Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 2024 week 4

Laurens Hof

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 2024 week 4

A new signup wave for Bluesky with 2 million new accounts, a way to store arbitrary files on your PDS, the Japanese Bluesky apps continue to build interoperability with each other, and more.

The News

Changes to blocking on X, as well as removing the ability to opt out of having your data being used for AI training, have lead to a new signup wave on Bluesky. Over 2 million accounts in the last week, with now more than 13 million accounts total being created. The inflow of new users created a significant flow of traffic, putting Bluesky high up the top of app store rankings in various countries. The surge in traffic took down Bluesky for a while, which seemed to have been related to an app that helps you find your X followers on Bluesky. One notable aspect of this surge in signups is how global it was, with various new communities in Asia being onboarded. This is clearly visible in this data set that shows the language composition of Bluesky per week, and it shows drastic changes. Brazil went from the dominant language to the third language in the span of two weeks. Bluesky became much more popular in Japan again. There are also new Asian communities that were barely present on Bluesky before, with Korean and Thai becoming the fourth and fifth most popular languages, while Thai did not show up at all in the week before. Bluesky developer Jaz says that this new wave has a higher retention rate than other waves. The elevated signup numbers have dropped to more stable levels again, but there are still some new ways to keep a close track of the numbers with these two new counters, as well as better statistics on the languages used on Bluesky.

Bluesky developer Paul Frazee posted a thread explaining atproto, saying that every user on atproto is effectively a website. A practical application of the idea that every user is a website is the new application ATFile. ATFile allows you to store and retrieve any data files directly on your PDS. The idea is quite straightforward: a PDS can accept arbitrary data, in order to have other apps beyond Bluesky build on top of a PDS. ATFile makes use of this property of a PDS to transform it into a simple place to store and retrieve files. It does not need to be your a self-hosted PDS either, you can also store files on a Bluesky-powered PDS. It shows a future of atproto with interesting questions regarding accountability and responsibility for hosting data; while all (decentralised) social networking platforms have to deal with the issue of people using the platform to host unwanted content such as copyrighted material, ATFile pushes this question front and center. It also shows indeed that atproto can be much bigger than a protocol for microblogging, and that you can indeed treat atproto accounts as websites. It gives a glimpse of a design space that is yet unexplored, and I’m curious to see where people will take it.

The integration of various products build on top of atproto continues, and it seems to be mainly pushed by Japanese developers. Klearsky is a third-party client for Bluesky, and with it’s latest update it now shows you your Linkat (a linktree-like product on atproto) profile on your Bluesky profile. As both products use atproto this can be seamlessly integrated. The developer said they are working Frontpage integration as well, you can see here what this looks like. Atproto-powered blogging platform Whitewind is also trending in this direction, their latest update also adds integration with Linkat.

In Other News

BlueArk is a new paid service to migrate your tweets from your X account to Bluesky, with the posts in Bluesky being shown on the original date they were posted. They are working on a feature where you can upload the entire archive file of your X account to be imported into Bluesky as well. There is also another free tool available that imports your X archive into Bluesky, but this does require some technical knowledge to use.

Earlier this year the Bluesky team published a paper ‘Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media’, this paper has been updated with some of the most recent statistics and developments.

Bluesky, and what Bluesky is not, is an article that explains atproto, and also compares to how it differs from ActivityPub. Some extra commentary and additions on the article by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold here.

For Developers

Bluesky published two new blog posts aimed at developers:

A blog to introduce Jetstreams; which is effectively a simpeler and more efficient way of the Relay (firehose), which gives speed and simplicity to the projects that need it, at the cost of validating every record (the ‘Authenticated’ part in AT Protocol). Bluesky notes that the Jetstream is suitable for more casual projects, while warning against using it for more formal or research based operations.
‘Lexicons, Pinned Posts, and Interoperability’ is a reflection on the latest update to the Bluesky app, which caused some interoperability issues by third-party apps. Bluesky says that they are ‘planning to build an aggregator and automated documentation system for Lexicons’.

On the note of lexicon discoverability, Frontpage.fyi just published their lexicon.

The Links

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.

Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 2024 week 4

A new signup wave for Bluesky with 2 million new accounts, a way to store arbitrary files on your PDS, the Japanese Bluesky apps continue to build interoperability with each other, and more.

fediversereport.com (fediversereport.com)