Bluesky has seen another week of growth, with the network growing 5% in size this week. It is drawing much more mainstream attention now, as illustrated by this interview by Wired with Jay Graber, as part of their The Big Interview event, posting Graber alongside people like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Mark Cuban. Bluesky is clearly positioning itself as the main place to get breaking news now. It was the best and quickest place to get breaking news on the Korean coup attempt this week, and news rooms are certainly taking notice. Sarah Jeong’s live posting right in front of South Korea’s National Assembly is the type of event that shapes the culture of a network.
Lots of stuff happening on Bluesky itself as well, with discussions on verification and AI datasets, book reviews with Skylights and much more!
The News
Verification
One of the main conversations on Bluesky this week was regarding the need for verification. People feel that Bluesky’s current approach of using domain names as verification is lacking, and that there are too many situations in which it does not adequately prevent impersonalisation fraud. Bluesky says they are “exploring additional options to enhance account verification, and and we hope to share more shortly.”
One of the central dilemma’s is that Bluesky PBC providing a centralised form of verification goes against their goals of providing a credible exit, as it significantly cements the amount of power and control that the company has over the network. At the same time, punting verification to opt-in labelers runs into the problem that any opt-in system has, namely that most people will not change the default settings. Verification labelers get their value from that everyone can see the label ‘verified’. There are options for Bluesky PBC here, for example providing a default (opt-out) labeling service that does not provide verification themselves but instead gets their data from condoned third-party labelers. These systems all do increase the amount of influence that Bluesky PBC has over the network in some form, during a period when the company is already criticised for not meeting their decentralisation goals. It will be interesting to see how the company manages these trade-offs.
The New York Times has started to provide domain name verification for their journalists, giving them the option to use journalistname.nytimes.com as their domain handle. It seems to me that this will change the dynamic around verification again, as doing so is a clear benefit for news publications, and other news organisations are likely to follow the NYT’s lead.
AI datasets
A continuation of the story around Bluesky posts appearing in AI training sets. More datasets have appeared on Hugging Face with Bluesky posts. These datasets are still available on HuggingFace 6 days after Hugging Face lead ethicist apologised for the 1 million post dataset, and assured the Bluesky community that ‘this won’t be happening again in the future.’ The PrivaCat Insight blog has a closer look at the situation, and concludes that these datasets are in violation of both Bluesky’s Developer Guidelines as well as Hugging Face’s Content Guidelines. Hugging Face explicitly requires the consent of the people represented in the dataset. It is clear from the situation that these datasets contain posts from people that have not given consent to be represented in the dataset. Hugging Face does not seem to be in a particularly great hurry to enforce their own guidelines, in contrary to their lead ethicist’s assurances.
Skylights
Skylights is a new app for ATProto, and it is a simple app to track and review the books you have read. The app is simple and straightforward; you search for books, and provide them with a rating and comments. It is a new AppView and lexicon on ATProto, and showcases what else can be made with ATProto besides microblogging platforms. Other developers are also building similar book review platforms on ATProto, and it will be interesting to see how compatibility between these different AppViews will develop.
In Other News
Bluesky’s starter packs are such a success that all other competing microblogging platforms are racing to implement them as well. Threads and Mastodon are working on them, and Farcaster has their own version of Starter Packs already released.
Last week I wrote that Pakistan was the first country to block access to Bluesky. It seems like that dubious honours should go to China instead.
More and more news organisations are starting to realise that Bluesky offers better engagement in absolute terms, and Bluesky wrote a quick blog post highlighting some examples. NBC News also wrote about how Bluesky is becoming a popular platform for journalists.
Altmetric is a popular way to track engagement on scientific research, and they now include Bluesky as a social media tracking source. Altmetric shared some early data to show the quick rise of Bluesky amongst total scientific engagement since early November 2024.
Last week I wrote about how the European Commission is trying to find out where Bluesky is located and how this relates to the DSA. The update this week is that the EC has figured out so far that Bluesky does not have an office in either Ireland or the Netherlands. Only 25 more member states to go.
Elk.zone is a popular Mastodon client built by the Nuxt community, and that community has mostly moved to Bluesky. They are now collaborating with their community to build a fork of Elk for Bluesky, Nimbus.town.
People have been working on various ways (1, 2, 3, 4) to implement comment sections on their website based on Bluesky comments. The Chicago Sun-Times is the first major website that seems to have implemented such a feature, their post asking for people to share their Spotify Unwrapped on Bluesky will also be shown as comments on their article page. (At least, I think, their website had too many pop-ups and registration walls to be actually usable.)
The first monarch to join Bluesky is Queen Rania of Jordan.
ATProto/Tech News
This section of news is aimed at people who are interested in the technical underpinnings of ATProto:
Cerulea is a new Relay for ATProto, that makes some specific design choices that are related to scaling down the network. Cerulea is a non-archival relay, meaning that it does not store repos on the relay, in contrast with Bluesky’s main implementation of a relay. In addition, Cerulea is an opt-in relay, that only crawls non-Bluesky PDSes. The creator says that it is intended for ‘small-circle atproto stuff’.
Lexicon.community is a new developer community initiative aimed at help developers cooperate and build shared lexicons that can be used by the community. It features some of the main developers building AppViews on ATProto thinking about how lexicons can be governed from a community perspective. As I wrote above for Skylights and book review AppViews, ATProto is quickly moving towards a state where there are multiple competing AppViews that compete in the same design space. Community governance for lexicons can help make improve the interoperability between different AppViews.
When you have your PDS hosted on a Bluesky server, you do not have final control over the keys unless you manually have set different rotation keys. There are now two tools available that help you set your own rotation key.
The open nature of ATProto means that people can also build different types of architecture on top of parts of the system. One of the developers of p2p framework iroh is experimenting with building p2p ATProto, and one of the cofounders of the Ethereum Name Space offers a 1 bitcoin bounty for someone who can build a Bluesky client with specific p2p capabilities as well.
Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold has published two new draft specifications for ATProto, one about data synchronisation that covers the firehose, and one about account hosting and migration.
PDSls.dev is a tool that lets you view the content of any PDS. It now allows you to create new records directly from PDSls.
Graze.social is a powerful new editor for building custom feeds. There are a lot of advanced option, with a guide on using the editor here.
The Links
Tools
- BskyInfo has a large collection of tools for Bluesky, sorted by category.
- A curated collection of 80+ tools and resources for Bluesky.
- Find out which Starter Packs you are in.
- TheBlue.social also shows you which Starter Packs you are in, as well as a tool to follow back accounts follows you.
- Bskylog is a tool that logs everything you have posted on Bluesky to local storage, and has it’s own UI for sorting and filtering through your data.
- Minisky is a small Bluesky client for showing notifications in your browser.
- Trending News Feed is a custom feed that takes the popular News Feed and sorts it by popularity.
- Bluesky Analytics is a browser extension that allows you to see statistics of any Bluesky account.
- A stats page to track the trending accounts for the last hour.
- A site with a variety of visualisers of Bluesky, as well as trending hashtags.
- A language counter for Bluesky.
- Generate an “I’ve moved to Bluesky” banner for your X profile.
- DarkSky is a Windows client for Bluesky.
- Get an (AI-generated) roast based of your Bluesky profile.
- Linknotifier is a bot that sends you a DM when someone posts a link to the domain you have set as your handle.
- Realtime Bluesky Metrics.
- Schedule posts with Bluesky Scheduler.
- Analyse your Bluesky posting stats with SkyKit.
Updates
The latest update to the Bluesky app adds the ability to sort comments by ‘hotness’, which is now the new default setting as well. This setting gives a higher priority to more recent comments that have been liked, with the goal of making it more worthwhile to comment on a post that is already a bit older and has already a number of replies.
- WhiteWind now supports OAuth.
- Sky Follower Bridge now allows you to import lists directly from X to Bluesky.
For Developers
- Porto, a tool to import your Twitter posts into Bluesky is now open-source.
- PDSls.dev now can open any ://at links for you.
- A Matrix-Bluesky DM Bridge.
- Embed Bluesky UI into your React application like posts, comments, and profiles.
- Browse Bluesky with the terminal using termsky.
- Zero-Cost Custom Feeds on Bluesky.
- A generally programmable firehose-to-webhook server.
Misc
- Could Blacksky emerge as Black Twitter’s spiritual successor on Bluesky? – Tarik Moody/Hyfin
- Selling account names in the blue, blue skies – Conspirador Norteño/Conspirator0
- Should I rebuild my app on BlueSky’s AT Protocol? – Danny Mathews/Taddy
- What is Bluesky’s AT Protocol and How Can It Improve Social Media – Amato Cole/How-To Geek
- Imagining Private Airspaces for Bluesky – Soatok/Dhole Moments
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 this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.