Welcome to this week’s update, with lots of news regarding T&S on Bluesky, managed PDS hosting, and a deeper dive into the Jetstream!
The News
Bluesky released an update on their current efforts on Trust and Safety, listing all the features the team is currently working on. There are quite a few features being worked on that are great (better ban evasion detection, moderation feedback via app), and I want to highlight two of them:
Geography-specific labels. Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines. This is a feature that I’ll certainly be writing more about once more about it becomes known, as it poses tons of interesting questions about decentralised protocols and national internet sovereignty. As Bluesky’s own labels can be avoided in an open protocol by running your own infrastructure, it poses the questions of whether people actually do this to circumvent local laws, as well as the extend local governments will accept this (or understand it, to be honest).
With toxicity detection experiments, Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button. It puts Bluesky closer to what other networks are doing, which is hiding bad or spammy comments behind a button you have to click to see. My guess is that Bluesky also eventually will end up in this position, skipping the labeling part altogether.
A report by Brazilian investigative researchers finds that Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese, mapping 125 accounts that sell or share CSAM. Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety already reported in early September that the sudden inflow of new users lead to a 10x increase in reported CSAM, as well as a more general strain on the moderation. Bluesky’s Emily Liu also stated in response to the report: “we’re taking this extremely seriously, and since the recent influx of users started, we’ve hired more human moderators (who are also provided mental health services) + implementing additional tooling that can quash these networks faster and more effectively”.
Bluesky has appointed a legal representative in Brazil, and will make an official announcement in the next few days. X not having a legal representative in Brazil is what ultimately led to a ban on X in Brazil. This week, X finally caved and appointed a representative, and X might become unbanned in the next few days again. It is worth watching how X becoming available again in Brazil will impact the current userbase of Brazilians on Bluesky. While some will undoubtedly go back to using X, the open question is how large this group will be.
In other news
With a maturity of the ecosystem, companies are starting to offer managed hosting of a PDS, both in the US as well as in Japan. It also raises interesting question regarding branding and marketing: both of these services explicitly advertise themselves as offering a Bluesky PDS: while that makes sense from the company’s perspective (very few people will understand what an atproto PDS is), I am entirely unclear if this desirable from the perspective of the Bluesky company.
Brazilian tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira interviewed Bluesky engineer hailey about developing on Bluesky, focusing specifically on mobile and React Native (in English). Ferreira interviewed Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee last week, and will talk with Dan Abramov on 26-09.
Altmetric, which tracks engagement with academic research, is working on adding support for Bluesky.
EmbedSky is a new tool to ’embed the last thirty posts and reposts from your BlueSky timeline in your blog or website’. It works with OAuth, which facilitates that the tool can only be used to embed posts from your own account.
On Relays, Jetstreams and costs
Some semi-technical protocol discussion about relays is worth mentioning, since I see people on the other networks talk about it. First, a super simplified description of how atproto works: everyone’s data is stored in a simple database, which does not much else besides storing your data, called a PDS. A Relay scrapes all the PDS’s on the entire network, and turns it into an unending stream of updates, often colloquially called a firehose. An AppView takes all the data from the firehose and makes it presentable for a user (counting all the ‘likes’ on a post, for example).
People on other networks often assume that running a Relay is prohibitively expensive, and it turns out it is not: Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users.
Relays can be ‘expensive’ in another way though: a lot of the data that goes through a Relay is dedicated to making sure that the data is authenticated. This is the ‘Authenticated’ part in the name ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol’. However, there are quite some use cases for which it is not necessary to validate every single event that comes through the firehose, such as a simple bot that listens for certain keywords. In that case, they can get by with a simpler version of the firehose.
Two versions of such a simpler version, called a Jetstream, launched this week. Bluesky engineer Jaz released their own version of a Jetstream, accompanying with an extensive blog post in which they describe how it works. They note that this reduces traffic activity by 99%, all while running on a 5$/month VPS. Jaz also says that an official Bluesky version of a Jetstream is coming soon.
Skyware (who recently released a lightweight labeler as well) also has their own version of a Jetstream available as well.
Frontpage, a HackerNews-like build on top of atproto, now has OAuth login.
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.
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>Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines
This seems like a bug, not a feature.
Will they be stopping posts about the Tiananmen Square massacre being seen in China? Or the truth about the invasion of Ukraine being seen in Russia? Or about the ICC agreeing that the IDF is committing genocide in Gaza being seen in Israel or the US?
> Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button
Let me guess. They're planning to use a Trained #MOLE for this, right?
Instead of doing what Slashdot pioneered, what Minds does, and what dReddit essentially does, which is harvest the wisdom of crowds by exposing rating/ flagging controls to readers. Then having human mods review the outcomes for balance.
> Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese
Which is an example of why fediverse moderation structure has always been more responsive than any centralised system.
The more accounts are spread across many small servers, the more the number of mods tends to scales with the number of new accounts. If Brazilian people who post in Portugese are (mainly) on Brazilian-run servers, with Portugese speaking mods, this language headache takes care of itself.
> Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users
I'd love to see an apples-with-apples comparison with the cost of running an AP relay, and how this scales as the number of accounts being proxies increases.
Strypey
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •>Bluesky is working to add the ability to remove posts only in certain countries, if they violate local laws but are allowed by Bluesky’s own guidelines
This seems like a bug, not a feature.
Will they be stopping posts about the Tiananmen Square massacre being seen in China? Or the truth about the invasion of Ukraine being seen in Russia? Or about the ICC agreeing that the IDF is committing genocide in Gaza being seen in Israel or the US?
#censorship
Strypey
in reply to Strypey • • •> Bluesky aims to detect rude replies and potentially reduce their visibility, possibly by hiding them behind a ‘show more comments’ button
Let me guess. They're planning to use a Trained #MOLE for this, right?
Instead of doing what Slashdot pioneered, what Minds does, and what dReddit essentially does, which is harvest the wisdom of crowds by exposing rating/ flagging controls to readers. Then having human mods review the outcomes for balance.
Strypey
in reply to Strypey • • •> Bluesky is having difficulty moderation CSAM in Portugese
Which is an example of why fediverse moderation structure has always been more responsive than any centralised system.
The more accounts are spread across many small servers, the more the number of mods tends to scales with the number of new accounts. If Brazilian people who post in Portugese are (mainly) on Brazilian-run servers, with Portugese speaking mods, this language headache takes care of itself.
#moderation
Strypey
in reply to Laurens Hof • • •> Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold ran an extra full-network Relay for 150 USD/month, and recently someone confirmed this is still possible after the massive influx of new users
I'd love to see an apples-with-apples comparison with the cost of running an AP relay, and how this scales as the number of accounts being proxies increases.