Ecosystem Review

Empowering Users, Not Overlords: Overcoming Digital Helplessness

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…

Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs

When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:

Looking AT the Blue Skies of Bluesky

The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users. These decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist. In this paper, we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky, a prominent decentralized microblogging platform. In contrast to alternative approaches (e.g. Mastodon), Bluesky decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders. We collect a comprehensive dataset covering all the key elements of Bluesky, study user activity and assess the diversity of providers for each sub-components.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.

Decentralized Social Media | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really?, a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which I consider worth reading.

BlueSky - The Future of Social Media

Watch BlueSky's user base grow in real-time. Innovative, decentralized social networking is here!

Guide to Bluesky: Getting Started and Best Practices

With over 20 million users and growing, Bluesky offers transparency, control, and a breath of fresh air in the social media world. Are you ready to escape the toxicity and censorship of other platforms? Sign up now! #Bluesky 🚀🌐

The ecosystem is moving

Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize....

How decentralized is Bluesky really? -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs ActivityPub, and the answer is that I do have opinions, but I am usually head-down focused on building what I hope to be the next generation of decentralized (social) networking tech, and so I keep to myself about such things except in private channels.

A quick and dirty guide to making custom feeds on Bluesky

So, you’ve made it! The remnants of science twitter have at last begun to coalesce around a new microblogging platformed owned by questionable individuals with inadequate content moderation t…

Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight