There are a lot of reasons to use Substack: apart from doing "all the basic things of a newsletter writing platform well", it's free to get started and - crucially - helps you build an audience. But "Substack makes it hard to leave when you want to leave the platform", as they're pursuing a classic lock-in strategy. Any competitor must provide sim…

At last, a single page setting out the What and Why of Blacksky, which "builds infrastructure for social groups to control how they show up online: how their feeds work, how harm is addressed, and how costs are covered. Instead of one-size-fits-all rules set by a company with growth targets, Blacksky enables groups to govern themselves, and pool r…

How Graze raised funding for NPR and PBS "while also learning more about the future of sponsored content on ATProto".Results: "The Graze.social NPR/PBS donation campaign's 168% ROAS is exceptional performance in the nonprofit digital advertising landscape. Industry benchmarks from M+R show that typical Facebook/Meta campaigns achieve only 48% retu…

The always good Laurens on the ActivityPub-ATproto open letter: "There is a large group of people who are actively moving the space forward, and who have signed the open letter that calls for mutual respect and working together for a better open social web. The number of people who voiced objections and concerns is minimal, but by focusing on proc…

"The first thing I noticed is how strange it felt to use... strange and empty, every interaction felt like it took an eternity... any interaction with others to require multiple levels of intentional actions".After acclimatising, however, "I began to feel comfortable ... very calming... [then] I ran out of stamina" - the site ceased 'working', so …

An open letter trying to calm troubled protocol waters: "the Social Web Community Group has seen an increase in heated discussions online ... a hotbed for conflict, disagreements, and misinformation. There has often been significant biases exhibited within these conversations."Points out that the 2 protocols have more in common than what divides t…

When this was written there were 23m Bluesky users: "Some publishers report traffic and conversion rates three to four times higher compared with platforms like Threads and X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.... EUobserver received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky (with 3,300 followers) compared to 1,320 from X (with 203,000 followers)...Fo…

Very first post on the ATmosphere Health Index

A 2024 paper from the Bluesky team where they "introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; make it easy for users to switch providers; give users agency over the c…

Some thoughts from a neuroscientist who's been kicking Bluesky's tyres: "The scientific community is once again shifting platforms... Between Mastodon’s ideals and Bluesky’s usability, we are faced with a complex landscape of compromises".Background: first he left X for Mastodon following Musk's purchase"over time, activity on Mastodon — at least …

"Europe’s systemic dependency on Big Tech’s social-media platforms threatens the continent’s digital sovereignty" - perhaps nothing new, but well argued nevertheless:"Just as the European Union seeks to reduce its reliance on external providers for semiconductors... it must do the same for social media. dominant platforms extract value from Europe…

"the next era of social media—built in Europe, run on our cloud, ruled by our laws... Social media is critical infrastructure, and a vital piece of the European tech sovereignty agenda... we need to build infrastructure ... on the AT Protocol... We have a plan for immediate action that can begin having an impact in 2025".Part of Free Our Feeds, …

Explore the definition and reference implementation of Lexicon Lenses, a transformation of records from one type to another. This working group is expected to production documentation produces lens definition, discovery, application, and best practices. It will also produce a feature complete reference implementation.

"Incorporating science social media into the scientific process [as]... Sharing large scientific datasets is a pain in the ass, and finding them is even worse [so let's build] ... A true "scientific data commons".. it's called github."However Github's social dimension is totally centralised - "that people do still share (small) data this way regul…

"Deer.social is a soft fork of the official Bluesky client, offering enhanced features, customizable toggles, and a focus on high-impact improvements for power users" as options you can toggle on, like the ability to "see through quote blocks and detachment (nuclear block for quotes/reply chains)", ignore " !no-unauthenticated labels", which I thi…

In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere — the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky.

In late April I was in Hamburg for Ahoy! 2025, the first European conference dedicated to the ATmosphere - the information ecosystem built atop of ATproto, the protocol underpinning Bluesky. I proposed a couple of ideas for the unconference sessions, and came away with content for at least 5 posts, none of which I've found time to write.

A deep dive into the April 2025 "censorship" on Turkish Bluesky illustrates that government censorship on ATmosphere apps is limited and will become even less effective as more people exploit its decentralised nature.Context in brief:March 2025, the Turkish "government ordered X to restrict access to various X accounts ... associated with the prot…

Some thoughts on how Groundmist supports the ideas I'm developing for decentralised collective intelligence, written in preparation for an online workshop with the Groundmist developer and other interested people.

Boris tests Leaflet's new ATproto integration: "Leaflet has a great rich text editor that works well even on mobile web. It’s a block based editor... you can embed various fancy blocks, like Bluesky embeds, RSVPs... Each block might be a different lexicon"(on Discord): "here’s the record in my PDS ... Blocks with rich text facets"More on leaflet:…

When I saw this "Open space proposal by Boris (Mann) at Ahoy" I shelved my very similar proposal and proposed another, which was successful (good news) and scheduled at the same time as Boris' (bad news).Boris' idea is essential, imho, to my ideas for decentralised collective intelligence - a "long form, Markdown lexicon Designed to work with digi…

The 3rd post of the series focuses "on interoperability and composability—how we can combine data from multiple local-first applications, privately and seamlessly".The problem: by their nature, "Local-first software applications typically store data separately and independently", so it's fragmented. The lack of "common mechanism or standard for de…

Grjte's 2nd Groundmist post "to explore ... local-first AppViews for local-first data, similar to atproto's AppViews for public data" first points out that the protocol allows anyone "to build a wide variety of different views ... of public ... Personal Data Servers (PDSes). These interfaces are known as "AppViews" ... provide just one of many pos…

Came across this via Boris Mann in the runup to Ahoy2025 - the very first time I saw someone developing the #ai4community tools I want for decentralised collective intelligence: "Groundmist echoes the design of AT Protocol... but applies these ideas and select elements of the protocol to local-first software and data... It uses Automerge, AT Proto…

Boris Mann's personal notes on what he wants for what is essentially the private garden segment of #ai4communities: a "multi-player personal notes & publishing stack", a place to put "meeting notes, quick scratch notes, pages on their way to be published, links and a few comments, research from multiple web pages... your companion for research, pr…

"Skeets is a 3rd party iOS / iPad OS client for Bluesky" which I saw at the Ahoy conference. It's a good example of how Bluesky is more than a X alternative: it can be used by any (iOS-carrying) Bluesky user, but offers other features than Bluesky PBC's own app, including:"Keep reading positionEdit postsPost notificationsBookmarks DraftsPush Notif…

"How would MyHub.ai evolve to become part of the ATmosphere?" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.

"Let's build a tool to help large organisations coordinate their Bluesky footprint, helping them get the most out of the platform" - One of my suggested conversation topics at the Ahoy conference, April, 2025.

Renée DiResta, "Invisible Rulers" author, on why "user exodus to smaller platforms has become increasingly common... What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees”; ... Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” ... attem…

Last month I published a couple of posts on X and Bluesky. They make a nice pair, so I'm including both, below, and taking this opportunity to ask for your perspective. I'd really value getting you and your organisation's views on both platforms in 2025, and I'd be happy to answer any questions in return.