"Could seeing how opposite sides of the US political spectrum use the same words differently be a first step toward greater cross-political understanding?... What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently?"MIT's Bridging Dictionary…

"Blacksky Algorithms, the team behind Blacksky and rsky, is now officially Blacksky Algorithms Inc", a Delaware C-Corp with its own fiscal host, and bigger ambitions."Blacksky will continue to rely on voluntary, member-supported subscriptions while also building and hosting technical infrastructure for developers, communities, and t…

More evidence that science is thriving on Bluesky: "Seventy per cent of [almost 6,000] Nature readers who responded to an online poll are using the social-media platform Bluesky...53% said they used to be on X but have now left...55% of respondents to the question ‘What do you use Bluesky for?’ said ...to connect with other scientists, keep u…

I've been cleaning out a few rotten systems recently.

According to Science, Bluesky "fosters collegial interactions among scientists, but potentially limits interactions beyond the academic community".It is becoming "the de facto meeting place for academics—many of whom seem to enjoy this “good boring.”". Why?default reverse chrono feed supports smaller accounts, and doesn't …

"With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square... it will take independent funding and governance to turn ... AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app... an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. …

"some of the design and the principles behind this design, as I understand them... we’re going to start by exploring atproto, and then talk about how BlueSky is built on top of it"Basic infrastructural elementsIn atproto:users create records that are cryptographically signed to demonstrate authorship.Records have a schema called a Lexico…

Simon Willison's "review of things we figured out about [LLMs] in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments" has 19 major points:"GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken": the year saw 18 organizations produce "models on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard that rank higher than t…

From 2018, a good history, but no solutions: "Facebook didn’t invent the feature, but they definitely broke it. How can we better regulate future disruptive ideas?".Brief historyPart of the A Brief History of Attention series, starts with some brief history, culminating with Zuckerberg combining "three core concepts — the social gra…

"a lexicon type that supports markdown style notes... for syncing your (public) obsidian/logseq notes on your pds, just having a place where people can view your research notes, personal knowledge management, or community wiki's, which people can later build custom front ends for"Essential for MyHub on ATmosphere, and its already be…

Mathematical comparison of ATProto and ActivityPub

"misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet ... as a justification machine".Humans are "evidence foragers ... historically [that's] meant digging into a subject, testing arguments... That was the foun…

In a "1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”... Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners". The bribe "Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract"? Ev…

CLW with a response to Bryan Newbold's response to her post, so: "my final thoughts (for my blog at least) on Bluesky and decentralization".tl:dr; "my assertion was that Bluesky was neither decentralized nor federated. In my opinion many of the points raised in Bryan's article solidify those arguments... [but] "credib…

"Now you can ... create an instant Bluesky-powered comments section on your own site! Here’s an example of how I added it to my site—which is built on Jekyll."

Good non-technical explanation of Bluesk's potential, which is hidden to keep things simple for most users for good UX reasons: "While Bluesky looks like other social apps, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network".Emily uses Chrome as a good metaphor: "Bluesky as a browser with a whole marketplace of extensions"…

"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…