Bluesky’s decision not to moderate a specific account leads to controversy in the community, more info on Bluesky’s plans for monetisation, and more new apps appear in the ATmosphere.
The News
Moderation controversy
Jesse Singal is a controversial writer who is known for his anti-trans writing, and he has joined Bluesky this week. The community has strongly criticised the lack of action by the Bluesky Trust & Safety team and people do not feel safe on Bluesky now that Singal and his followers have joined. 1
It is a messy situation: Bluesky is burning a lot of goodwill with the community by not taking action against Singal. A major selling point for Bluesky is that it is a safe and enjoyable platform to be, and that Singal is allowed on the platform severely negates that advantage. Trans people and Black people have had an outsized impact in creating Bluesky’s culture that allows Bluesky to grow, and now they are the group that feels most at risk.
Bluesky’s upcoming subscription service is also dependent on goodwill of the community, as the developers have been clear that the features are ‘nice-to-have’ and not mandatory. Burning goodwill when you need that goodwill in order to have a successful subscription service is painful. From the perspective of platform health and keeping people safe it feels like Bluesky is making a significant error here by not banning Singal.
What makes the situation so difficult is that it seems to me that national politics are a significant part of the equation here. The upcoming FCC Chairman under the Trump administration, Brendan Carr, is explicit about wanting to dismantle the “censorship cartel“, and Carr wrote the FCC section of Project 2025. In that context it is a fair assumption to make that the FCC would harass Bluesky over the banning of Singal. Furthermore, Bluesky is now in explicit competition with two billionaires who also own microblogging platforms. Both of these billionaires feel threatened by the success of Bluesky, and are an active part of the upcoming Trump administration. The media reform group Free Press also states that Carr “will carry out Trump and Musk’s personal vendettas.”
Bluesky is placed in an difficult choice here: not taking action against Singal does damage to the community, places people at risk, and gives space for other harassers to also join in on the network. If Bluesky does take action, it runs the risk of harassment and retribution from the FCC and some of the most powerful people on the planet. That said, I think that the Bluesky team has not handled this well from a communication’s perspective: either fully committing to not saying anything at all, or giving clarity would both have been better options. I also feel that this framing of ‘community damage versus political risk’ runs the risk of overcomplicating the situation, whereas a simple ethical framework of protecting vulnerable people would serve both Bluesky and the community better.
Ads
TechCrunch interviewed Jay Graber, and during the interview Graber talked more about potential advertising on Bluesky. During an interview earlier this year with Wired, Graber said that Bluesky would not ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads‘. In this week’s interview with TechCrunch, Graber did not rule out advertising completely either, saying that “the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more user intent-driven”.
Graber is talking about ads that are run and shown by Bluesky PBC here, and the assumption is that Bluesky (the app) will have ads when Bluesky (the company) makes money of the ads by showing them in their own app. But personally, I think the much more likely direction is that popular custom feeds that are run by independent people will start putting in ads into the feeds. The most popular custom feeds get hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and do cost money to maintain. A pinned post at the top of the feed with an ad would be a logical place to offset the costs of running feeds. What I’m curious about is the perception if this happens: will people say that Bluesky has ads when it is actually custom feeds that have ads?
Subscription plan
Bluesky is working on a subscription plan, likely called Bluesky+. This subscription plan was announced as part of their recent series A round, and COO Rose Wang said on Bloomberg TV that the subscription plan is to launch at the end of the year.
The team is currently working on the feature, and published some mockups for Bluesky+ to their GitHub repo, which were then republished to Bluesky. The mockup shows potential features such as profile customisations and higher quality video options as part of the Bluesky+ subscriber plan. The mockup also lists a price of $8/month ($72/year) for the plan.
Bluesky employees state that the mockups do not represent the final features and price of the subscription plan, and that is just a mockup done during development work. They also reiterate the team’s design goals: ‘no pay-to-play, no paid checkmarks’. A badge to show your support is not clear yet if this will be part of the plan, but CTO Paul Frazee came out strongly against showing such a badge on posts.
Breaking news
It has been a tumultuous week in geopolitics, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and a coup attempt in Korea. For both events, Bluesky has proved to be a good place to find breaking news before it appeared in the media. However, as Ryan Broderick writes in Garbage Day, Bluesky still has a ways to go. Sarah Jeong, who live-posted the Korean Coup attempt, also agreed, saying that the lack of good notifications filters made engaging with people difficult. Still, I think the perception that Bluesky can be a good place for breaking news is important in shaping reality. Bluesky is also working on adding a separate tab with conversations to the notifications screen.
Bots
Bluesky has attracted a new threat: AI-powered reply bots. These bots reply to comments in a polite tone to voice asinine concerns (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It is unclear what the intended goals of these bot networks are. The Bluesky team is actively ‘bot hunting‘, and seems to be successful at hunting these Reply Guy As A Service bots. This is far from the only bot network that is targeting Bluesky however, and Conspirador Norteño has an overview of the varieties of spam accounts hitting the network. Another problem is that of impersonation accounts, and around a quarter of the biggest account have at least doppelgänger account.
The ATmosphere
The wider ATProto network keeps expanding, as more and more developers are starting to realise they can build social apps on top of the network. This week saw the launch of multiple new apps (AppViews in technical terms), with even more apps currently being actively developed.
Bookhive
Bookhive.buzz is a new platform for reviewing, rating and managing the books you read. The platform is still in beta, but already fully usable. The front page of the site allows you to see a stream of all the other books people on in the ATmosphere are reading and reviewing. Your profile shows you a cover of the books you have added, and the page for the book shows you the rating and review. It also shows other people on the network who have also added the book to their collection.
Skylights is another book review site on ATProto that came out recently. The two apps are not interoperable, due to some design decisions about how data should be treated. It indicates that even though ATProto allows for open data and interoperability, the actual interoperability of data and apps should not be automatically assumed.
Pastesphere
Pastesphere is a simple app with a clear function: easily share a link with some text or code snippet in it, similar to Pastebin. The connection with ATProto is that all the shared texts are stored on your own PDS, giving you control and ownership of your own data. You simply log in with your ATProto (Bluesky) handle, verify via OAuth, and are ready to share.
Place.Blue
Place.blue is a real-time collaborative canvas where people can draw images together, pixel by pixel. It has similarities to Reddit’s /r/place. While the project is still in early stages, people have already made intricate drawings with the project.
In Other News
Bluesky is attracting the attention of more high-profile politicians and political parties: There are now over a hundred .gov and .edu accounts on Bluesky, including politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The UK Parliament has also joined Bluesky with their domains verified.
Graze.social allows people to build their own custom algorithmic feeds for Bluesky, and now shows usage numbers for feeds. It gives us an insight in how much traffic popular feeds such as the News feed already generate. This in turn provides another data point that validates News organisations’ reports that Bluesky generates significant traffic to news websites. Personally I’m a fan of the Trending News feed, which sorts all the news links by popularity, for a quick look at current trending news. Graze also added banners to their feeds that display in case the feeds go down to better communicate the outage.
Winston Tseng is an artist in New York City who ‘uses brands and advertising to communicate societal issues‘. His latest project is putting up ‘guerilla-art Bksy “ads”‘.
Gravatar now offers free domain options and an integration to set that domain as your Bluesky handle.
Postpone.app is a multi-platform social media scheduling tool, and they now added support for hidden tags for Bluesky posts. Hidden tags are hashtags that do not show up in the text of a post, but are present in the meta-data for purposes of search and discovery. Ouranos is a Bluesky client which also supports these tags.
The Links
Tools
- BluePrint is a browser extension to customize and theme Bluesky.
- A custom feed that shows the Starter Packs that are currently getting engagement on posts.
- LivingBio allows you to customise your Bluesky profile bio to automatically update based on certain triggers.
- Finding the time of day when your followers are the most active on Bluesky.
- Skyblur allows you to post blurred content on Bluesky. I’m honestly slightly confused what the use case is here but it seems highly popular in Japan.
- GoneSky blocks an account and all of its followers, similar to Blockenheimer or AT Orbital Laser.
- You can now browse through all custom feeds build with Graze.social.
For developers
- An initial poll for interest for a in-person ATProto developer conference in late March in the US Pacific North-West, not organised by the Bluesky company.
- Weather Vane is an ATProtocol identity validation and verification tool.
- The Lexicon.community is building a collection of all lexicons on ATProto.
- A new tool to setup a did:web for use on ATProto.
Misc links
- Tapping into data from Bluesky – Misha Kidambi/Altmetric
- Bluesky’s Approach to Trust and Safety – a podcast interview with Bluesky’s Trust & Safety Lead Aaron Rodericks – Katie Harbath/Anchor Change
- Don’t Strip-Mine The Sky – Ernie Smith/Tedium
- Who owns the graph? – Ben Adida/Benlog
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.
- I’m skipping over some of the stuff here. I’ve rewritten the part multiple times now trying to explain why people think Singal poses a threat to the Bluesky community, and the writing turns messy and tedious. If you want to understand why I’m making this claim, just listen to trans people on Bluesky instead, they can explain it better than me. If you disagree with the assessment of Singal posing a threat to the community, that’s fine too, take it as my personal opinion that you are free to ignore. ↩︎