There have been some big developments at Bluesky lately, so I figured I’d drop an update on it, since there’s a good chance you’ll start seeing a lot from there soon. (For those who don’t know, Bluesky is a hip new federated social network in the style of Twitter. I wrote an explainer about it in July here, which is rather long but nothing in it is inaccurate. The project began in-house at Twitter intended as a way to open-source the network, then spun off into their own company.)
I’ve been excited about Bluesky for a while now because it is in many ways a piece of technology I’d been waiting for for years. They’ve learned from the failings of prior attempts at big decentralized social networks, such as Mastodon, and are focusing on meeting users where they’re at, which makes sense since its origin is literally a Twitter-built Twitter replacement. Why should you care? Well–we all know the harms that can be caused by centralized social networks run by billionaires. Some of those may be endemic to large networks, but others, such as what Musk has done to Twitter, and the very real problems this may cause in the world, are caused by centralized control. If you’re worried about Zuck or Musk or whoever having a stranglehold on communication, decentralization may be for you! People can’t own something that cannot be purchased. And while Bluesky is a company, the free and open-source software they have developed is not; “the company is a future adversary” is their motto. (See my post linked above for some key details on how Bluesky is not Mastodon.)
Bluesky offers exciting features like a free and open API, custom algorithms and feeds, multiple third-party apps and websites, account self-verification, and the overall online experience we’ve come to take for granted from a service that isn’t owned by a fascist. Still no gifs yet though.
So: recent developments!
Just yesterday was the anniversary of the first post, and they recently hit two million users, more than 200,000 of whom are active on any given day, which is pretty good.
More importantly: they’ll soon be releasing a public website for viewing posts, allegedly around the end of November. It will still be an invite-only service (although those are fairly easy to come by these days), but once that releases, it will be easily accessible to people who aren’t dweebs. I say “people who aren’t dweebs” because almost everything you do there has been public the entire time, via API. For example, here are all posts about cats in real-time. But a public website will still be a big deal. It will greatly expand the visibility of the network, presumably letting you embed posts in articles and the like. The lack of this feature has been a barrier to adoption for many people (as well as a comfort to others), so this will change the world’s relationship with Bluesky in, hopefully, a big and good way.
The second bit of important (to me, haha) news is that they’ve basically finalized the federation architecture, and plan to open the network up to third parties early next year, once they’ve released their moderation software. What will this mean for the users of bsky.social? Nothing, if the team has done their jobs correctly. For everyone else, it offers some exciting possibilities. You’d be able to run your own service, or hop onto a service run by somebody else, which integrates with bsky.social and offers an experience that is, if you want it to be, indistinguishable from being on bsky.social. Or, it could offer a totally different experience. It’s customizable on so many different layers that with any luck there will be something for everyone. They accomplish this with some interesting architectural decisions. Let’s dive into that below the fold.