Last Month in Bluesky - October 23

Welcome to the October update for Bluesky. The team has provided a roadmap on what they are working on, and even though it is focused on developers, there is a lot of interesting information it in for people who are interested in the network in general. Just as interesting is what is not in it; plans about content moderation are mostly missing. A high-profile case of impersonalisation with the Kyiv Independent newspaper showcases the challenges that lie ahead in a federated network. Let's dive right in:

Bluesky roadmap

Bluesky has published a roadmap for their current development plans for the AT Protocol that powers the network. It can be found here, and it is a fairly technical read, focused on developers. There are still quite some things of interest for regular users in it:

• Federation is coming, scheduled for early 2024
• DMs are coming, but quite a way off.

The main work that the Bluesky team is focused on is getting to federation. This will allow the network to properly scale, as the current infrastructure starts to hit its limits. Federation is currently available in a separate testing environment for developers. The developers are currently working on completing the final parts of the protocol that enables federation to happen. Most of the technical roadmap is dedicated to the individual work items that are happening, or need to happen. The infrastructure that is currently used on the live network now has most parts in place to allow federation to happen. Altogether the team estimates that the network will open up to everyone via federation in early 2024.

DMs are an often requested feature, and people regularly mention that the only reason they still use their X account is to access DMs. Implementing DMs requires significant additions to the protocol, as currently all information is public. Proper end-to-end encrypted messaging needs to be added for DMs to work. The team is currently planning on focusing on this after federation is complete. The amount of work that is needed, means that DMs are still quite some time away, and should not be expected any time soon.

One part of the roadmap that does not get any mention is content moderation, and how this will function in a federated version of Bluesky. Federation opens the network to a whole new set of threat vectors, as the fediverse has experienced, but this does not get any mention in this roadmap. Even features such as comment controls, a valuable tool for safety, that are actually being implemented into the network, are not mentioned.

Protocol governance

As part of the technical roadmap, the #Bluesky team announced that they will be looking to bring the development and maintainance of the AT Protocol to an independent standards body. This will happen after the team has implemented federation, which is currently expected to be in early 2024. The team recognises that once the network federates, decisions on the network will impact other organisations, companies and individuals, and decisions should not be left exclusively to the Bluesky team.

The current plan is to house the protocol at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF is a different standards organisation that ActivityPub uses, the W3C. Bluesky expects that the process will take quite a while: “Our current hope is to bring this work to the IETF, likely as a new working group, which would probably be a multi-year process. If the IETF does not work out as a home, we will try again with other bodies.”

The current app that most people use to access the network, also called Bluesky, will not be part of the application, and the Bluesky team intends to remain in control of the development of the Bluesky app.

Impersonisation

Bluesky recently had a high-profile case of impersonation, with the account of the Ukraine newspaper Kyiv Independent. The impersonator account of Kyiv Independent existed for a while, getting to over 5.5k followers while reposting real links to the real website of the Kyiv Independent newspaper. The impersonation came to light when the impersonator account started spamming links to an unaffiliated Patreon account, trying to scam people into donating. A reporter at the Kyiv Independent created a Bluesky account, and drew further light to the impersonation. As a result, the fake account got an impersonation warning label added to the account. This was however still somewhat confusing, as the fake account had significantly more followers than the real account, and people often use follower numbers as a proxy to determine if an account is real. Finally, two days later, the impersonation account got taken down altogether.

This saga provides some insights in the challenges that lie ahead when Bluesky will federate in the near future. The original decision by Bluesky to only add an impersonation warning, and not delete the account, aligns with their vision of a federated network. In the near future when people can create accounts on other servers (called a PDS), the Bluesky organisation does not have the power to remove an account when it is located on a PDS that is not owned by the Bluesky organisation either. They do have the ability to provide the impersonation warning to everyone who uses their app (but people who use different apps might not see this either).

These concerns will certainly play up again in the future. For now, the impersonator account was located on the PDS that is owned by the Bluesky organisation, and the behaviour was a clear violation of their own community guidelines. Why it took a few days to decisively act upon it is unclear however.

Journalism and Bluesky

A three month old post by Bluesky team member Emily got significant traction again this month. The post stated that news organisations and journalists could email Bluesky to get an invite code directly. As a response, the Bluesky team published a new blog post explaining how journalists can skip the invite waiting list. However, with the amount of unused invite codes floating around, it does not seem that getting an invite code as a high-profile name would be a big barrier to joining the network.

Building on AT Protocol

The Bluesky team has published some more information for developers on how to build on the AT Protocol, as well as example projects ('cookbook'). The list of community projects got updated again as well, and showcases the amount of projects that people have already build on top of the network. There is a large variety of clients already available. Personally I'm eying to see if there will be a movement to make apps with native support for multiple networks at the same time, so you can use only one client to access both Bluesky, the fediverse, and any other open network.

That's all for October, thanks for reading! If you want to receive a weekly update about what is happening in the world of decentralised social networks, subscribe here!