Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 1
Karaoke on atproto, labelers continue to be used for self-expression, and no more Placeholders.
The News
Bluecast is an audio space app build on atproto that is popular within the Japanese Bluesky community. Recently, Bluecast has signed a contract with JASRAC ,the largest musical copyright administration society in Japan. This is because Bluecast also recently added a new karaoke feature, and you can now do karaoke on Bluecast with officially licensed songs, and with Bluecast handling the rights and fees.
Labelers on Bluesky continue to shift away from content moderation towards self-expression. Some new labelers that have appeared this week are a Time Zone labeler, and three different labelers for show support for sports teams. In conversations on the feed it is becoming clearer to more people as well that this design space is still largely underexplored, and I’m curious to see where people will take the system next.
Account migration on atproto is possible since February 2024, but Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold describes the current state as ‘still a bit scary and developer-oriented’. He provided a new tool and walkthrough to make the process easier. This still puts the process firmly in the space of developers however, and Newbold notes that ‘getting account migration integrated in to the Bluesky app itself is the ultimate goal, though having better support in external tooling is still a big step forward.’
Atproto uses Decentralised Identifiers (DID) for the protocol underneath Bluesky. This DID system allows you to change usernames (‘handles’) seamlessly without your account itself changing. There are different implementations of DIDs, and Bluesky chose their own implementation and called it a placeholder (DID:PLC), originally expecting that it would get replaced over time by a different DID system. Now the DID:PLC system has shown to be working well, and it will not be replaced. In an interview with the Dot Social podcast, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber ret-conned the name of DID:PLC as ‘Public Ledger of Credentials’ to further illustrate that DID:PLC is not a placeholder anymore. Currently, the Bluesky PBC company holds full control over the DID:PLC database, and earlier Bluesky employees floated the idea of moving control of the DID:PLC directory to a ICANN-style organisation. Now that the placeholder is not a placeholder anymore, it is worth seeing how Bluesky’s thinking regarding the control of the DID:PLC directory has evolved as well.
Bluesky has released the initial specification for OAuth for atproto. OAuth for atproto is now entering the Developer Preview Phase. This hasn’t stopped some atproto developers from already launching OAuth before this phase even went live, as Smoke Signals, Frontpage and other atproto apps already support it. The next steps are to make an web interface where users can manage their active sessions, as well as implementing more granular permissions. Bluesky also notes that their implementation of OAuth is similar to other social web protocols such as ActivityPub, and are open to collaboration and harmonisation on the OAuth profiles for atproto and ActivityPub.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has joined Bluesky with a verified account, and the organisation clearly has a savvy social-media team. The introduction post contains some amazing custom artwork, as well as the following statement: ‘It is our understanding that Bluesky in its current state is largely a social media platform for people who have a problem with authority. Out of respect for you all, we will not attempt to engage in the usual “brand building” of establishing a hollow parasocial relationship with our followers.’
There is fierce competition in the space of apps that allow you to schedule posts for Bluesky and/or cross-post them across different platforms, with the following updates and releases this week. I’m sure there’s even more of them but honestly I lost track.
- Publer.com now supports Bluesky.
- Postpone.app now supports Bluesky video.
- Crossaint is a new iOS app to cross-post to Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon.
The Links
- A first look and waitlist signup for Aviary, a way to ‘share domains with friends, family, communities, and organizations to use with ATProtocol’. I’ll cover Aviary more once it becomes available.
- You can find out the aggregated total engagement of a post that includes all engagements on quoted posts with this tool.
- ‘Web Without Walls’ – a talk by Bluesky engineer Dan Abramov with an introduction to the AT Protocol.
- Make Identity Central Again, with Bluesky’s Jay Graber – Dot Social Podcast.
- There will be a Bluesky Meetup in Tokyo with developer Dan Abramov on October 11th.
- ATproto.wiki is a new unofficial community wiki that aims to document all things on the ATmosphere.
- Weekly statistics for the language distribution of Bluesky.
- An unofficial collection of bots for all 122 National Weather Service offices across the USA that provide service updates.
- TOKIMEKI.blue is a Bluesky client with multi-column support, and the latest update adds bookmarks and drafts, features not yet supported in the official Bluesky client.
- Catch (anonymous) glimpses of Bluesky posts as they get deleted.
- My dad (who also created all the artwork for the website) made a bot for Bluesky, so if you want to regularly see drawings and etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn, go check it out!
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 me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.