A short introduction: I’ve been writing these Last Week newsletters for a while, and they consists of a News section and a Links section. The News section focuses on the social side of the network, along with the more impactful tech news. The Links section gives all the links to other articles, tech and tools that are relevant to the network. Bluesky is growing so much now that it is not really feasible for me to include both sections in a single newsletter; so today you’ll get all the Links, and tomorrow I’ll send out all the News that has happened in the ATmosphere.
Enjoy, I’m sure there is more than enough interesting links in here.
(For all Dutch speakers: I’ll be on radio BNR tomorrow at 14.00 to talk about Bluesky for an hour.)
The Links
Bluesky has been doing community outreach this week:
- A second Twitch livestream for Q&A with COO Rose Wan, CTO Paul Frazee and CEO Jay Graber. Hip hop artist Flavor Flav also joined in as a cheerleader for Bluesky.
- Paul Frazee and Emily Liu (who does communications for Bluesky) held a Reddit AMA
Decentralisation remains a point of conversation:
- Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the co-authors of ActivityPub, wrote a very extensive article, asking ‘How decentralized is Bluesky really?‘
- Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold wrote a reply to Lemmer-Webber’s article.
While viewpoints differ on decentralisation from a technical perspective, they are in agreement that Bluesky and the ATmosphere is currently not decentralised in a social sense: the vast majority of people exclusively use Bluesky’s infrastructure. This echoes what I wrote about Bluesky and decentralisation here last week. The concept of Relays remains a significant part of the discussion of whether or not Bluesky is decentralised. Because of the increased load on the Relay due to the amount of new people joining, Bluesky stopped taking in posts from the fediverse bridge for a few days this week, indicating the amount of power that Bluesky has over the network.
PDSls, the tool which allows you to inspect and see every PDS on the network, has gotten a variety of updates. You can now log in, and edit and delete posts from your own PDS. Edited posts mostly do not show up on Bluesky anymore, barring some exceptions. For other services such as Picosky or WhiteWind edits do show up.
More organisations are playing with the concept of letting people set their handle on their subdomain, with Newgrounds and Neocities, as well as itch.io already providing the option last week.
Bluesky Tools
- AT Orbital Laser is a tool to instantly block and account, as well as all that account’s followers, similar to Blockenheimer.
- Vanity.blue gives you a variety of free custom handles.
- StarterPacks.net allows you to see and search through all Starter Packs.
- BlueskyStarterPacks.com also allows you to see and search through all Starter Packs, and also shows traffic information on them.
- DarkSky is a Windows client for Bluesky.
- Skitter is a Bluesky client in the theme of the old Twitter web client.
- Analyse your Bluesky statistics with SkyStats.
- Beeskie is a another Windows app for Bluesky.
- BlueHorizon gives you analytics of your account, as well as the ability to schedule posts.
- Bluesky User Search allows you to search for accounts with some more accessible search filters.
- Bluesky Follow Scanner analyses the accounts that follow you.
- BlueskyMeter is another analytics tool.
- Blucerne is an advanced search tool for Bluesky that is currently in development.
For Developers
- SDK.Blue is ‘a list of all libraries/SDKs for building things on ATProto, grouped by language’.
- Extending Also Known As.
- Tandem is a tool to create a backup key for your PDS.
- Tech Talk held a session with the creator of the Game Industry Labeler, recording here.
- Browser.blue lists all Lexicon record types.
- DASL (Data Addressed Structures and Links) is a new standard for data formatting that uses the same data structure as ATProto.
- This Website is Hosted on Bluesky.
- Using Bluesky posts as blog comments.
- Hosting Bluesky with Coolify
- A RFC on Lexicon Resolution.
- Posting to Bluesky from a Microcontroller.
- Adding Bluesky-powered comments to any website in five minutes
- Self-hosting Bluesky PDS.
- How to setup a Bluesky PDS Server on Digital Ocean cloud.
- Next steps with Bluesky – hosting your own data and more on the API.
- How to run your own Bluesky PDS Server.
- bsky-bc, a music discovery contraption.
Hosting your PDS on increasingly esoteric hardware:
Updates
- OpenVibe is an cross-platform app that supports Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and Nostr. Their latest update supports for tagging users on multiple platforms.
- Bluesky client TOKIMEKI adds direct support for Audio Spaces app Bluecast.
- The SkyFollowerBridge is working on support for Threads.
- Discord has been working on better integration with Bluesky. Discord now also allows you to link your Bluesky and Mastodon profiles.
- Clearsky, the tool that allows you to see information such as blocks, as well as lists and starter packs you are on, is back online after it had been offline for a while due to increased network traffic.
- Third-party Bluesky client Ouranos now shows your profile on other ATmosphere platforms as well, such as Frontpage, WhiteWind and Linkat.
- Blacksky is expanding.
- Blue Badge 0.2.0
An open firehose
ATProto allows everyone to tap into the ‘firehose’, the eventstream that broadcasts every single event on the network. This allows anyone to build tools and visualisations that utilise this data, ranging from serious and helpful to deeply silly. Last week I already covered a long list, and here are some more:
- Show all links to Bandcamp.
- Bluesky WebSocket Firehose – Simon Willison.
- How to Extract Analytics from Bluesky, the New Open Social Network
- Bluesky Mosaic shows an continually updating gallery of all images (note: NSFW images are not filtered out).
- Bluesky hashtag Tracker keeps track of hashtags, but only as long as you got the website open.
- SwearSky shows you all profanity on the network, and helpfully provides a voice-over for all curse words.
Misc
- Social Media Manager Tools for Bluesky
- An open source app we can all learn from
- A very extensive Obsidian website with explainers on how Bluesky works.
- Benefits of an open network – Bluesky employee Emily Liu.
- BlueSheep is a simple game that uses your Bluesky profile to ‘deploy your own sheep’.
- Bluesky has more than 21 million users. Where does it go from here? – Morning Brew
- A Note About the Knight Institute, X, and Bluesky.
- Open-source champion Kelsey Hightower on the promise of Bluesky.
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.