NeoDB
The main story this week needs some introduction, as it involves a platform that seems to be virtually unknown in the English-speaking side of the fediverse, even though it has been around for a while, and actively being used in the Chinese-speaking side of the fediverse. NeoDB is an platform that allows people to ‘manage and explore collections, reviews, and ratings for various cultural products, including books, movies, music, podcasts, games and boardgames’. It is a huge scope, and NeoDB has a large amount of integrations with other products.

NeoDB has had a full fediverse integration for a while, with reviews federating out, and comments/likes federating inwards to the platform, as well as the ability to sign up for NeoDB with an existing fediverse account. All of this is not news in itself, but worth mentioning, both for context as well as a suggestion for people to check it out.

What is news about NeoDB is that their English documentation site was published last month, which should help significantly with discoverability of the platform, which so far has mainly been used by a Chinese audience. The second part of the news is that this week, NeoDB shipped Bluesky and Threads integration, allowing you to log in with your Bluesky or Threads account. Furthermore, the developers are publicly pondering if they should be ‘dual-stack’, meaning that they fully integrate with both ActivityPub and atproto. The direction of the larger social web seems to be trending in the direction of platforms that span multiple protocols, with NeoDB being another example.

The News
Mastodon has made two updates this week that helps highlight journalism on the fediverse. The first update is that underneath some links that are shared on Mastodon, “the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account”. Mastodon says that this highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work”. The feature is rolling out slowly: only a few publications are included, and other publications can manually opt-in. It is currently also still only visible on mastodon.social, and currently requires admin approval. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says that wants to “avoid the risk of malicious sites framing users as their authors, but we intend to build out a self-serve system to manage which sites you can be featured from very soon.” While the feature is only visible on Mastodon so far, it works with other fediverse accounts: I linked my federated WordPress account to this blog, for example. Already apps are starting to implement this feature, such as Pachli.

The second feature update for Mastodon is that articles which appear in the trending News tab, allow you to see what people are writing about that article. This respects privacy settings, so not all posts will be visible. Both Phanpy and IceCubes already implemented the feature into their clients as well.

Ghost has taken two major steps in their work for implementing ActivityPub. They have made the repository for their work on ActivityPub available as open source, under the MIT license. Secondly, Ghost’s own newsletter about their fediverse integration has become the ‘first federated Ghost instance on the internet’, and you can follow @index via your own fediverse account.

Interoperability between different types of platforms on the fediverse can be quite unreliable, but the link-aggregator side of the fediverse is seeing some improvements recently: Mbin has added PeerTube support, after PieFed also did so a few weeks ago. Furthermore, Lemmy has made it easier to follow communities from the microblogging platforms in their recent 0.19.4 update: All posts (not comments) made on Lemmy get added a hashtag based on the community name. So if you want to follow the asklemmy community from your Mastodon account for example, you can simply follow the hashtag #asklemmy.

Pixelfed and Loops developer Dansup says that Loops, an platform for short-form videos that is currently in development, will first come to the Pixelfed app, and that only later it will become a separate app.

Casey Newton interviewed Adam Mosseri on Threads’ first anniversary, and posted his answer on Threads work on fediverse integration. Mosseri says that is not driving a lot of growth (by my own estimates it seems likely that like less than 10k people have turned on fediverse sharing), and that it “is proving very difficult just to do the basics, particularly from a compliance and a privacy perspective”.

Newsmast has released their ‘Amplifier‘ feature, which gives you more control over your timeline. With it, you can select to see if you want posts, reposts or comments in your timeline. It also allows you to shift your timeline to a different ‘timezone’, for example 12 hours back. You can see what that looks like with a short video here.

Shreyan Jain published an in-depth article about atproto and Nostr. It’s a long read, well-researched and places the protocols in a larger historical context. If you want to understand how these protocols work and how they compare to each other, I can definitely recommend the article. It seems to me we are far from the end of innovation and change in the space of decentralised social networking protocols, making it worthwhile to learn and build upon other protocol’s choices.

The Links
Last Month in Bluesky – June 2024.
Mastodon has expanded their core engineering team, and consists now of three people.
Newsletter software Buttondown confirms that ActivityPub support is scheduled for their Q3 roadmap.
Ghost recently funded Fedify, and Fedify developer Hong Minhee wrote some more details about the development process and funding.
The first release candidate for PeerTube 6.2 adds automatic video transcription based on Whisper, auto-tags on video, as well as a comment moderation system page.
A web app to search and explore your own Mastodon bookmarks.
Newsmast’s Michael Foster writes about how to reach the potential of the fediverse with storytelling.
ActivityPods published ‘a guide to create your first social app with ActivityPods 2.0′.
A weekly overview of the fediverse software updates.
Kookie is a new Misskey fork that focuses on the Brazilian community.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

Labeler implosion
The two biggest labelers dedicated to content moderation have called it quits this month. Aegis was a labeling service that provided ‘community moderation predominantly to Bluesky’s LGBTQIA+ and marginalized users’, which had recently gotten a micro-grant by Bluesky. Aegis’ moderators came under criticism from the community, for both alleged behaviour as well as improper labeling, and Aegis decided that trust within the community was broken to such an extend that the best course of action was to stop the service. I’ll note the events that led to the situation it are best told by members of the community themselves, as I feel it is not my place as someone outside of the community to do so.

As a result of Aegis disbanding operations, Taurus shield, another community labeler expanded operations, trying to fill some of the gaps that were left by Aegis, such as a label for antisemitism. The work load, expectations and a lack of support became quickly too much so that Taurus also decided to call it quit and delete their labeler as well.

These events signal a shift in current expectations what labelers are for. Bluesky advertised labelers as a way for communities to help protect themselves, calling ‘community labeling’. The situation with Aegis and Taurus has shown that labelers that are a high-profile part of the community can however cause unwanted power dynamics. For now it seems that the near-term use-case for labelers will be more for memes or labelers that provide more specific niche services, instead of labelers that provide a wide range of difficult content moderation decisions.

Bluesky
Bluesky added three app updates (1.85, 1.86, 1.87) this month. Some of the standout features are temporary account deactivation, starter packs and social proof with followers that you know. Temporary account deactivation was a highly requested safety feature that allows you to temporarily disable your account, without having to delete your account, and already some high-profile accounts have used this feature when it was necessary to take a break. Bluesky also added more ‘social proof’, when you check out a profile, you can now see followers that you know. This feature helps with establishing if people are in your network and can provide another signal whether you should trust someone or not.

With starter packs, people can now share a customisable link for others to sign up and join Bluesky. When people sign up with your link, they will also suggested custom feeds and people to follow. One of the hardest parts of a new social network is for new accounts to fill up their feed and build up a new social graph. As anyone can create a starter pack, communities can now easier migrate and get started.

The ATmosphere
The ATmosphere, meaning all the other projects and products that use atproto beyond the Bluesky app, has been expanding, with some new types of projects in the works.

Frontpage.fyi is a federated link-aggregator that is currently in closed beta. The platform takes some inspiration from Hacker News, with a single front page where people can submit links, and vote and comment on them. Frontpage is build on top of atproto, which means that you can log in with your Bluesky account. The developers are actively experimenting with ideas for further integration between Bluesky and Frontpage.

Last month I wrote about Soleia, a work-in-progress on building a donation/giving platform on top of atproto. An early sandbox version is now available, while the developer is waiting for OAuth to come to atproto. Meanwhile, developer Ryan Skinner is also working on building a project inspired by Vine, video demo here.

Blogging platform WhiteWind has officially launched as a 1.0 version, and the code is now available as open source. WhiteWind was the first platform to build a custom AppView for atproto ,and has been available since March. In the post to celebrate the launch, the develop explains that they wanted to contribute to and grow the ecosystem of development on atproto, by demonstrating what is possible to build with the protocol.

Bluecast, the social audio spaces app that integrates with atproto, is trialing a paid Pro version, that gives longer broadcasts and better audio quality. Bluecast has been able to find a consistent audience in Japan, with accounts such as ‘Weekend Bluecast‘ contributing to a regularly planned schedule of streams that listeners can tune into, creating a community in the process.

An extensive update by Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, and building a community on atproto. Its an extensive update that’s worth checking out, that deals with how to define your own identity that is not just something that people compare it too, as well as building community for the long run. Fraser also shows how “Blacksky depends on big cultural moments in order to succeed”, not Elon Musk Events.

Fraser’s blog post also showcases how you can embed a comment section on a blog post which integrates with Bluesky, based on work by Ændra Rininsland (and previous work by Graysky). It allows you to set a link on your blog to a post made on Bluesky, and all the comments on the Bluesky post will show up as replies/comments on your blog. Another example is here by Bluesky’s Emily Liu.

Threads can now technically interoperate with Bluesky via the fediverse bridge, although this feature will not be made available for the foreseeable future. Seeing a Threads post on Bluesky was done as a technical demonstration, but creator Ryan Barrett says that he is waiting for Threads to further implement ActivityPub before committing to adding support to this to the bridge. Speaking of the bridge, TechCrunch published an article to it explaining what it is and how it works.

A fairly technical news item, but I think it is relevant all the same. Posts bridged from the fediverse to Bluesky that are over 300 characters (Bluesky’s character limit) get trunkated. Bridge developer Ryan Barrett has implemented a feature that allows third party clients to work around this limit, and this has now been implemented by Skywalker, a third party client for Bluesky. People talk about federation often in terms of technical interoperability: can servers of different products communicate with each other. But to quote @maegul: “federation happens in the client”, meaning that the interoperability in a manner that users care about happens on a client level, not server level. This news is a clear example of this phenomenon.

The Links
An interview with Skygraph, who has build multiple custom personalised algorithmic feeds for Bluesky.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written a guide on how to use labelers and custom feeds.
Getting started with XBlock, the labeler that allows you to hide screenshots from Twitter and other social networks.
A script to auto-delete old posts.
A video tutorial on how to get started with custom feeds with Skyfeed.
Some statistics on posts that are not coming from Bluesky’s own PDSes.
For developers:

An atproto demo app by Bluesky engineer Why.
For developers: PDS Explorer is a tool that surfaces some PDS data structures.
Bsky-sdk is a new Rust library specialised for using Bluesky.
‘How we do React Native CI/CD at Bluesky – At Nearly Zero Cost‘ by Bluesky engineer @haileyok.com
That’s all for this month, thanks for reading. You can follow me on Bluesky, or subscribe to my newsletter below. You’ll get a weekly update on the fediverse in your inbox, and a monthly update on Bluesky and the ATmosphere.