Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411

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Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2411.b

Bluesky and the ATmosphere have had a busy week in the wake of the US election, with new inflows from a variety of communities. The developer community has been busy as well, with tons of new tools, feeds and more.

The News

Growth

Bluesky has seen a large inflow of new users in the last week, and crossed the 15 million total accounts this week. More than a million accounts have joined in the last week, and the results of the US election seems to have played a significant factor in people looking for an alternative to X. Active users are up a lot as well, with over 7 million Monthly Active Users.1 The Bluesky app has shot up to the top of the download charts as well. What stands out about this inflow of people is that it is slowly building into bigger and bigger days: previously when an Elon Musk Event happened, there was a spike in signups, which died down over a few days to normal levels. This time, every day the number of signups is bigger than the previous day, and it has shown no signs of stopping so far.

This is not the biggest inflow of users that Bluesky has seen, that was a while ago when X was banned in Brazil. This time it got much more media attention, which seemed to have started when The Verge reported on it. The Verge also reactivated their account and a good number of Verge reporters also started posting again. This seemed to have functioned as a permission structure for the rest of the media to also focus on Bluesky, and all the other media organisations have joined in on reporting about Bluesky’s growth.

The inflow of users, and attention paid by some media, started already a few days earlier, when there was a flow of Swifties that signed up to Bluesky, and Wired reporting on it. It’s hard to get accurate statistics on how large this movement of Swifties was, but it seems that around 3k of them registered as their swifties.social handle.

The draw for new people to join Bluesky is that it is becoming clearer to many people that Bluesky offers a large amount of engagement with real people. Bluesky COO Rose shared some statistics on how chatty people on Bluesky are, and Bluesky engineer Hailey collected posts of people sharing their experience how Bluesky is seeing more engagement for them compared to other platforms.

Starter Packs

Starter Packs have been around for a few months now, but have massively taken off in the last week. It seems to have been a major contributing factor to the current inflow of people that are happening: much more people are sharing and using starter packs. This increases the density of the connections on the network, and people get much busier timelines and their follower count can go up drastically. This increases the perception of people that the network is indeed active, and makes them more likely to get the word out to other people. Social networking communities are always changing, and Bluesky is no exception in that regard. What does seem uncommon however, is the speed at which Starter Packs allow these changes to happen: it facilitates the shift of entire communities towards Bluesky, who can easily find their old connections. It means that changes to the culture to Bluesky can happen faster than ever before, and that is something the Bluesky community will have to adjust to as well.

PinkSea

PinkSea is a new platform on ATProto, for drawing and sharing pictures. It is an Oekaki board, and for those who just like me don’t know what that is: Oekaki (Japanse diminutive for ‘drawing’) is a forum where people share pictures they drew with the tools that are included with the forum. PinkSea works the same way: you cannot upload pictures or drawings, you draw them with the tools that PinkSea provides. This limitation is what makes an Oekaki board attractive, as you know that the artist has drawn the picture by hand themselves.

PinkSea is another step in expanding the ATmosphere, and helping shape it in ways that are different from microblogging. Like other platforms in the ATmosphere, being built on ATProto means that you log in with your ATProto account, and your data gets stored in your PDS. As Bluesky does not show posts from other ATProto platforms, PinkSea will crosspost your drawings on Bluesky as well, with a link back to the PinkSea platform.

The Links

Community development features

  • Bluesky-labelers.io allows you to browse through and search all labelers on Bluesky.
  • You can upload custom gifs to Bluesky with this tool. It also brought us longcat on Bluesky.
  • bsky-widget allows you to create profile cards for your websites / blogs.
  • bluesky.ms is a crowdsourced database of anyone and everyone in the Microsoft community on Bluesky.
  • Check out your user stats with SkyKit.
  • Convert a Starter Pack to a List.
  • The Sky Follower Bridge, which allows you to find people on Bluesky that you follow on X, has a new website to get started.

Feeds

Community

The independent ATProto dev community held a Tech Talk with three developers showcasing what they are building on ATProto. Video of the talk here. Two showcases where how people build their own blogs on top of ATProto, using the PDS as a data store. It also showcased Ouranos, a third-party client for Bluesky. Ouranos showed the ability to add out-of-bound tags to posts (similar to Tumblr), as well as showing Smoke Signal Events feeds on your Bluesky profile.

For Developers

Software updates

  • Bluesky adds a thread composer and gives people the ability to self-apply content warnings on posts.
  • Frontpage adds notifications.

Misc

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.

  1. For the stats people: this is based on firehose data, which only registers activity such as commenting or liking a post. It does not count people logging in to the app and reading but never taking any action. This makes it harder to compare this number to centralised platforms, which usually do count people who log in without further action as an active user. ↩︎

#bluesky

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