Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2412

Fediversity Fediverse Report
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Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2412.c

Investors are starting to eye Bluesky, a new governance organisation for the bridge for the social web, no resolution but more tension around moderation questions, new platforms for the ATmosphere, and more!

Editors note: I’ll be on holiday break for the next two weeks. The next edition of Last Week in the ATmosphere will be out on January 8th. Thank you for reading and supporting me in 2024!

The News

ATProto draws investors

The success of Bluesky is starting to draw the attention of investors to the potential that ATProto and the ATmosphere have. Skyseed is the first fund that is dedicated exclusively to Bluesky and the ATmosphere. The fund is started by Peter Wang, who is the cofounder of popular Python package Anaconda, and has 1 million USD in committed capital. Wang says that Skyseed will be doing developer grants as well as pre-seed and seed funding. In the press release, Wang says that the main appeal of ATProto is the open social graph that ATProto enables, which allows people to build all kinds of new social apps. Even in this week’s newsletter, we are already seeing multiple new apps being made on ATProto that utilise the open nature of the network in some way.

Other investors are also aware of the possibilities, billionaire (and active Bluesky user) Mark Cuban said in an interview this week that he is not yet investing in Bluesky, but that he is ‘working on it’.

Bridges and A New Social

A New Social is a newly launched non-profit for the open social web, that focuses on bridging the different platforms and protocols. The organisation will house the governance of Bridgy Fed, the bridge that connects Bluesky with the fediverse and Threads. Bridgy Fed creator Ryan Barrett has spoken before about the bridge becoming critical infrastructure and the need for governance. Anuj Ahooja will be the Executive Director of A New Social, with Ryan Barrett as CTO. The new organisation has already buy-in from the major players that are affected by it: Bluesky, Meta, Mastodon and Flipboard are all supporters. I wrote more about A New Social and Bridgy Fed yesterday in the weekly fediverse update, but the news is just as relevant for Bluesky and the ATmosphere. In general I think what the space of the open social web needs most right now is more organisations and groups that are focused on governance, and I’m excited to see it happen this way with A New Social.

Singal and digital spaces

The presence of Singal on Bluesky continues to be a major source of controversy. It is drawing attention from the media, and a petition ‘Bluesky Must Enforce its Community Guidelines Equally’ has gotten over 25 thousand signatures. It has prompted the Bluesky Trust & Safety team to put out a statement, although the statement is carefully crafted to avoid mentioning any specifics. Instead, Bluesky’s T&S said that they “do not currently take action on accounts that share Bluesky screenshots with commentary, unless that commentary violates our Guidelines”. In practice this means that Bluesky’s T&S is choosing not to act on the situation.

It is hard not to feel that Bluesky PBC has majorly stumbled here, and the organisation has lost a lot of goodwill and trust, with some high-profile people leaving the platform as well. It is also unclear what Bluesky PBC has gained from the decision to keep allowing Singal on the platform. To me it also feels that Bluesky PBC is struggling to adopt and understand what the Bluesky platform actually is. One of the core strengths of ATProto is that it allows people to build multiple platforms on the same underlying open protocol. Theoretically Bluesky PBC really wants there to be multiple platforms on their protocol, and that is a point that they keep reiterating. But when push came to shove, when Bluesky PBC had the opportunity to define Bluesky as a specific platform with a specific culture that includes trans people and excludes transphobes, Bluesky PBC did not take the opportunity. Instead the company opted for a more generic web 2.0 platform thinking, where Bluesky PBC views Bluesky as a platform for everyone.

One of the original sins that has led to the current situation is that we have tied our digital identity to a single platform. Instead, people should be able to exist on multiple platforms at the same time, allowing us to express ourselves in different ways depending on which community and platform we are using. This mode of thinking is what allows communities and platforms to have opinionated forms of moderation, where moderation can be used to shape community and culture. One of the coolest things about ATProto is that it allows us to be part of multiple platforms and communities simultaneously, with a single digital identity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that the company that is building this protocol refused to take the opportunity to get there, and instead caused major harm to their own community instead.

Blacksky

While I’m disappointed by Bluesky PBC’s (lack of) action, I do find encouragement in how Blacksky is building online community. It is becoming clearer that Blacksky can be seen as its own space in the ATmosphere, connected to but different from Bluesky. To me it provides a great model and vision of where the open social web is heading towards. It shows the power of opinionated moderation that is intended to keep vulnerable people safe. People are starting to pay attention to Blacksky: with media coverage in Wired, NonProfitQuarterly and BlackGirlNerds, an extensive dev interview with creator Rudy Fraser, and people within the fediverse community pointing to Blacksky as an example on how to build digital place on the open social web (1, 2, 3)

Graze.social updates

Graze.social is a tool that allows you to build your own custom algorithmic feed, that has added various new features this week. You can now migrate custom feeds made in another place to Graze, add a blocklist to your feed, or made a feed only visible to a member list. Graze also published a mission statement. In their statement, they call algorithmic feeds the original sin of web 2.0, and that the way to counter-act the negative effects of The Algorithm is to provide anyone access to easily build their own custom feeds.

Domain extortion

Bluesky is pushing using your website domain as your handle as a form of verification. The implied expectation here is that famous people will often have a domain in the form of firstnamelastname.com. Not all well-known people do actually have such a website domain (or even any personal website at all), and an entrepreneurial scammer saw an opportunity here. The scammer set up an extortion scheme, where they registered the domain name of various public individuals in the form of firstnamelastname.com, and tried to sell the domain back to the affected individual for thousands of dollars. Tedium has a more extensive overview of the situation, as it took some more chaos before the scammer was banned from Bluesky. Tedium also goes into more detail on how this is an indication that domain names are not a good way to do verification.

In that context, I found it interesting that Bluesky’s communication head Emily Liu has pivoted slightly in her framing of using a website as a handle. In a recent post she describes using your website domain name as your Bluesky handle as a way to connect your social audience with your web presence. Personally I think this makes more sense; using your website domain as your social handle is a powerful and useful feature, but its usefulness does not come from the ability to prevent scamming and impersonation.

Bluesky also announced a new feature this week: if you update your accountname.bksy.social handle to your own website domain name, the original .bsky.social handle will stay reserved for you, allowing you to switch back anytime you want. People have expressed concern that the original .bsky.social handle became available for others to use. For some this was a reason not to use a custom domain name, and now they can set a custom domain name with more peace of mind.

Bluesky and the DSA update

The European Commission Spokesperson confirms that the EC has been in contact with Bluesky about Bluesky’s “DSA obligations and the Commission’s presence on the platform.” The spokesperson says that all online platforms need to have a legal representative in the EU. It is unclear how the DSA deals with the specific affordances of ATProto. ATProto allows for multiple different AppViews which all can act on the same underlying data, does that mean that they are all different platforms according to the DSA? At any rate I’m glad that the EC opted for a direct line of communication with Bluesky, although I did find their original approach of asking all member state instead to be very funny.

The ATmosphere

Recipe.exchange is a new platform for sharing your recipes. The platform is build on ATProto, meaning that you own the recipes you post, and can view and share recipes by others. The platform is straightforward and simple to use, allowing you to easily browse through the recipes without clutter.

Woosh.link is a new link-in-bio platform for ATProto, created by a new design studio Federation Studio. The product is easy to understand and well designed, and functions similar to how other Linktree products work. Federation Studio says that they are working on adding more features, such as analytics and tracking, and more customisation options. Woosh is similar to Linkat.blue, but does not seem to be interoperable with each other.

Review platform Skylights has added support for reviewing movies and TV shows, in addition to reviewing books. Skylights takes data from open APIs instead of the more popular paid APIs: open-library instead of GoodReads for books, and TMBD instead of IMDB.

AniBlue is a review platform for anime, on ATProto. The platform is currently only available in Japanese. It functions similar to the other review platforms such as Bookbuzz and Skylights, focusing on anime instead.

GrayHaze is a live streaming service that is being build on top of ATProto. GrayHaze is still in development, but the developer published an extensive blog about the product and how it works. Live video streaming is not a possibility that has come up often in conversations about ATProto yet, and GrayHaze takes a bit of a different approach from a technical perspective, which makes the blog worth checking out for people who are interested in the technical side of ATProto.

WhiteBreeze is a front-end for WhiteWind, allowing people to self-host their WhiteWind blog posts without them having to go to the WhiteWind website.

Autoblue adds ATProto support to a WordPress website, allowing you to automatically share your WordPress posts to Bluesky, and display reactions and comments made on Bluesky on your WordPress site.

The Links

What I’ve been reading

Tools

For developers

  • Friday December 20th will be an ATProto Tech Talk with the developer of WhiteWind.
  • Hopper is a tool that lets you customize the websites and services used to view AT-URIs.
  • AtomPDS is an independent PDS implementation in .NET.
  • A relay/proxy service for the PLC directory.

That’s all for this year! Thank you for reading and the support. I’ll be back in January. In the meantime, you can follow me on Bluesky.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-the-atmosphere-2412-c/