Last Week in the ATmosphere
Welcome to the weekly update on everything that’s happened on Bluesky and the broader network called the ATmosphere. A short introduction for people who might not know me: I’m Laurens Hof, and the last year I’ve written a monthly update on all the news that’s happened on Bluesky. I’ve written a weekly newsletter about everything that is happening in the fediverse, the other decentralised social network, as well over the last year and a half. And now you can expect even more regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere as well, coming out every Wednesday. It’s been a busy week* with video, 10 million accounts, and more!
The News
Bluesky has added support for video. The feature has been often requested, especially from the Brazilian community. Over the last few weeks the team has made it their top priority to launch the feature as soon as possible. Videos have indeed been very popular on Bluesky, with 169 years of videos being served within 2 days, and half a million videos posted within 4 days. Each video can be one minute long, and people can upload 25 videos per day.
There are two things that stand out to me about Bluesky’s video support: videos have shown to be highly popular on Bluesky, and the openness of the ATmosphere network allows people to build new types of network that are more catered towards watching videos specifically. I’m curious to what extend this will actually happen. Furthermore videos require significantly more resources than text posts, so it is worth watching how this impacts Blueskys thinking about costs and monetization.
- Bluemotion is a video hosting app for Bluesky, by the same developer that also makes the audio spaces Bluecast for Bluesky. The developer announced that Bluemotion will be shut down as it has fulfilled its role.
- You can download videos from Bluesky with this video downloading tool. Cobalt.tools also already supports the downloading of videos of Bluesky.
Bluesky crossed 10 million accounts this week, of which around 4 million came in the last month or so after the ban in Brazil on X. It now has around 5.5 million monthly active users. User retention after this new signup wave is also notably high, with daily active users peaking at 1.91 million, and staying at 1.57 million some two weeks later. Every signup wave has a significant amount of churn, as it is very difficult to get people to change their habits and start regularly using a new social platform, and Bluesky’s churn seems low to me. Bluesky celebrated this milestone by letting everyone know which number they joined the network with, and how early they were. The amount of people sharing it shows that people on Bluesky definitely like to show off their early-adopter status.
The adoption of Bluesky by the Brazilian community as the default social network after the ban on X has continued. After the dust has settled it looks like the Brazilians now fairly consistently represent three quarters of the total posts on the network. President Lula (‘s social media team) shows that they’re aware of the features that Bluesky offers, and has used a Starter Pack to promote different candidates for elections. Some of the biggest football clubs in Brazil have established an official presence as well, such as Corinthians and Vasco da Gama. When goals get scored during the games, this is now clearly visible in significant spikes in posts, with the number of posts per second doubling temporarily. Another developer made a directory of Brazilian accounts on Bluesky, sorted by various categories, to help people onboard as well. A Brazilian esports organisation now sells handles with their (sub)domain to raise money for the organisation as well as for people to show they support the team.
The Brazilian Bluesky community also had their first major cultural moment this week. During a televised debate between electoral rivals for mayor of Sao Paolo, one of the candidates hit one of the other candidates with a chair. Videos of the event went viral, and over the last two days the majority of the network’s top posts have been memes about the event. One of the most popular posts described it as ‘a really canonical event on this social network’. This is also in contrast with Threads, where the event seems to have not gone viral at all.
Skyware is a new lightweight labeler server. Originally, the labeling system was designed by Bluesky to be a content moderation system. Over time, the labeling system has slowly transformed, away from content moderation, and towards labelers that you can self-apply for silly or more practical use-cases as indicating your pronouns (or to recreate Orkut). Skyware is the next evolution in this, where the software is only for labeling accounts, and the moderation part of the system is stripped away altogether. Still, other organisations are experimenting with using labelers for content moderation: News Detective is a fact checking organisation that now has a labeler on Bluesky as well. How effective a fact-checking system is when people have to opt into receiving the fact checks on a social network remains to be seen however.
In other news
- The third Tech Talk by the (unaffiliated) atprotocol.dev community is by Ændra Rininsland, who is behind the labeler XBlock and the News feed.
- A research paper that studies how Bluesky has evolved from invitation-only to being open to the public. One of their findings is that Bluesky is a chatty network, something that was already the case before the arrival of the Brazilians: users tend to create more posts than reshare other posts, in contrast with Twitter/X where the dynamic is the other way around.
- For the people interested in the nitty-gritty of protocols: NodeInfo is a standardized way of exposing metadata about a server running one of the distributed social networks, and it is currently mainly used for ActivityPub servers. Now there is an effort to expand NodeInfo so it can also be used for a PDS on atproto.
- Bridgy Fed is a way to connect Bluesky to other decentralised social networks such as Mastodon. The latest update now also bridges video between the network, and you can let the bridge ask an account via a DM if they want to opt-in to the bridge. Bridgy Fed will only send a DM once, even if someone else also asks.
- Graphtracks allows you to check the statistics of atproto accounts, allowing you to see a graph of your follow and likes over time. It shows the power of a completely open API, where anyone can now have full detailed statistics about their account.
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 me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
* 10 days actually, I switched from publishing on Sunday to publishing on Wednesday this week as well.
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