Last Week in Bluesky – 2025feb.c
Social platforms are not, and can not, be neutral in a context authoritarianism, and Bluesky cannot avoid this dynamic either. On a lighter note, many experiments with building image and video clients for Bluesky are ongoing, more insight in how ATProto can scale down, and more.
Bluesky is political
The US continues its rapid decline into authoritarianism. Authoritarian states tend not to be particularly great fans of places where the opposition can gather and freely talk. American politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, house minority leader Hakeem Jeffries or Illinois governor JB Pritzker all use the platform to put out messages explicitly against the US Government. Authoritarian states also tend to put great propaganda effort into being seen and understood as representing “the people”. In that context it stands out to me how high-profile Americans like Mark Cuban present Bluesky as being an “app of the people“. It shows the value that Bluesky has, but also how the network is quickly becoming a relevant political actor. Considering this context it remains prudent to keep the possibility in mind that Trump and Musk might crack down on social networks such as Bluesky, and prepare for such situations accordingly.
Free Our Feeds shared a first update on their project to build independent ATProto infrastructure. The organisation says that their first priority is getting an independent archival relay up and running in Europe. For this, they are targeting a 4 million USD fund raise over the next 8 weeks. Currently, Free Our Feeds has raised almost 100k USD. The big question here seems to be if large institutions have an appetite for bigger donations.
Personally, I think the challenge here is that only having an ATProto relay that is not under US jurisdiction is a good step in the right direction, but not sufficient to make the Bluesky network resilient against US government interference. For that, the Bluesky app (AppView, in ATProto terms) needs to be in a different place as well. And running a different app on ATProto means doing content moderation, which is both expensive and the type of nitty-gritty work that is harder to get funding for.
Speaking of funding for content moderation: the Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) initiative is a new collaborative effort by various large tech companies to build open source moderation tools. Bluesky is partnering with Roost by co-developing various modular tools. Smaller social media organisations often lack the tools needed to do proper content moderation at scale, and Roost is aimed at helping that by making these tools open source and available for everyone. The organisation is also thinking about how they can help Bluesky third-party labelers with their tools. Still, the announcement led to quite some outrage in the community, which is strongly tied to people’s distrust of AI tools, as well as earlier grievances regarding Bluesky’s moderation choices. While the outrage had little connection to what the collaboration between ROOST and Bluesky actually entails, it does provide a good indication of why content moderation can be a barrier to build other products on ATProto.
The Media apps
Some updates from the various image and video Bluesky clients that people are building:
- TechCrunch covered various apps that are building Instagram competitors: Flashes, Pinksy and Skygram, as well as the ActivityPub-based Pixelfed.
- Flashes is taking some steps towards building their own Lexicon with a new portfolio feature, which allows people to select some of the images they have posted on Bluesky to be highlighted as their portfolio. Flashes is currently available for beta testing, with the release planned on February 25.
- Flashes developer Sebastian Vogelsang said that the main reason why Flashes is a client for Bluesky, and not a standalone ATProto app with it’s own Lexicon, is that this means having to do your own moderation. This is a problem that all other apps that are build on ATProto face: doing moderation is the hardest and most expensive part of building a standalone product.
- Flashes is currently only available on iOS, and Vogelsang said that making Flashes available on Android will only happen with either external funding or if subscriptions bring in enough funding.
- Video app Skylight is struggling to the beta approved on the Google Play Store.
- Pinksky is another Instagram-like app for Bluesky, and it is now available on Android. TechCrunch has taken a closer look at Pinksky as well.
- Gridsky is a new web client for Bluesky that aims to bring “the Instagram experience to Bluesky”, with both a design of the feed as well as user profile that is similar to that of Instagram.
- Upcoming ATProto video app Reelo (previously also known as Tik and Flicky) has renamed itself to Spark. Spark is the only media app for ATProto that takes a different direction by not leaning on Bluesky, instead building its own Lexicon. This allows spark to build new features such as a music and audio library for videos. Spark will not only show videos, but images as well, as seen on a preview. Spark has set itself up as a Public Benefit Company as well, and plans to launch late March.
In Other News
For the people who are interesting the technical side of Bluesky and ATProto, I highly recommend reading this blog about how ATProto and Bluesky can scale down. For the non-technical people, the short of it is that it shows that Bluesky can indeed be self-hosted for a low cost. It shows that the cost of running the Bluesky AppView is in that 31 million people use the AppView, and that the cost is not in processing the data that these 31 million accounts generate. This is done by building a new separate component in the ATProto infrastructure, that creates an index of all links on the entire network. This database can be used by others as well, making the entire network more modular.
Cred.blue is a newly launched project that generates Bluesky credibility scores. It looks at the public data footprint of ATProto accounts to “establish their credibility and authority”. It looks at a variety of factors, such as alt-text usage, if accounts use more of ATProto than just Bluesky, activity, profile completeness and more. Ranking people on credibility scores is a sensitive subject, and not something that everyone agrees with. Cred.blue describes itself as “one experiment among many that is attempting to help people understand which social media accounts are more (or less) trustworthy.”
Bluesky has made some more updates to their app, including the ability to limit replies to people who follow you. The new setting can also be combined with the (already present) option to limit replies to people who you follow to limit replies to only mutuals. There is also a new developer mode setting, which gives some extra options related to ATProto, such as easily copying someone’s DID.
Bluesky is now using Crowdin for translations for the app. Crowdin is a platform for apps to manage translations, which allows other people to contribute with translations as well.
Some American sports news: the NBA and MLB have set up official accounts on Bluesky, although they have not started posting yet. This is in contrast with the NFL, where NFL teams are not allowed to have a Bluesky account because it is not an “approved platform”. Fans are now suing the NFL for not allowing teams to have a Bluesky account.
ATmosphereConf, the volunteer conference about Bluesky and ATProto, has shared more information about some of the talks Bluesky members will give. CTO Paul Frazee will talk about Bluesky’s history and future, Head of Protocol Daniel Holmgren about the principles underlying ATProto. The conference will be held on March 22nd and 23rd in Seattle, USA. The conference is also looking for people to make designs for swag for the conference.
Dazzle is a new site for trending topics on Bluesky, using their own algorithms separate from Bluesky’s trending topics. It shows various trending topics, sorted into some 20+ categories, with a short AI-generated summary and some of the more popular posts the trending topic it is based on.
In the media
- Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in) – Kristina Bravo/Mozilla
- What Makes Bluesky the New ‘It’ Space for Urbanists – Planning Magazine
- The Fork Around and Find Out podcast talked with Bluesky engineer Jaz about what it’s like to scale Bluesky from 100k users to >30M.
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.