Making custom feed building blocks with Surf, transfer your account to a new PDS in style with ATP Airport, and Bluesky expands their verification system.
ATmosphere Report – #118Making custom feed building blocks with Surf, transfer your account to a new PDS in style with ATP Airport, and Bluesky expands their verification system.
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ATP Airport is a new tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS, created by Spark developer Roscoe Rubin-Rottenberg. Migrating to a different PDS was already possible, but required
technical know-how. ATP Airport makes the process much more accessible, with an easy-to-use interface and striking design. What’s notable about the design of ATP Airport is that it takes a story-telling approach to explain and frame what is a fairly technically sophisticated operation. Moving a user’s repo with their social networking data from one server to another is an operation that has no clear equivalent in the current social networking landscape. This makes the process hard to explain to people: knowing what a repo transfer to a different PDS does, and why someone would want to do it, requires a significant amount of knowledge. ATP Airport is an interesting attempt to make this technical process more accessible, by using an analogy of airport transfers. Making the concepts of ATProto, and the new affordances that regular users now have access to will require a lot more education and explanation from a wide variety of actors. ATP Airport already refers to an upcoming new feature: the ability to set your own rotation keys for your PDS. This is another example of a complex technical feature, that requires technical know-how both in execution, as well as in understanding why a user would want to do such a thing. Storytelling and analogies to make features such as PDS transfers and PLC rotation keys legible are sorely needed, and ATP Airport is a cool way of making it more accessible.
Bluesky is
expanding their
verification system, and people can now apply to be verified. Bluesky says that “notable and authentic accounts can apply for verification”. The
eligibility guidelines for notability are
quite broad, and each account is considered on a per-case basis. Bluesky also expanded their list of Trusted Verifiers, adding
another set of news organisations as Trusted Verifiers. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee describes one of the design goals of the verification system as
“a healthy digital society should distribute power!” So far, Bluesky has limited their distribution of power over who should be verified to only American news organisations. When the system launched last month, I
wrote how the system of Trusted Verifiers simply moves the power further up the chain. The way that Bluesky PBC limits Trusted Verifiers to a single specific type of news organisations, shows the limited extent that power is distributed so far when it comes to verification.
I wrote the following about Surf this week’s
fediverse newsletter, republished here as it is just as relevant for the ATProto community. Surf is a new app by Flipboard, that describes itself as a browser for the open social web. The app allows people to build and browse custom feeds, that take in content from across the open social web. It can combine Mastodon posts with Bluesky posts, as well as RSS and more, into a single feed. With their most recent
update, Surf has created Starter Sets for building custom feeds. Starter Sets are organised around various popular themes, like News, Tech or Sports. Within these themes, people can choose from a large variety of data sources to get started with building their own custom feeds. These custom feed sources can be from across the open social web and are modular. This means that a list of Mastodon accounts can be combined with a Bluesky custom feed to create a new single custom feed that consists of both data source. These custom feeds can also be published to Bluesky, so people who are not using the Surf app can also view these feeds.
Surf also now offers a variety of tools to manage the content of a custom feed. For example, a feed can be customised to include or exclude reposts, replies or adult content. There are also options to filter out posts about politics from the feed. The ability to filter about posts about Elon Musk is surely a popular feature as well. Surf categorises all posts via algorithmic clustering, which gives the ability to limit posts in a feed to a certain topic. This means that you can add an account to a feed, but only their posts related to the specified topic will be displayed. The app is currently in closed beta, and Flipboard is gradually onboarding more people from the waiting list.
In Other News
Graze, a tool to build and monetise custom feeds, recently started
Graze Grants, where they fund 5 projects on ATProto with 1000 USD to grow the network. This week, Graze
announced the first two recipients of these grants, SkyShrooms and Tomo. SkyShrooms is a mushroom-themed trading card and battle game built on ATProto. Tomo is an old-school guestbook that can be added to personal websites, powered by ATProto. Creator Ms Boba has regularly been
live streaming her work on creating such a guest book as well.
ATProto video app Spark has
shared some of the features they are working on. They include a video editor, duets, a sound library, live streaming and more. It is an ambitious set of features that Spark is working on. Spark is not a video client for Bluesky, comparable to Skylight, instead they use their own data format (lexicon). Using a different lexicon than Bluesky is a tradeoff; it requires the app to build more infrastructure themselves, be responsible for moderation, and lose some of the interoperability with people using the Bluesky app. However, the planned features shown by Spark here also show the value doing so, it allows Spark to build a set of features that would not be possible as a Bluesky video client.
Wormhole is a browser extension for ATProto that allows you to easily switch between apps while viewing the same data. If you have a post open in Bluesky, the extension allows you seamlessly to open that same post in a variety of other ATProto apps, from PDS browsers like atp.tools and PDSls to PLC log viewers like
boat.kelinci and more.
UFOs is a new tool and API which provides
data and insight on how all lexicons are used on the network. It is made by the creator of
microcosm, which they describe as ‘building blocks for ATProto’. One of these other building blocks is constellation, which keeps track of all links on the entire ATProto network, and the network consists now of over
5 billion backlinks. Links in this context means any form of interaction that happens on the network, as any interaction consists of a backlink to another piece of data. UFOs is effectively a filter on all of these data, to show which data types (and thus, which applications) are being used on the network.
BlueArk is a tool to import Twitter/X posts into Bluesky with the original data. BlueArk tried to build a small business around the tool, as it was launched during the period in late 2024 where Bluesky saw a massive inflow of users. As this inflow has slowed down significantly, BlueArk
says they are entering maintenance-only mode, as they cannot cover cost anymore. The service will remain available for the time being.
A
Working Group for a Commons European Moderation Relay has started, with the goal of figuring out how to build DSA-compliant moderation infrastructure. One major challenge for people and organisations that are currently considering is figuring out what compliance with European regulation like the DSA looks like. There is uncertainty both from a legal perspective (for example, how does the DSA apply to an infrastructure part like a common open relay) as well as technical practicalities (what is the best way to handle takedown requests for independent PDS hosting providers).
Bluesky in the media:
- A podcast interview with Bluesky’s head of Trust & Safety Aaron Rodericks, in which Rodericks talks more about how to make decisions during phases of rapid growth with limited resources.
- Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke at the Web Summit conference, VOD here.
Tech and tools
- Skyswipe is a new video client for Bluesky, that gives a TikTok-like interface. The app is available for beta testing on iOS Testflight. The developer says that there are no current plans for an Android version.
- A demo implementation of creating group chats on Bluesky chats. It works by creating a bot account that forwards the messages between all the different participants of the group chat.
- The PDS implementation in Rust by the Blacksky team now has full admin capabilities, similar to the Bluesky implementation.
- A new tool for ‘like’ statistics, and see which accounts have ‘liked’ the most of your posts, and which accounts have you ‘liked’ the most.
- A new tool to handle PDS admin via a web interface.
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 this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog
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