ATmosphere Report – #114The 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 @futur set 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 ArXiv paper on Bluesky’s growth.
- A frontend for a (selfhosted) PDS which displays the accounts on the PDS as well as their most recent posts.
- An interview with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee by Flipboard, at their recent Fediverse House event at SXSW.
- A tool to explore duplicated content on Bluesky.
- A Bluesky MCP server to bring context from Bluesky and ATProto into the context window of an LLM.
- For ATProto data nerds: A watchface for Rebble which displays the current tid.
- A simple web app to store running data on your PDS.
- A blog on decentralisation and threat models.
- 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.
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fediversereport.com/atmosphere…
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…
Yehuda (TurtleIsland.blog)
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Fedi.Tips 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Arne D. S. Haldorsen • • •Restrictions on who can follow you do not directly affect the visibility of your posts.
Post visibility is only affected by the visibility settings of your posts. More info on these at fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts…
The only way restricting followers affects visibility is if you make posts with "followers-only" visibility and also restrict who can follow you, which indirectly affects who can see your followers-only posts.
I'm not sure what Mastodon's in-house groups situation is.
Who can see my posts and replies in Mastodon? How do I choose post visibility settings? How do I send DMs in Mastodon? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
fedi.tipsPoliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂ likes this.
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MaryPot 🏳️🌈
in reply to Arne D. S. Haldorsen • • •Just putting a word or two in, because I am interested in the answer and can't find somewhere to follow the thread otherwise.
I'm also desperately looking for a groups sollution to offer members of my FB groups and subscription services won't work for that.
Best "group" sollution I have seen so far is following hashtags here on the Fediverse. UI is still too "geeky" for older users, though, so I'm still looking.
Arne D. S. Haldorsen
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • • •So far I think NodeBB forums and Lemmy are the closest you'll get the FB groups experience, but they are still a bit too cumbersome.
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Fedi.Tips 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Arne D. S. Haldorsen • • •@MaryPot @harald@hub.volse.no
Discourse has just added Fediverse support too, so this is another option for groups.
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julian
in reply to Fedi.Tips 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️ • • •Re: @FediTips If I reply to a post from someone who has restricted who can follow them, then who can see my reply?
feditips@social.growyourown.services ahaldorsen@tutoteket.no feel free to reach out if you have trouble setting up or administering NodeBB.
We're on the fediverse, and happy to be here!
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rakoo
in reply to Arne D. S. Haldorsen • • •mobilizon was actually built for groups organizing stuff and having a public presence. You can create events associated with the group of course, but also internal discussions, share resources, publish public or private announcements.
@MaryPot @FediTips @MastodonEngineering @harald
Fedi.Tips 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
in reply to rakoo • • •@rakoo @harald@hub.volse.no @MaryPot @ahaldorsen
Mobilizon is perhaps more for replacing Facebook Events? Facebook Groups is a bit more forum-like?
More info about Mobilizon here: fedi.tips/mobilizon-event-orga…
Mobilizon: Event organisation and discovery | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
fedi.tipsPoliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • •@MaryPot 🏳️🌈 Friendica's private group management works very well at the moment, but can only be used by other Friendica users. The interface has improved significantly over the past two years, but it could be made even simpler. From this point of view, the Raccoon for Friendica app has improved the Friendica web interface, taking inspiration from the viewing mode present on Lemmy and other software in the "topicverse". By the way, Raccoon for Friendica also works with mastodon accounts and has the same simplified interface for groups, although – as I said before – only public Friendica groups work for Mastodon users, not private ones.
PS: Friendica also has an event manager, quite compatible with Mobilizon, Gancio and the WordPress Event bridge plugin. This makes it a great alternative to Facebook, but of course the problem is always the fact that Facebook's numbers, with all its billions of users, represent the real added value of that infernal platform 🤣
agendadigitale.eu/cultura-digi…
@Arne D. S. Haldorsen @Mastodon Engineering @Fedi.Tips
MaryPot 🏳️🌈
in reply to Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂ • • •@notizie
Set up account. Am trying to figure out how groups work. Seems like Friendica is really a hub for oher group servers, such as Lemmy.world?
Because of the pottery aspect of the main group I would love to find a new home for, there are many people not very computer savvy, many of them. Easy navigation/UI is important.
I would love to join this group, but it says I have to be logged in, even though I think I can see it from my Friendica account.
lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • •@MaryPot 🏳️🌈
Friendica is primarily a macroblogging social network and while the topic view is not as nice as Lemmy, Piefed, MBin and NodeBB the group management support is well established.
Friendica is not friendly... but it is not that difficult to use either. If you're interested in a user guide, you can translate this post from Italian
informapirata.it/2024/07/25/w-…
Yes, just copy that link and paste it into the Friendica search box: then you'll see that community as if it were any user profile, except that you'll see it marked as a "group". As soon as you follow that account, you can post to that group simply by mentioning the group account in the first message of the thread. You just have to remember to make sure that the first paragraph of the first message is less than 200 characters, because Lemmy's compiler will make it the title of the thread (so you should NEVER put the mention of the account in the first line)
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MaryPot 🏳️🌈
in reply to Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂ • • •@notizie
I do English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and German... but no Italian. Do you have a different link for me? 🙂
MaryPot 🏳️🌈
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • • •@notizie
PS. Wasn't the whole idea of the Fediverse that it would be all-access? Without an account on every site? 🤔
Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • •@MaryPot 🏳️🌈 Of course, yes, but this concerns interoperable functions such as reading, replying, reacting.
The more advanced functions however are features that some platforms have and others do not, so they only work within software with the same functionality.
Let me explain:
1) you can view a Mobilizon event from your Mastodon account, but you cannot create an event from Mastodon
2) you can view a peertube video from your Mastodon account, but you cannot upload a video to Peertube from your Mastodon account
3) you can create a new thread in a Friendica or Lemmy group, or reply to a thread in a Lemmy group from your Mastodon account, but you cannot join a private group from your Mastodon account
Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂
in reply to MaryPot 🏳️🌈 • •