitsexperte Ischinger sieht in den Gesprächen in der Türkei immerhin einen Auftakt zu ernsthaften diplomatischen Bemühungen. Der Weg zu einem Frieden zwischen Russland und der Ukraine sei aber noch sehr weit. In der Ukraine wird weiter gekämpft.
PT contestava norma que vetava certidão a quem entregasse contas fora do prazo; o documento é exigido para candidatura A maioria dos ministros do STF (Supremo Tribunal Federal) votou nesta 5ª feira (15.mai.
“We’re wired to keep prices low, but there’s a limit to what we can bear, or any retailer for that matter,” Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told The Associated Press on Thursday after the company reported strong first-quarter sales. apnews.com/article/walmart-ear…
@bundeskanzler: Dass Präsident Selenskyj trotzdem nach Istanbul gereist ist, ist ein enormes Entgegenkommen. Putin ist nicht erschienen - damit hat allein er sich ins Unrecht gesetzt. Ein neues Sanktionspaket ist fe...…
Les ministres du gouvernement israélien ne pourraient pas être plus clairs. Ils affirment qu'Israël va «enfin conquérir la bande de Gaza». Ils menacent de «détruire complètement» #Gaza et affirment que sa population palestinienne «partira en masse vers des pays tiers». Ces actions constituent des crimes de guerre, des crimes contre l'humanité, notamment l'extermination et des actes de génocide. hrw.org/fr/news/2025/05/15/le-…
Comment ont-ils pu laisser cela se produire ? Aujourd'hui, tout le monde peut voir qu'Israël commet des atrocités à Gaza dans le cadre des hostilités qui ont éclaté le 7 octobre 2023.
xAI blamed an 'unauthorized modification' for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to "white genocide in South Africa" when invoked in certain contexts on X.
After Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to go to Turkey, the Russian bot network "Matryoshka" has begun distributing fake editorials from major Western media outlets with headlines about how Vladimir Putin outplayed Volodymyr Zelensky with the Istanbul talks.
Российская сеть ботов «Матрёшка» начала распространять фейковые передовицы крупных западных СМИ с заголовками о том, как Владимир Путин переиграл Владимира Зеленского с переговорами в Стамбуле
The Workers Party of Britain (WPB) packed London’s Bolivar Hall, the cultural premises of the Venezuelan Embassy, on Saturday May 10 for its celebration of the 80th anniversary of the victory over fascism in the European theatre of World War II.
xAI blamed an 'unauthorized modification' for a bug in its AI-powered Grok chatbot that caused Grok to repeatedly refer to "white genocide in South Africa" when invoked in certain contexts on X.
Australian Bond Exchange (ASX:ABE) is an asset listed on the ASX, and part of the Financials sector. Grafa’s asset page shows Australian Bond Exchange’s share price, chart, trading volume, earnings per share, dividends per share and P/E ratio.
Meduza has learned that Russia’s state-controlled news media have received instructions from the Kremlin’s domestic policy team to portray this week’s negotiations in Turkey as a distinctly Moscow-driven event.
Gerd
in reply to Auschwitz Memorial • • •Christian Klose
in reply to Auschwitz Memorial • • •DJ Enno
in reply to Auschwitz Memorial • • •RedAlert (Michael)
in reply to Auschwitz Memorial • • •🕯🖤🕯🖤🕯
#keinvergessen
#KämpfenBeginntMitErinnern
#niewiederfaschismus
#niewiederistjetzt ‼️
#AllezusammengegendenFaschismus
#afdverbotsverfahrenjetzt
#stopptDieBrandstifter
#WirSindDieBrandmauer