Beyond the Blue #7

Every week @ferran.cc sends you a newsletter with the latest Bluesky and AT Proto news

Jun 30, 2023

Welcome to the 7th issue of this newsletter!

The most significant topic this week is probably the Bluesky team post, with their approach to Bluesky and the AT protocol as public commons. The team demonstrates a clear understanding of various aspects, such as moderation, prevention to enclosure, and the social aspects of a protocol like community building, moderation, user freedom and more.

It’s refreshing to see a team that is actively working towards building the social media protocol and its instance in a direction that values the concept of commons. They seem aware of the risks involved when building a social media protocol and seem committed to creating a structure that protects participants from various dangers, including the risk of enclosure by private interests. This aligns with the research and studies conducted by academics like Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler, who have delved deep into understanding the elements that define and make commons (digital or not) work effectively.

Additionally, it’s great to see Paul Frazee, who appears to be leading the efforts on moderation and community topics within the app and protocol, opening up proposals for debate on Github. While this process may not be official, in my opinion there should ideally be an established process to handle participation and governance to ensure its integrity and prevent it from being influenced by third parties, including the Bluesky company. I am still in the process of absorbing all the information, which is a lot, but I hope to be able to give quality feedback like Bosset did.

It’s critical to keep protocols independent of personal interests or private benefits. While individuals or collectives can build services on top of a protocol, it’s important to maintain a clear separation between the different layers and to protect the public good that the AT protocol can provide.

I would like to congratulate the Bluesky team for the corageous political decisions they are making to safeguard the common good of the protocol from the start. Somehow it reminds me of the birth of another protocol, Ethereum.

Whether you are a blockchain technology enthusiast or not, the decisions made by the Bluesky team (including the non-profit company) are reminiscent of the Ethereum founders' decision to establish the Ethereum Foundation as a non-profit organization to ensure protocol neutrality and preserve its status as a common good.

I hope this direction will be respected and remain a cornerstone of Bluesky and AT Proto.

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.
Yochai Benkler

I hope you enjoy this newsletter. If you do, please share it on Bluesky and among your friends!

News

John Spurlock has created a new version of Firesky that is fed with posts from instances using the Bluesky developer sandbox. This means that you can now access a real-time stream of content from individuals who are testing the initial version of the Bluesky federation.
Bluesky Team has released an update to the Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, which will take effect on July 14, 2023. Keep in mind that these changes will only be applicable to Bluesky Social and Bluesky app. As new stable servers begin to emerge, we should be prepared to see different Community Guidelines and Terms of Service on those instances. But it appears that these new servers have to be compliant with the Bluesky Guidelines and ToS to be able to federate, and this may not be free of conflict.
Jerry Chen has announced that Goodfeeds has indexed 400 feeds! It’s becoming easier to find feeds on topics that cover everyone's interests. However, with so many feeds popping up, how do we know which ones will actually work in a few months? It'd be great to have a way to check if feeds are active or their uptime. This could have a massive impact on the UX of AT Proto for end-users and to manage their expectations.
In the past two weeks, there has been a lot of discussion on Bluesky following the Bluesky Team's decision to ban a user who posted content that could be categorized as self-harm and suicidal. This decision was challenging and raised numerous concerns and complaints from the community. However, yesterday, the Bluesky Team released a new update outlining their policy and approach to address this issue on Bluesky Social.
The AT Proto is progressing towards maturity. Bryan Newbold, from the Bluesky team, announced the addition of more specifications and more content to the protocol specs. While there are still significant elements yet to be released, as indicated in the “What is missing” section, this update reflects the ongoing efforts to enhance and expand the protocol. Check this History of commits to know what’s new.
A new Bluesky App version is out: It introduces a more user-friendly experience for adding Alt text on images, and a language-picker to easily identify the language of a post.
It seems that new ways to exploit Bluesky are popping up. @flicknow.bsky.social discovered many accounts showing bot-like behavior that could be misusing the protocol.
Roselia's design of an alternative logo for the Bluesky app has been a big hit! Personally, I like it very much, and I'd love to see it on my phone!
There is an account on Bluesky publishing Sponge Bob episodes… frame by frame! 🤪

Featured apps tools clients

Handle tracker: A tool that tracks a user’s previous handles and DID records. Developed by @paul.bsky.social.

Don't forget that you can find more apps, tools and clients in the Bluesky Community Hub.

Featured Skeet

Bluesky Stats

Number of users: 180,989 (+25,016 since last week)
Number of skeets: 6.99M (+1.17M since last week)

Data extracted from Jaz's Bluesky stats on 2023/06/30