Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky - Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation

Beyond Mastodon and Bluesky - Toward a Protocol-Agnostic Federation

You’ve heard of stuff like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make an account on one, and it only works there. You can’t send a DM to your friend on Twitter from Facebook Messenger. You can’t browse your friend’s Instagram feed from Twitter. Each one is closed off

Mastodon - Decentralized social media

Learn more about Mastodon, the radically different, free and open-source decentralized social media platform.

Social Networking Utopia — Matt

In discussing the network topology of social networks — whether centralized like Facebook or federated like ActivityPub — I think the ult...

Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of... - Adam Wood

Recently I’ve been thinking about a couple of different tech-related things that sort of overlap. One is the (emerging) shape of the new social web; the other is a pull I’m feeling to try and lessen reliance on American companies.  I’ve been interested in / concerned by what became of social media for some time.1 Since the sundering of Twitter in 2022, I’ve kept an eye on the various alternatives, with particular interest in Mastodon and Bluesky. Actually, to be more accurate, my interest has been in the protocols behind those platforms: ActivityPub and AT Protocol respectively. Both have their...

Mackinac

A multi-protocol social media app for Bluesky and Mastodon

Mastodon Exit Interview

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

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.

The State of the Open Social Web

A comprehensive look at Mastodon, Bluesky, and the growing ecosystem of open, interoperable social networks.

Beyond Bluesky: These are the apps building social experiences on the AT Protocol | TechCrunch

A list of AT Protocol-based, consumer-facing apps that are either built on top of Bluesky or its underlying protocol, allowing users to take back control over their social networking experiences and personal data.

Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

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Making Social Media Social

As some of you might know, I am part of a team of people moderating a Mastodon server. And as so many of those servers we’ve been having some problems with fake signups lately. This is about how we mitigated the issue and how it was beneficial beyond that. So for those who don’t know […]

Bluesky's AT Protocol: Pros and Cons for Developers | Hacker News

As Doctorow writes, putting the energy into building up your contact list all over again is not appealing at all and so remain wary of this. Similar reasons not to go all in on Mastodon which wasn't it or any of the other centralized Twitter clones that popped up a year or two ago which have now started to shut down etc.

Proposal: OAuth Scopes · bluesky-social atproto · Discussion #3655

Note: a more complete proposal was published in July 2025: https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/tree/main/0011-auth-scopes We’re continuing work on rolling OAuth out to the atproto network. ...

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.