Laurens HofBluesky Report – #133
A programming note: over the last weeks I’ve been experimenting with some different formats to share news about Bluesky and ATProto, instead of this weekly newsletter that contains all the news. I’ve been posting shorter updates on ATProto-powered publishing platform Leaflet, and sharing those on Bluesky, you can view all of them here at connectedplaces.leaflet.pub.
Doing so has worked out well, and I’m working out the best way to do so structurally. For now, it means that there have been a few news stories from Bluesky and ATProto that I’ve not written about, which are the focus on this article.
Meanwhile, there are two major stories that I’m not writing about today:
- The ongoing movement around the world regarding age verification laws for social media. New age verification laws are being rolled out in Brazil and Australia, and Bluesky is expanding their age verification service to the US states of South Dakota and Wyoming.
- There is a deliberate effort made to designate Bluesky as a ‘leftist‘ space by US pundits, while at the same time related US pundits are actively calling for the US government to crack down on all left and democratic organisations and spaces.
Yesterday I wrote about why I care about the open social web, and that these networks face a variety of threats, from techno-fascism to government shutdowns to age verification laws which mainly seem to function as an entrenchment of Big Tech. In that context I think the above news stories are by far the most important stories to understand Bluesky, ATProto and the wider open social web. However, I’m still finding the balance on how to write about these stories: I have no interest in become a pundit on US politics. The attitudes, opinions and takes of US pundits on Bluesky however are increasingly done in a manner that it might materially impact Bluesky and the open social web. My thinking for now is to deliberately wait a while before writing on such news, so I approach such subjects with more distance and give me some time for my thoughts to form.
With that out of the way, a short overview of all the other things that happened in the last few weeks in the ATmosphere that I haven’t covered yet elsewhere. There’s a lot of other stuff happening as well, which I’ll write about early next week again!
The News
Bluesky continues to be an important platform for academic research. Nature has published an article on an arXiv preprint dataset that analyses Bluesky posts, and finds that posts about research on Bluesky receive substantially more attention than similar posts on X. Nature reports: “The team found that almost half of the posts about science on Bluesky garnered at least ten likes, and that one-third were reposted ten or more times. Previous research on X has shown that the proportion of science posts receiving at least ten likes varied between 4% and 7.5%, and that the proportion receiving ten or more reposts ranged from 1.4% to 4.4%2. Interactions on Bluesky were an order of magnitude higher than on X, the researchers said. Quotes — whereby users share posts and add their own text — and replies were nearly two orders of magnitude greater on Bluesky than on X, they said.” Altmetric, an organisation that measures social media research impact, also finds that Bluesky continues to grow in importance for academic research. They report that they are “starting to see higher total cumulative annual mentions for entire organisations on Bluesky than on Twitter.”
Custom feed builder platform Graze has been offering the ability to include advertisements in custom feeds for a while now. Graze ran a benchmarking test where they ran a fundraising ad campaign for NPR and CBS. Graze saw a 168% return on ad spend for this campaign. Graze says that this compares to an average of 48% return on ad spend on Meta’s platforms. Furthermore, Graze’s campaign did not feature any type of targeting or user profiling, in contrast with Meta’s extensive targeting (and surveillance) infrastructure. Another aspect is that 70% of the ad spend on a Graze campaign goes to the feed operator, for example the green.shoots fund supports ATProto communities with the revenue from promoted posts on custom feeds. It shows that there is a significant potential for Bluesky as an advertising ecosystem as well
The ATProto community held a Community Hack day in New York at the end of August, with demos of the products that people are working on. Vlogger and streamer DaPurpleSharpie has an excellent live blog of the event, which gives a good impression of what people are working on: from integrations with crypto wallets to IFTTT on ATProto: If This than AT. Another ATProto-related event that recently happened was the Protocols for Publishers session, about how to build an internet that works for publishers, with a strong focus on the potential of ATProto in this space. NiemanLab has a writeup of the event.
Last week’s Bluesky and ATProto news reports
For last week, I wrote multiple shorter news posts about ATProto, which you can find here:
Playing With Fediverse
cinquleur
Pleroma development feed
fortune