Last Month in Bluesky - August 23

Welcome to the first edition of Last Month in Bluesky, a monthly update on what's happening on Bluesky and the AT Protocol. For everyone who doesn't know me: Hi, I'm Laurens, and I've been writing a weekly news update the last year about what is happening in the fediverse. Now I'm expanding this to give a regular update on Bluesky. Microblogging feeds are by their very nature ephemeral, and writing down what is happening is a way to organise and document the news. I largely refrain from reporting on Discourse and Drama, but I do focus on the cultural impact on technology. In the end, especially in social networks, technology choices are never neutral, but impact people, and that is what is worth writing about.

In this edition (which will cover the last few days of July as well):

• Blocking and the affordances of protocols
• Custom feeds and the Discovery feed
• Spam accounts

Blocking and protocol design

Clearsky is a new tool that allows you to easily look up information about blocks. It shows you both all the accounts you have blocked, as well as all accounts who have blocked you. All this information is publicly available on the ATProtocol, but not easily accessible without the help of third party tools like Clearsky. Developer Justin Case (@thieflord.dev) added a leaderboard as well, showing the top 20 accounts both who are blocked the most and who have blocked the most. Making blocking information available is a controversial subject, as people see it as a potential harassment vector. This conversation was topic of significant discourse for a few days this month, but the developer stated explicitly after the conversation that he will not take the tool down.

All three decentralised protocols for social networks (fediverse, Bluesky and Nostr) need to answer the question of how to deal with people that build something that the protocol allows, but is not universally appreciated by the people on the network. The fediverse has taken the approach of social conventions, and has a long history of calling out and shaming people who build applications that the protocols allows, but do not fit with the culture of the network. On the other hand, Nostr has taken the complete opposite approach, and fully leans into the permissiveness of the Nostr protocol: if you can build a feature, you can do it, and you don't have to talk to anyone else about it.

Bluesky is still trying to find it's place here. The protocol is completely open, and the culture of the developers seem to encourage the permissiveness that is more similar to Nostr. This is visible in their FAQ, where they emphasise the publicness of the data. Their explanation of why blocks are public information focuses on the technical aspect, and does not mention the cultural aspect of why people would prefer blocks to be either public or private information. When people join Bluesky because they prefer the culture and people on Bluesky over other platforms such as Twitter, they are not necessarily interested in the minutiae of protocol affordances however. This friction, on the edge of protocol affordances and cultural expectations, is bound to rise again in the future once the AT Protocol fully starts to decentralise and federate with other servers.

Discovery and custom feeds

One of Bluesky's main selling points is custom feeds, giving people control over the algorithms that serve them posts. In a blog post in late July, Bluesky has given more detail on how custom feeds work, and given quite a few examples of how people are using custom feeds in practice. They showcased  Skyfeed Builder, which you to easily build your own custom feeds, in a featured community project. Skyfeeds recently announced that there are now 10.000 custom feeds made on the network, with a whopping 87% made using Skyfeed Builder.

Bluesky also announced a new Discovery feed, to replace the old 'Whats Hot' feed as one of the default feeds for new accounts. Whereas the old 'Whats Hot' feeds only showed posts from the entire network, Discovery mixes in posts from the entire network with posts from the people you follow.
This has changed the network a bit; in the previous versions, you could assume that most people on Bluesky saw the same posts as you did on the 'Whats Hot' feed, leading to a more singular community and discussion. Now, a significant number of the most popular posts of the day (visible via the Catch-up feed) do not show up in my personal Discovery feed. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows the network to splinter into multiple sub communities, but it is a significant change from how Bluesky used to operate.

The New York Times published an opinion article by Julia Angwin about the importance custom feeds and algorithms, citing Bluesky's custom feeds as a good example. She states: "Algorithms make our choices invisible. Making those choices visible is an important step in building a healthy information ecosystem." The entire article is worth reading, here.

Spam accounts

Issues with spam networks on Bluesky are slowly coming into focus. This takes two forms; creating accounts with large followings that can be repurposed later, and the setup of what looks like an astroturfing network.

The first issue comes in the form of content farm accounts, currently mainly themed around cute animal pictures. These accounts follow tens of thousands of people, in the hope to get a follow back, and post stolen pictures of animals. The issue is that these accounts can later be repurposed for other uses, as Yoel Roth explains here.

Another issue is what seems like the formation of a spam network, by accounts that all follow the pattern of two random words as a user name ("Negative Wallpaper"), and a few random words in their bio. The blog Conspirador Norteno (@conspirator0) has all the details and the analysis. For now it seems like the network is dormant, and its unclear what the purpose of the network is.

In other news

• You can now self label posts on Bluesky. Bluesky uses an AI to automatically apply labels such as 'nudity' or 'porn' to posts. The AI used is not always accurate, especially regarding male nudity or furry content. Now that people can self-label their post, it is a bit safer to browse feeds on public transport again.
• Other social networks get massive increases in traffic in events where Elon Musk announces changes to X that are unpopular with it's users. For Bluesky this increase is so significant they had to apply rate limits to manage the record traffics.
• Blueskydeck is a new web client for Bluesky. It is especially suited for a multi-column layout similar to Tweetdeck.
• A new tool to automatically crosspost your posts on the fediverse to Bluesky.
• Bluesky allows you to edit link preview cards, Ben Tasker notes. In a blog posts he explains how this works, as well as the risks that are associated with freely editable link previews.
• A tutorial by the Bluesky team on how to post via the API.
• Third party web client Twexit.nl has a new feature, language lists, which helps to find people to follow that also post in your own language.

Thank you for reading! You can subscribe below to receive my weekly newsletter on all the news that has happened in the fediverse.