ATmosphere Report – #109

The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, independent relays are starting to appear, and more.

ATmosphere Conference

This weekend was the first ATProto conference, the ATmosphere Conference, in Seattle. Over two days there were a large number of speakers and sessions, with over 150 people in attendance, and a significant number watching the live streams as well. I could not make it to the US, so for a full overview of the event, I recommend this extensive article by TechCrunch’ Sarah Perez, who was present at the event. The entire event was livestreamed, and all talks can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.

Some assortment of thoughts I had while watching the livestream and VODs over the last few days:

• Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave a short speech, about her background as a digital rights activist, and how she is now “holding the door open, so people can see another world is possible”. Graber is clearly aware of her position, where she is seen as a figurehead of the network, while also wanting to build a decentralised network where there is place for competing platforms. Being a figurehead of a network, without becoming the de facto leader of the network, while also holding the leadership position of by far the largest organisation in the network, is a challenging position to balance.
• Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee talked about where Bluesky came from and where it is going. One of the things he talked about is the consideration of why Bluesky decided on their own protocol and not ActivityPub. His answer focuses on practical considerations, especially how ActivityPub handles identity and account migration. Watching the ATProto Ethos talk by Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren it struck me that the question could also be framed as a matter of lineage. Holmgren talks about how ATProto takes inspiration from the Web, Peer to Peer systems as well as Distributed Systems. Placing it in such a context makes it clear that ATProto has quite a different background and other ways of thinking than ActivityPub has.
• Ændra Rhinisland talked about how community projects can become load-bearing for the network, without adequate support structures for the people who run such projects. She also runs the popular news feeds using Graze. Graze has been adding support for advertisements, and Ændra is one of the first to take advantage. In her talk she walked through how at current usage rates, the feeds could generate over $20k per month in ad revenue. She plans to use this revenue to support the queer communities building on ATProto, and showed early plans for a self-sustaining fund powered by Graze’s feed revenue, to support initiatives such as Northsky.
• The talk by Ms Boba is a great indication of how much under-explored design space there is on Bluesky and ATProto. Her talk focuses on labelers and fandom communities, and has some great examples of how they can be used outside of moderation.
• Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser gave an excellent talk, describing Bluesky as a skeuomorphism, meaning that it imitates the design of the product it’s replacing. This phase is a part of the adoption cycle for new technologies, but Fraser does not to stop at imitation but instead explore the new ways that communities can be build online. Fraser is specifically interested in building platforms that can serve mid-sized communities, ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million people. The Blacksky community is an example of this, and Fraser hopes that Blacksky can inspire other communities to do the same. His framing of content moderation as community care and not a cost of business also resonated with me.
• Erin Kissane’s talk goes into detail about vernacular institutions, local and grassroots organisations and practices that are often illegible to outsiders but deeply embedded in local communities. This allows them to be close to the needs of their community members, but makes them hard to see and understand from the outside. This outside illegibility is a double-edged sword: IFTAS served a crucial role for trust and safety in the fediverse ecosystem, but had to shut down to a lack of funding as a result of being illegible to financiers.

Some more articles on the events:

• The under-the-radar tech revolution that could change how the internet works – Marcelo Calbucci/GeekWire
• Things That Caught My Attention – Dan Hon
• What’s next for ATProto, the protocol powering Bluesky and other apps – Sarah Perez/TechCrunch

The next ATProto conference, Ahoy!, will be in Hamburg, Germany, on April 24th. This one-day conference will feature ATProto speakers from the European side: Sebastian Vogelsang, who develops the Bluesky clients Skeets and Flashes, Redsolver, who has build the first popular custom feed platform Skyfeed, and Anirudh Oppiliappan, who is the cofounder of git colloboration platform Tangled. I can tease that I’m pretty excited about the next speaker to be announced, who is also a very familiar name within the ATProto developer community, so stay tuned!

On relays

Bluesky PBC has been working on a new version of the relay that makes it easier and cheaper to host, under the Sync 1.1 proposal. This new version is now starting to roll out, showing a significant drop in resource usage. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shared some statistics here. Independent ATProto developer @futur.blue set up his own relay as a speedrun. He shows that a full network relay can be run on a 50USD Raspberry Pi, with an easy-to-follow tutorial here.

That full network ATProto relays are cheap to run has been known for a while within the ATProto developer community, but that knowledge has not spread much yet. One reason for this is that independent developers have set up relays primarily for their own use, sharing access with a few friends, but no other publicly accessible full-network relays exist yet1.

Upcoming short-form video platform Spark is building their own complete infrastructure. Spark’s relay will publicly accessible, and hosted in Brazil. Having ATProto infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction is a conversation that has come up regularly, and often followed by the assumption that the alternative is to have infrastructure like a relay hosted in Europe. Spark is bringing in a slightly unexpected twist here, by having the first publicly accessible relay that is not owned by Bluesky PBC being hosted in Brazil instead.

Having other relays that are not owned by Bluesky PBC has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and the Free Our Feeds campaign was founded on the idea that a significant financial investment is needed to do so. Furthermore, it assumes that such a relay is not only expensive, but that it requires an extensive governance infrastructure to manage it. The current developments regarding relays call both of these assumptions into serious question: relays are cheap, not expensive. Furthermore it seems that there is enough incentive that organisations that are serious about building their own ATProto platforms are willing to run their own relays.

In Other News

Bluesky PBC has published a proposal on how they want to handle OAuth Scopes. OAuth Scopes is one of the main projects on the roadmap for the first half of this year. Currently, logging into an ATProto app via OAuth requires you to give that app permission to access all the data for your account. OAuth Scopes allows an app to only ask for the permissions that are necessary, and not the entire account. There are two problems that need to solve: the technical part of making it work, as well as the handling the UX to communicate clearly to people what data an app wants to access. The challenging part of the UX is how to handle the translation from the technical description of the data that is requested (stylised like ‘app.bsky.feed.getFeed’, for example), into a way that is understandable for the everyday user. The second challenge is that apps require permission not for one, but for many types of this lexicon data. A third-party Bluesky client that is restricted to only Bluesky data will still have to request a dozen of these Lexicons. A long list of technical lexicon names makes it impossible for regular people to have an informed opinion on what data is and is not being accessed. Bluesky PBC’s proposal is to group different lexicons into bundles, and create new lexicons that reference these bundles. Scoped OAuth can then request access to a bundle of lexicons, with a description that is legible for regular people.

Git repository platform Tangled is working on news ideas how a GitHub alternative might do things differently, and one of their first proposals is defining two types of pull requests. For another look at Tangled, this blog post experiment with what the platform allows.

One of the talks at the ATmosphereConf was by independent developer Rashid Aziz, who is the co-founder of basic.tech. Basic is a protocol for user-owned data, and seems to be fairly comparable to the PDS part of ATProto, with the major difference that Basic allows for private data on their version of a PDS. Aziz used the combination of these two protocols to create private bookmarks for Bluesky.

The new Record Collector labeler automatically displays if someone has been using other apps in the ATmosphere outside of Bluesky.

Rocksky is a new music scrobbler service on ATProto, that is currently in closed beta testing. It allows people to connect their Spotify account and automatically ‘scrobble’ (track) the music they are listening to.

The Links

Some tech-focused links for ATProto:

• ATCryptography is a package with cryptographic utilities for the ATProto, written in Swift.
• A blog post by independent ATProto developer Mary about ‘AT Protocol, OAuth, and well, decentralization’. Mary also published a repository car file explorer this week.
• A Python API library for Bluesky.
• Independent ATProto developer Kuba Suder writes about database optimalisation and speeding up the process of firehose processing.
• ‘this website is hosted on bluesky (for real this time)’ is a blog post about hosting your website data on an ATProto PDS, with a ‘thin AppView layer’ for easier to parse URLs.

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 @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.

1. Cerulea.blue is a publicly accessible relay, using a custom implementation, but it is limited to non-Bluesky PDSes. ↩︎

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/atmosphere-report-109/