@ Laurens Hof
2025-03-06 21:19:02
Bluesky Report – 2025mar.a
Frequency is a new project for a decentralised relay using a blockchain. The Bluesky clients ecosystem keeps developing.The NewsRelays, a blockchain and Free Our Feeds
The Bluesky relay is often seen as a centralising aspect in the ATProto ecosystem, and there are various projects underway to combat this. Bluesky PBC is working on significantly lowering the technical requirements for hosting a relay. Free Our Feeds is working on getting a publicly-accessible relay on European infrastructure. Blockchain company Frequency has announced that they are building their own custom relay implementation.
Frequency’s plan is to split the relay into two separate parts: an archive and a firehose. The archive is non-blockchain database that stores and archives all the data coming through the network (unless people delete or opt-out), while the firehose is the actual event stream, which continuously broadcasts all the events on the network as they happen. All data that lives on ATProto already has a unique identifier, a CID (Content Identifier). Every time an event happens on the network, the CID of that event gets stored on a blockchain, while the actual data gets archived in the regular database. This blockchain is effectively a list of CIDs with timestamps of when these events happen. This is the comparable with the firehose output of Bluesky’s relay, it is a list of events as they currently happen.
Frequency’s blockchain-style relay has some differences, and some similarities, with how Bluesky’s relay functions. Both Bluesky’s relays output a continuous stream of events as they happen on the network. Users can tap into this firehose to get continues updates on all events that happen on the network, and use this to power their apps. Bluesky’s relay is realtime, while Frequency updates their blockchain every six seconds. This means that using Frequency’s relay will have a slight delay. Frequency also has an advantage over using Bluesky’s relay, it allows you to ‘replay’ the event stream from a past date, allowing you to see what the firehose looked like at an arbitrary date in the past. I’m not clear on what the actual use case in practice for such a feature is, but at least it is a feature that is new.
The main reason why people became aware of Frequency’s announcement is for the ties it has with Free Our Feeds. The press release ties Frequency’s project explicitly as a project between Project Liberty and Free Our Feeds. Robin Berjon, one of the driving forces of Free Our Feeds however stresses that there is actually little connection between Free Our Feeds and Frequency, stating that there is no money or anything exchanged. Instead he describes it as two separate projects that both are working on the same goal: making Bluesky and ATProto more decentralised by providing more publicly-accessible relays. The whole situation honestly has me quite confused: if there is indeed no meaningful connection between Free Our Feeds and Frequency’s blockchain project, why is Free Our Feeds mentioned so prominently in the press release? Furthermore, it is clear that the culture of Bluesky is one of a deep distrust of anything that reeks of blockchains and crypto. What is the value of tying the Free Our Feeds name to a project that was always going to be distrusted and ridiculed by the community, simply because it uses a blockchain?
That said, one common criticism aimed at Bluesky and ATProto is that the relay is a centralising force. While there are few independent developers that run their own relay, there is no other relay that is publicly accessible to anyone, besides the relay run by Bluesky PBC. Frequency, for all the hate and ridicule that blockchains and crypto companies rightfully deserve, is an organisation that is actually working on further decentralising the ATProto network by building a different type of relay. But for Frequency to actually get any real credits, I’ll first want to see it working in practice, because I do not feel that the crypto/blockchain ecosystem is one where organisations deserve the benefit of the doubt, and a large amount of “Ill believe it when I see it” is warranted.Bluesky clients update
Tapbots, the makers of popular apps like Ivory for Mastodon and Tweetdeck for Twitter have announced they are making an app for Bluesky called Phoenix. Tapbots said that they see Mastodon as their home on the social web, and plan to continue developing Ivory. They also said that they need to keep up with Bluesky, as that is where the growth is, and the company cannot sustain itself on subscription income from Ivory alone. Some app developers, like Openvibe, are working to combine the multiple networks such as fediverse and Bluesky and Nostr into a single app. However, this is not the direction that Tapbots is taking, saying they believe the user experience is better if the networks keep being separate. The plan is to release Phoenix somewhere this summer.
Image-focused Bluesky client Flashes has officially launched this week, and the client has racked up over 50k downloads so far. Flashes is a Bluesky client, and at its core it is a way to view images posted on Bluesky. One of the challenges of building an Instagram-like image-sharing app as a Bluesky client is that people use microblogging platforms in a different way than image-sharing platforms like Instagram. Flashes includes features to help people share photos in a way that’s more Instagram than Bluesky. For example, the Portfolio feature allows people to their best photos as their portfolio’, while filtering out less serious content such as a quick meme. Flashes also prominently features two custom feeds for only posts that are made with Flashes, to get timelines that are more catered towards photo-sharing.
ThreadSky is a Bluesky client, that is a mix between Reddit and Bluesky. ThreadSky takes Bluesky posts, and displays them in a Reddit-style format. This makes ThreadSky different from other ATProto-based link-aggregator platforms like Frontpage. Frontpage is largely separate from Bluesky, only your account is shared between Frontpage and Bluesky. ThreadSky is a client for Bluesky, and displays Bluesky data in a visually distinct manner that is more suited for reading comments sections. The app is still in development, with quite some features not working yet. However, I do find that a Bluesky client that focusing on the comment section of Bluesky posts to be an interesting direction, and it does make reading comment sections on popular posts quite a bit easier.Bluesky is political
Two weeks ago I wrote about how the America’s rapid decline into authoritarianism is resulting in Bluesky becoming a political actor in itself. Authoritarianism does not tend to go well with places that allow people of the opposition to freely gather, talk and organise. In that light, some more illustrations on how Bluesky is an explicitly political place:
The TeslaTakedown protest movement against Elon Musk has its roots on Bluesky in a conversation between actor Alex Winter and sociologist and professor Joan Donovan. Winter describes Bluesky as his major tool for signal-boosting and driving momentum for the protests, with writers like Ed Niedermeyer also using the network to drive the momentum on the protest movement forward.
A simple comparison in engagement on Threads and Bluesky for the phrase Slava Ukraini.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not going to Trump’s Joint Address, instead commenting and answering questions on Bluesky and Instagram Live.
Bluesky as a place that shapes politics is also visible in Russian disinformation network Matryoshka being active, this time to spread false rumours about Germany’s election being rigged.Some updates on Trust & Safety on Bluesky:
Last week, someone hacked television screens inside an US government office building to display an AI-generated video of Donald Trump sucking on Elon Musk’s toes. Videos from inside the office that also showed the AI-generated video appeared on Bluesky, first posted by reporter Marisa Kabas, where it went viral. This post then got taken down by Bluesky for violation the rules on “non-consensual explicit material”. 404 Media published an entire article on the situation. Bluesky reversed course quickly and restored the post, saying “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.” Another Bluesky employee clarified that “the mods are *very* touchy on any AI generated sexual videos. We have updated policy to make exceptions for notable political/newsworthy cases like this.”
Bluesky also announced they are partners with the Internet Watch Foundation. Bluesky will use several of IWF’s services, which are related to shared lists of known CSAM material to help Bluesky find and take down such content more easily. Bluesky also worked on cutting down on DM spam in recent weeks.In other news
Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser talked about Blacksky in a podcast interview
Registering a recovery key for your ATProto account.
Bluesky ads.
cred.blue is a library of ATProto resources.
Bluesky will be at SXSW, with CEO Jay Graber giving a keynote as well as a session with The Onion.
PMSky is a project to build peer moderation on Bluesky.Next week’s sneak peek
Next week’s edition will be focused on ATProto and the wider ATMosphere network again. Some news that I’ll be covering, with a sneak peek if you’re interested in digging in yourself:
Threaded is a Git collaboration platform on ATProto.
The ATProto Community fund announced a project for location data on ATProto.
Popsky is a review platform app for iOS.
OpenMeet is an open source alternative to MeetUp build on ATProto.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all the articles of this week, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
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