Beyond the Blue #6
Every week @ferran.cc sends you a newsletter with the latest Bluesky and AT Proto news
Welcome to the 6th issue of this newsletter!
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to all 40 people who subscribed to the newsletter! It makes me really happy to know that the newsletter is helpful to you. Thank you so much! 🥰
There's a lot happening in Bluesky and AT Proto every week, making it difficult to choose what to include in the newsletter. Sometimes, I have to leave out and not comment on small updates. But my goal is to create a newsletter that's easy to ready and short to provide an overview of what's happening in Bluesky.
This week, the biggest news is the launch of the developer sandbox that allows to start testing the federation functionality of the AT Proto! I’m excited to see the first round of servers popping up and, now that all the pieces are being putted together, even forks of the protocol (which, in my opinion, will be another indicator of success).
I hope you enjoy this newsletter. If you do, please share it on Bluesky and among your friends!
News
The AT Proto federation is now closer than ever with the recent launch of the sandbox environment by the Bluesky Team this week. This allows you to set up your own server. However, please note that participating in this experimental phase is solely for testing purposes. The software and infrastructure is still in its early stages, so it's important to follow specific guidelines and expect potential data loss. Will we see a network of federated servers by the end of summer? 👀
David Buchanan, a security and cryptography expert, started an AMA on the AT Proto that derived in excellent content. I highly recommend the thread, participate asking questions and to follow the -in words of @dholmes.xyz- “the first account we look at when we have some anomaly on our service”. Buchanan is also the creator of PicoPDS, a minimum viable atproto PDS for protocol experimentation purposes.
The tireless Jerry Chen releases, at the very least, one new development per week! This week, he brings us GoodFeeds, a custom feed search engine for AT Proto that will soon be added to the Graysky client as well!
The issue of Bluesky's growth has been a hot topic since the official client launch. Turns out, it's not exactly taking off, and there are loads of inactive accounts just gathering dust. There are probably a bunch of factors at play here, but it seems like the Bluesky team is already on it. And they took some actions, though more tactical than the strategic, but with visible effect (5.74% of growth yesterday).
Bluesky user @emilyonhere.gay has brought attention to the fact that the current method of deleting posts on Bluesky is not immediate. This could raise legitimate concerns, as users are not informed on the frontend. Paul Frazee has acknowledged the issue, and he is actively working on a solution.
One month ago, Privacy girl, wrote an article analyzing privacy on Bluesky, which I highlighted in the first issue of this newsletter. She has updated the article, and I highly recommend taking the opportunity to give it a second read.
Featured articles
Federation Developer Sandbox Guidelines: As said, the AT Proto federation is here for testing and experimentation! Check this article to know more about this announcement, what to expect and guidelines to follow. If you want to be among the first to test it, you can follow this technical guide, which will walk you through the process of self-hosting a Personal Data Server (PDS).
How Bluesky Is Seizing the Opportunity of Twitter's Decline With Custom Algorithms: An interview with Paul Frazee covering topics such as the AT Proto approach to custom feeds, Bluesky’s open marketplace for algorithms, toxicity on social media and more. This Q&A was made by @montgomery.bsky.social.
Featured apps, tools, and clients
Now Breezing: A tool that automatically publishes a post every ~10 minutes with the most trending words on Bluesky. As of June 23rd, the tool is offline, but its maintainer Nick Wright is working on getting it back online.
SkyWatch: This account maintains mute lists to reduce exposure to abuse and bigotry on Bluesky.
Don't forget that you can find more apps, tools and clients in the Bluesky Community Hub.
Featured Skeet
Bluesky Stats
Number of users: 155,973 (+25,701 since last week)
Number of skeets: 5.82 (+1.08M since last week 😮)
Data extracted from Jaz's Bluesky stats on 2023/06/23