Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.
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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 Bluesky and ATmosphere reports are back after I was occupied last week with the Ahoy! conference about ATProto in Hamburg. It was amazing to meet so many cool people in real life, and share the excitement of working on this network together. There were some great talks, and just being around people who you can talk in-depth about Bluesky and ATProto with is just great. Hoping to see many more ATProto conferences pop up and meet more of you in real life.
A practical note: if you missed the ATmosphere report last week, a reminder that I’m also sending out the reports via email every Friday. This comes with an extra analysis article that’s not on the website, so don’t forget to subscribe!
Bluesky launches a blue check verification system
Bluesky has launched a new verification system for their platform, with blue checkmarks. With the checkmark system, Bluesky selects a few Trusted Verifiers, who can hand out checkmarks. Bluesky PBC will also hand out checkmarks to “authentic and notable accounts”. The main reason for this system’s existence is that the other verification system, using domain names as handles, did not perform well enough. Bluesky PBC says that 270k accounts have set their own domain name as a handle, but not enough high-profile accounts have done so. The other problem with domain names as verification is that many well-known public figures do not have a well-known website. The first organisations that are Trusted Verifiers in the Bluesky app are the New York Times and Wired Magazine.
Bluesky PBC advertises the new checkmark verification system with its Trusted Verifiers as “a healthy digital society should distribute power”. However, it is unclear with the current implementation to what extend power is actually distributed. Bluesky PBC is the one who selects the Trusted Verifiers that can be displayed in their app. In their blog post, they also write: “Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.” To me, it seems far from distributing power, and can at best be seen as distributing operational work. With Bluesky PBC holding full control of who gets to be a Trusted Verifier, as well as reviewing their output, how much power has Bluesky PBC actually distributed?
The new checkmark verification system is not exclusive to the Bluesky app however, and it is build on an open system. Anyone can create verifications or become a Verifier, as all the data for verification is openly accessible to anyone. The only difference is that verifications that are not made by Bluesky PBC or one of their Trusted Verifiers will not be visible in the official Bluesky clients. Other systems have already sprung up, a new verifier tool by cred.blue allows anyone to easily hand out verifications. The Deer client, which is a fork of the Bluesky client, already allows for anyone to set their own Verifiers as well. I’ll talk more about this in an upcoming article, as what is happening with Deer and verification has some interesting implications on how the network will likely develop.
For now, Bluesky PBC has build a technologically cool system, which also solves a meaningful problem that their app has in the short term. While the way it is currently implemented falls short of the advertised distribution of power regarding verification, the team is clear that this is an early implementation and that the system will evolve later.
Streamplace funding
Some news from streaming software Streamplace:
Streamplace has raised 100k Livepeer tokens, worth around 500k USD, from the Livepeer Treasury to further expand the Streamplace platform. The money will be used to expand the team, enhance infrastructure and build a deeper integration with ATProto, as well as building content moderation infrastructure.
A short explanation of Livepeer, and how it relates to Streamplace. Livepeer is a decentralised network for video transcoding and processing. Transcoding (in this context) processes the video stream to make it accessible in various formats and qualities, so a stream can be viewed both by someone on a slow internet connection in 360p, as well as someone with fast internet in 4K definition. Livepeer is a DAO, with an attached crypto token. Streamplace uses Livepeer for the video transcoding, and because of this integration, which allows the Livepeer network to grow as well, the Livepeer DAO has awarded Streamplace 100k tokens, currently worth around 500k USD. It is unclear to me how the Livepeer token works, with its corresponding tokenomics, and where the value of the tokens is coming from.
Streamplace creator Eli Mellon gave an interview on the devtools-fm podcast where Eli goes into more detail on the background of Streamplace and how the software works.
Two other ATProto apps are working on integration Streamplace. Skylight already announced earlier to be working with Streamplace. At the ATProto conference Ahoy in Hamburg last week Joe Basser, co-founder of the ATProto video platform, announced to be working on livestreaming with Streamplace as well.
Streamplace is hiring a Decentralized Video Protocol Engineer and a Lead Front-End Engineer
An OBS overlay to display Streamplace chat on-stream.
An update on relays and independent infra
Bluesky PBC made some changes to how their relays work, with an update with the unassuming name of ‘Sync 1.1′. The update made it much cheaper to run relays, as they do not have to store data of the entire network anymore. This has made a drastic impact on running relays. Last month, independent developer @futurset up a relay on his own Raspberry Pi. Now Phil, another independent developer, has set up multiple relays and made them publicly accessible. This means that there are now multiple other full-network relays that index the entire network, that are outside of US jurisdiction. Just as importantly, running these full-network relays is cheap, with costs getting as low as 18 USD per month. Feed builder Graze is also creating their own implementation of a relay: Turbostream includes a large amount of extra information in the stream. For example, where Jetstream (a simplified version of a relay) broadcasts a reply, Turbostream broadcasts a reply together with the post that is being replied to, as well as a range of other information. This in turn makes it easier to other parties to build on, as most information needed is already included in Turbostream.
These developments leads to some interested new questions. When it comes to running a relay, technology and costs are clearly not barriers anymore. But what about moderation and uptime guarantees? Is having a relay that many other parties depend on even the right model of the network?
It also calls the model that the Free Our Feeds campaign had in mind, which aligned more with a perspective of expensive and large relays. Today, Free Our Feeds announced that they will donate a 50k USD grant to a new IndieSky Working Group. The IndieSky came out of the second day of the conference, organised by Boris Mann and Ted Han. Mann and Han are behind the ATProtocol Developer Community Group, and also organised the first ATProto conference in Seattle last month. The goal of IndieSky is to “work together on R&D, code, and infrastructure on how and why to run different parts of the ATProto stack”, with more details in the announcement. The first meeting for the working group is on May 8th.
In Other News
The Ahoy! conference for the European Social Web was last week, and as an extremely biased person who helped organise the conference I think it was a great success! Massive shout-out to Sebastian Korfmann who has done an incredible amount of work getting the conference to such a great place, super impressive. During the conference I did some longer video interviews with some of the people in the community, those videos will be released in the coming weeks. The main takeaway for me from the conference was to see the amount of positive energy and enthusiasm in the community. People are aware that they are contributing to a space that has massive potential and is undergoing rapid changes. I’m excited to see more conferences for ATProto, and meet more people from the community in real life, as it has been super great to meet the people at Ahoy!.
Turtleisland.social is a Mastodon server for the North American Native/Indigenous community. They have set up their own PDS server for community members to join Bluesky as well. Community-centered data hosting is one of the possibilities with the PDS system of Bluesky that is mentioned regularly as an option, but has not been borne out much yet. Two other communities are in the process of building out a similar structure: Blacksky is creating their own PDS software for the Black community, and Northsky is building out systems that allow people to easily migrate their ATProto account to a Northsky PDS. It’s worth pointing out here that the early adopters of new technology on social networking are all minority communities. For people building social networks this provides a pragmatic argument (besides the much more important ethical argument) for creating safe digital spaces: the people for whom safety is the most crucial are also the most likely to be early adopters of new technologies.
Not all early adoption is by minority communities: Gander.social is a newly announced social network on ATProto, focusing on the Canadian community. Gander has a lot of plans for features that make it stand out from the Bluesky app. The project is still in development, and it seems once the project gets closer to launch it will become clearer what the ATProto integration will actually entail.
Bluesky has made some changes to their PDS, allowing people to sign up directly for an ATProto account on a PDS without going through the Bluesky app. Link aggregator platform Frontpage is one of the first to take advantage of this, allowing account creation on the Frontpage platform now.
Bluesky PBC is joining Lexicon Community Technical Steering Committee. Bluesky Engineer Bryan Newbold will be the representative. It signals a growing maturity of the ecosystem, that an effort run by the ATProto developer community can come to a place where Bluesky joins the initiative on an equal footing.
Openvibe is a multi-network client that combines someones Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads accounts into a single app. Their latest update is an customisable For You algorithmic timeline, which combines posts from multiple networks into a unified algorithmic timeline.
Newsletter publishing platform Ghost now has a simple setting to share posts on Bluesky, via the ActivityPub bridge. This was already possible with Bridgy Fed, but that required some manual steps, where it is now a simple toggle setting.
The Links
For the protocol-minded people:
A proposal for private images (not posts!) on ATProto.
Proposal: A Simple XRPC Method for Signing Payloads in ATProtocol
News from Bluesky takes the most popular links on the network and displays them in an interface more like Hacker News.
Bluesky video client Skylight is working on a dislike feature so people can further fine tune their algorithm.
An example of how inauthentic accounts use Starter Packs to quickly build a following and integrate themselves into the network.
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.
bsky.app login screen at the top right showing account creation changed to turtleis.land Our Bluesky Personal Data Server joins our Mastodon server for a more complete Native/Indigenous social media experience The Bluesky Native community is much lar…
