Last Week in Bluesky - 2025jan.c

Bluesky and how the platform evolves is getting more and more intertwined with the developments on the internet and politics more broadly. This week this is visible in the short-lived TikTok ban in the US, which suddenly shifted the attention to building video products on ATProto.

Note: this week's newsletter focuses on Bluesky and the cultural and social news regarding the platform. Next week's edition of Last Week in Bluesky and the ATmosphere will focus on the technical side again, with more attention to all the other things people are building on ATProto.

The News

The TikTok ban and unban last week, as well as Meta's appeasement to Trump, has many people focused on building alternative video apps on ATProto. There are quite a few different projects and launches related to video this week:

• Bluesky launched a new type of feeds, specifically for videos. The concept is simple, the custom video feeds have an interface that is specifically designed for video, with a strong resemblance to other apps like TikTok.
• Skylight is building an video client for Bluesky, and has been drawing a large amount of attention with their regular video updates.
• Reelo is building their own video app on ATProto, outside of Bluesky, and has set themselves a tight roadmap with a planned release on March 20th.
• 3rd party clients like TOKIMEKI also add the ability to show video feeds, with multi-network clients like SoraSNS not far behind.
• Surf, the multi-network custom feed creator from the people behind Flipboard, is getting in on the action as well.

Bluesky has published their 2024 Moderation Report. The report is detailed and focuses on statistics, avoiding the more qualitative aspect of moderation. Some of the findings of the report that stood out to me:

• Bluesky has around 100 moderators with 24/7 coverage, and continues to hire more as the platform continues to grow, and now provides psychological counselling for moderators.
• Bluesky is working on automating various detecting systems for reports. In December they started with an automated system for impersonation reports, saying that they can now process these reports in seconds, with some false positives. The team is now exploring expanding the automation tooling into other policies. Bluesky also says that appeals and false positives are all handled by human moderators.
• I used to work as a data analyst but I'm not anymore, so now I'm free to do statistics crimes: eyeballing and roughly averaging statistics over both 2023 and 2024 gives that around 5% of active users make reports, and around 3% of active users receive a report.
• Bluesky is looking to move more communications regarding moderation decisions directly into the app instead of via email. Another future update will make it possible for people to make appeals on account takedowns directly in the app instead of via email.

NFL teams cannot use Bluesky, and the New England Patriots was told by the NFL to shut down their Bluesky account. The reasoning given by the NFL is that Bluesky is “not an approved social media platform for the NFL yet". NFL teams are allowed to post on X, as the NFL has an official partnership with X.

Bluesky is now recruiting for three positions: a Backend Go Developer that works on the infrastructure, a System Integrity Engineer that focuses on building out moderation systems, and someone to manage day-to-day operations.

The Analysis

The current movement and attention towards video on ATProto has been heavily influenced by TikTok and its ban in the US. But building a TikTok alternative requires to answer the question: What is TikTok? It turns out that different answers are possible here, that result in people building quite different products.

TikTok is an Algorithm

The first approach is to create a feed that is only for video. The recognition here is that there is functionally little difference between a Bluesky post that contains a video, and a TikTok post: both 'posts' contain some text and a video after all, and the main difference is between how the post and video are presented. This is what Bluesky has launched today: Custom Feeds can now easily be modified to only show video, and the feed will have a different display that focuses on video. Bluesky also now has a Trending Video section, which is effectively a custom feed that is only for video's, with a popularity algorithm applied to the feed.

Graze takes this approach one step further: it gives people the ability to create their own custom video feeds. Graze already has extensive customisation options that allow people to build their own customisable algorithm for a feed for any topic. Graze also has the ability for people to monetise their feeds. Booksky Video is a popular early example, as an equivalent to TikTok's BookTok community.

TikTok is an App

The second way to view TikTok is as an app on your phone that is tailored to make watching videos as smooth and accessible as possible. Because all Bluesky's data is openly accessible with ATProto, it means that people can build their own client apps for Bluesky. There have been multiple 3rd-party clients available for Bluesky for a long time, with popular ones including deck.blue and Skeets. So far, these apps have been focused on providing a similar microblogging experience as the official Bluesky app, with their own twist on it.

Now, newly announced clients like Skylight are dedicated specifically for watching Bluesky videos. Other clients like TOKIMEKI and SoraSNS instead take a similar approach to Bluesky itself, with a dedicated section for video feeds that have a different interface

TikTok is a platform

The third way is to focus on TikTok as a platform, where it is its specific own digital space. This allows for building a platform with its own features, independent of Bluesky, and its own moderation system, also outside of Bluesky. This approach is taken by reelo. By building their own custom Lexicon, they place themselves outside of the Bluesky ecosystem. This gives them more flexibility, control and independence, but also takes more effort, and comes with the requirement of doing moderation.

The difference between building a client like Skylight and an app like reelo is explained by a part of ATProto called Lexicons. Yesterday I wrote an explainer article, going into detail what Lexicons are, and how they explain the difference between these two different approaches.

Some more thoughts on the moderation report:

• As Bluesky has grown almost 10-fold in 2024, in an irregular pattern. This makes many of the statistics that describe the past entire year hard to parse and compare.
• The report notes that there are now over 4000 users running their own Personal Data Server. What is missing from Bluesky so far is how people running their own PDS impacts how Bluesky does moderation. For example; what is Bluesky's moderation policy for violations by accounts that run their own PDS, that would have resulted in an account takedown if the violation would have been done by an account on a Bluesky PDS? How are the procedures different in that situation? Has Bluesky received legal requests for self-hosted accounts? If so, what is Bluesky's policy here? I feel that a more qualitative approach for the moderation report would have helped here.
• Bluesky applied 5.5M labels in 2024, of which around 100k were human-applied labels. The large majority of labeling is done automatically, and used for purposes like classifying images as adult content. 2024 saw also the addition of the 'Show hidden replies' feature, where posts that have a label get hidden behind a button. It leaves me unclear with what the purpose of the human-applied labeling system still is, especially with how little it gets used. If a post is bad enough to get a label and hidden behind the 'show hidden replies button', but not bad enough to get removed altogether, what purpose is to make a distinction between 'rude' or 'threat'? Just hiding the post behind a 'show hidden replies' button seems sufficient to me.
• Bluesky has lost a lot of trust within the community with how the approached the presence of Jesse Singal on the platform. Responses to the moderation report by Bluesky's team shows that this is still top of mind for a vocal part of the community. Not talking about it in the Moderation Report, instead taking a purely qualitative approach, indicates that the team would rather avoid talking about the subject. I'm doubtful that this is a good strategy towards restoring trust in the moderation team.

The Big Tech platforms have a long tradition of paying creators to grow their platform. Just this week, Meta reportedly tried to convince creators to switch from TikTok to Instagram last week by offering them up to 5000 USD for posting on the platform. The NFL having an exclusive contract with X fits in the pattern, especially since X has set up a portal for the NFL on their platform. But with the tech oligarchs in the US rapidly grabbing power, a leader that demands fealty, and X becoming close to state-run media, I'm curious if using platform exclusivity will be used by the platforms and creators to signal loyalty as well. The lines between "We are only posting on X because of an exclusivity contract" and "We are only posting on X to curry favour with US government and show our loyalty" is much blurrier than it used to be. With Bluesky being seen as a competitor to X and Meta's platforms, as well as a platform that has high-profiel criticisms of the US government, I would not be surprised to see similar situations as this case with the NFL and Bluesky arise.

The Links

• The Technological Poison Pill: How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification - Mike Masnick/Techdirt
• An interview with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee on the Software Sessions podcast.
• We need to protect the protocol that runs Bluesky - Eli Pariser & Deepti Doshi/Technology Review
• Finding fake followers (Bluesky edition) - Conspirador Norteño
• How Bluesky Grew From A Twitter Side Project To An X Competitor - CNBC
• Tech Talk: ATMosphere Experiments for Fujin and Beyond
• How Bluesky Works 🦋 - Neo Kim/The Systems Design Newsletter
• The Sky Follower Bridge now supports TikTok, allowing you to find the Bluesky accounts of the TikTok creators you follow.

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 this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.