Bluesky's "Find Friends ... makes it easy to find people you know on Bluesky... protects your privacy and keeps you in control", unlike other platforms' approach to contact import, which have resulted in "phone numbers have been leaked or brute-forced, sold to spammers, or used by platforms for dubious purposes". Key point: "It only works if both …

Laurens Hof's report from EuroskyLive looks at Robin Berjon's use of Elinor Ostrom's observation that "The properties that define the architecture of a protocol and those that define the rules in an institution are the same", and how this is illustrated by Bluesky's recent changes to their reporting system, which expands the "6 reporting options t…

"Composable moderation decentralizes rule-setting, reducing pressure on any single platform and limiting attempts to “work the refs... pressure a singular trust and safety team into making decisions that favor their side”.Gives a good summary of how "Composable moderation ... uses labels to describe issues with content or accounts, leaving individ…

"Large organisations need dedicated tools and processes to manage their Bluesky presence and get the most out of ATproto".A repost onto Medium of version 4 of a wiki page I've been developing for most of the year.

"What happens when you put politicians, media businesses and protocol engineers in the same room to discuss European sovereignty?" - my post following Eurosky.Live in Berlin, November 2025.

"A journalist gets blocked by Bluesky, but her Bluesky posts can still be seen via Blacksky. This apparent contradiction goes to the heart of resilient social media, where businesses must support their users to stay in business"

"Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA) delivered a letter to social media leaders demanding the immediate removal of posts and accounts that celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk" is a good example of why social media conversations must NOT be concentrated in one legal jurisdiction (particularly, let's face it, Trump's US).The letter was sent to …

Further progress by Bluesky on "improving the quality of replies and making conversations feel more personal, constructive, and in your control":identifying social neighbourhoods "the people you already interact with or would likely enjoy knowing" and prioritising conversations in thema dislike option to help personalise Discover & other feeds. "D…

"Bluenotes is a fully-featured fork of the Bluesky social app, with the addition of a Community Notes feature that works just like Twitter/X's Community Notes."I logged in using a Bluesky app password for now (they're working on OAuth) and kicked the tyres. The interface is Bluesky with a twist: my accounts, custom feeds, etc., but with an additio…

"When infrastructure is too centralized, gatekeepers gain new powers to capture, enshittify, and censor."Short, link-rich piece on the many ways science is being undermined by gatekeeping scientific publishers and "Large intermediary platforms... inserting themselves between researchers and between the researchers and these published works—through…

Laurens pulling no punches: "The Trump administration ... relies on social media for validation of their policies and proposals", with how its actions will play on social a major consideration in what it does - the tail wagging the dog. They rely on X, but "As X radicalises more and more into a place for regime supporters, the platform starts to l…

The leaflet and Semble teams discuss cross-lexicon integrations, creating interoperability without falling down the "slippery slope to building an "everything" app". The approach: plugins a la Obsidin.As "Semble is all about collecting, curating, and sharing "micro-knowledge" -- insights, recommendations, reviews, hot-takes and so on -- ... [ie] c…

"while many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that’s misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well... not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing... But there’s a huge problem in that many people ... seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of co…

"Bluesky develops open protocols, and we want everybody to feel confident building on them. We have released our software SDKs and reference implementations ... To provide additional assurance around patent rights, we are making ... the short and simple Protocol Labs Patent Non-Aggression Pledge: Bluesky Social will not enforce any of the patents …

"the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted a workshop with eighteen experts to explore governance challenges to defederation... on decentralized social media [which] offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety".A good example of how the dis…

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…

"We’ve built a network of scientists and researchers active on Bluesky. The goal is to better understand how this group of users interact on the platform... we arrived at a science-oriented network of 17,980", computed centrality measures to identify influential members, and created an interactive 3d visualisation.They also provide details of the …

"Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X... according to the first large-scale analysis of science content on Bluesky... suggest Bluesky users engage with posts more than do users of X... The results were posted as a preprint on arXiv last month and have not been peer reviewed.""Interactions on Bluesky wer…

Collection of posts from media publishers on the traffic and engagement from Bluesky compared to X, Threads, etc. Image: Similarweb's report, which also said:"Threads generated 24.5 million outgoing referrals in November, but 42% of that traffic was to sister site instagram.com. Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits, spread more evenly ac…

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…

X is still larger but very regularly Bluesky easily eclipses it in terms of research being shared.

Very first post on the ATmosphere Health Index

"decentralized approaches come with their own trade-offs, and therefore multiple architectures exist... we conduct the first large-scale analysis of Bluesky... [which] decomposes and opens the key functions of the platform into subcomponents that can be provided by third party stakeholders".The intros of Fediverse and Nostr provide a useful spectr…

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…

This study examines:"the shift in the scientific community from X to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics", following the Academic Twitter migration. Is there "evidence of a community shift", and if so "examine the differences in values and indicators..."? "provide valuable insights into whether Blue…

Altmetric's blog post announcing that they had "expanded its tracking capabilities by integrating Bluesky" when there were "over 20 million users".

This preprint "looks at the dynamics of this migration" from X to Mastodon of academics: using "publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period... gathered follower-followee relationships ... finding that the subset of academics ... were well-connected. However, this strong intern…

"Jack Dorsey ... invested $10 million ... fund experimental open source projects and other tools that could ultimately transform the social media landscape." Original focus nostr, but now "will experiment with other tools, too, like ActivityPub... as well as Cashu.""operating like a “community of hackers,”... could include new consumer social apps…

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 …

"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, …