"This post was extracted from the draft of my December newsletter and published on Whitewind, demonstrating how a new array of apps on the ATmosphere - the ecosystem built with ATProto, Bluesky's protocol - could potentially usher in seamless decentralised collective intelligence."

"I usually circulate my newsletter to its subscribers via Mailchimp before reposting it to Medium for my subscribers there. However, for this edition I posted this content from Obsidian, my notemaking tool, direct to Bluesky's Atmosphere. It's early days, but I think this augurs well for decentralised collective intelligence."

3 important points (for me, right now):"The two biggest labelers dedicated to content moderation have called it quits... a shift in current expectations what labelers are for. Bluesky advertised labelers as a way for communities to help protect themselves, calling ‘community labeling’. The situation ... has shown that labelers that are a hig…

connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, gathers all of the links posted to your timeline, and aggregates them to show you the most popular links in your network

"Let our AI analyze your posts, roast your takes, and reveal what your posting history says about you".Honestly not roasty at all - rather hagiographic, judging by mine, but who am I to argue with a 88% authenticity score, even if I have no idea how that is measured? https://blueskyroast.com/roast/mathewlowry.bsky.social.But a pretty coo…

"Assigns you a Bluesky animal based on your recent activity"Apparently I'm part of a squirrel squad and a bit of a Social Butterfly Explorer with enough discipline to (mostly) post before and after work (except for Friday afternoons).

"Analyze accounts that follow you". eg spot bots & trolls, discover followers you really should follow back, and even "Get raw JSON to do more analysis yourself"."Runs entirely on your device, without login" and - illustrating the openness of your Bluesky content - "You can analyze the followers of any accoun…

"a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful ... "How decentralized is Bluesky really?", Hubbed earlier, which "raises the bar on analysis in this space. However, I disagree with some of the analysis".First, agreement with CLW's "shared heap" image, and a good summary of how Bluesky works: "atp…

ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber "often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub... I do ... but I am usually head-down focused on building... [and] anything I had to say on the subject would not be received productively". But, encouraged by a core Bluesky developer, here is her longread.It'…

With "Obsidian Web Clipper ... highlight and capture the web in your favorite browser. Anything you save is stored as durable Markdown files... customize how content is saved based on the website with powerful templates"Essential plugin for integrating Obsidian further into my personal content strategy.

Does what the title says: converts a Bluesky Starter Pack into a List. Tested successfully here: https://bsky.app/profile/mathewlowry.bsky.social/post/3lbmwcewk2226

"a markdown blog service using atproto... Your article is immediately delivered to all the federated atproto services" - basically the intersection of Bluesky & Obsidian, and a key building block for myhub.Basically a platform for posting blogs onto, using your Bluesky account: your blog is simply https://whtwnd.com/{Bluesky handle o…

A convincing argument from paragraph one: "You would never ever in a million years build your own CRM system or custom CMS — or in most cases, your own LLM. ... yet, everywhere I look, I see IT departments convincing themselves that building their own RAG-based chat is somehow different. It’s not. It’s actually worse."The author then enu…

Great piece on Substack, who "want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.... every single new feature ... is proprietary and locks you into their network... There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a for…

The original post which launched the Nostr protocol, the "simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global “social” network:... doesn’t rely on any trusted central server, hence it is resilientbased on cryptographic keys and signatures, so it is tamperproof;does not rely on P2P techniques, therefore it works."H…

"The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists."Establishes the metaphor with a story about “scientific forestry” - the late 18th century growth hacking technique that "made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer rel…

Excellent intro to Bayesian thinking: when struggling to function in a world of uncertainty, "Bayes offered an elegant solution. Instead of demanding absolute certainty... he provided a mathematical framework for learning from experience... to systematically update our beliefs as new evidence emerges, transforming probability from a static me…

Via Ross Dawson on LinkedIn: "A core part of human intelligence is the ability to work flexibly with others to achieve both individual and collective goals". Unfortunately, intelligence is usually considered as a property of individual or collective, never both, and so "not in a way that can be used to understand how groups can make…

"In physics... the Observer Effect. Electrons, photons ... behave differently when under our gaze... Social media has made us both the observed and the observers, trapped in a relentless cycle of performing and watching... the line between genuine human expression and algorithm-driven self-parody has dissolved into a soup of memes, virtue vs…

From the basic Nostr intro video - "Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays is a simple protocol that allows users to sign and share notes using websockets". Users use their cryptographic key pair to sign a note, verifying its source.NIPS are "Nostr implementation possibilities ... standards allow clients to communicate .…

"Nostr is (among other things) a decentralized social network run over a series of apps and relays, servers that anybody can run to process communications data". It flips the concept of social media platform "on its head: with one private key, you can access multiple apps/interfaces of your choice. However, Nostr is not just social …

Taking funding from a VC firm called Blockchain Capital raised quite the furore: " a common response ... was that “the enshittification has started”.""Bluesky is aware of the negative connotations ... explicitly stating that “the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancial…

"The new social layer allows us to meet the needs of those who want a completely open “town square” and those who prioritize carefully managed and curated experiences... Private companies cannot be public squares, but protocols can be".While Nostr or Farcaster can be "censorship-resistant because ... no one can send them deletion re…

An almost 30min video from Justin Garrison in July 2023 asking: "What is the difference between Mastodon's ActivityPub and BlueSky's AT Protocol?... We're not going to be looking at [apps] ... like Mastodon and Bluesky or Threads" - instead, a mid-level dive into the underlying protocols, and "some pros and cons of ea…

My mid November 2024 newsletter summarises how a deep dive into Bluesky has changed how I view #AI4Communities, and summarises some of the most influential things I've read recently.

No one is the enshittifier of their own story

Bluesky's announcement of their open-sourcing of "Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool... individuals and teams can work together to review and label content", coupled with the ability for people and communities to "run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app".This enables &…

Another Bluesky guide with "the tips & tricks that I often give to friends when I send them an invite code", including a brief but informative history lesson.Of particular interest to me in early November 2024:"they promise they won’t “enshittify” the service in future... [are] explicitly building the network to be “billionaire-…

Good intro to Bluesky custom feeds on the "Skyfeed ... third party app that helps you manage and organize you Bluesky experience. Within Skyfeed is a custom Feed Builder", which tbh is probably the only reason to use Skyfeed - the interface takes some getting used to.By the time I read this I'd already created my first custom feed u…

An interesting starterguide to Bluesky, written when it was "still in beta... though the application has recently passed 1 million downloads". Some interesting points:culture: "early adopters tended to be people from marginalized communities who were fleeing outright persecution" on other platforms; they all got invite codes &q;…