Overview: Fediverse

"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…

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'…

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…

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…

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…

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;…

My late October 2024 newsletter introduces my ongoing work exploring #AI4Communities, and provides some of the resources going into the next version.