dan

bittersweet news: today is my last day at Bluesky. 💙 i’m very thankful to the team for letting me learn many new things on the job (including React Native). i’m wishing them luck in the improbable — but inevitable — task of making decentralized social media usable and competitive.

my main “bluesky tip” is simply — like and follow posts and people you enjoy seeing in your feed, and “show less” what you don’t enjoy.

“training” Discover algorithm takes annoyingly long for now — but it does get more specific with time, and the team will be making it more responsive. data helps.

a few common Bluesky misconceptions i see in articles

i wonder if diagrams like these might help draw the distinction between ActivityPub (and how Mastodon uses it) and AT Protocol (and how it’s used by Bluesky and atproto apps)?

with AP, instance = application + hosting. data gets sent between instances.

with AT, data flows *from* hosting *to* apps

in early 2000s microsoft ceo said open source was “cancer”. now open source is common sense

i wonder how long it’ll take for open social to become common sense

"but where are all the bluesky instances?"

i've heard this so many times that i wrote an explainer

formats over apps

i’m not procrastinating i’m microworking

hi to all old friends from twitter!

i want to show you this thing: atproto-browser.vercel.app. put your bluesky handle in it and explore :)

this should give you some intuition about how this place works under the hood. happy to answer any questions about it!

sneak peak of what just landed on main (should go out in one of the next releases)

atproto aha moments:

- you can host your data
- it's just json
- it's typed but any app dev can invent those types
- records have URIs
- records are signed so cacheable without trust
- relay aggregates everyone’s events into a global stream
- backends subscribe to relay and update local DBs

Reply to @danabra.mov

since this keeps going around, a few common clarifications:

- no pay-to-play. we won’t prioritize comments of subscribers
- we don’t plan to do Twitter-style “paid checkmarks”
- if we do add a “supporter” profile badge, it will be hideable
- bookmarks will be free (when we get to them)

i’ve joined bluesky as a software developer. i already announced it on twitter and copypasting doesn’t feel right so i’ll link to my thread: x.com/dan_abramov/.... since bluesky is still invite-only, for now i’ll probably keep using twitter for announcement-y stuff and bluesky for more random posts

this will require quite a bit of polish before we can put it into a release but the thread composer prototype is finally working!

huge thanks to @mary.my.id whose monumental exploratory PR provided the basis of this work — there’s absolutely no way we’d get even to this stage by now without it

the video feed thing is a first pass that the team knocked out in a week. the algorithm is repetitive now — it will improve over time

i’m excited that third party devs can work with video feeds from day one. bluesky app can display other devs’ video feeds; other apps can display our video feed

i'm looking for a new job

now might be a good time to plug the talk i gave last month about the AT Protocol. it’s about the relationship between the user and the product, about the shape of the web, and a bit about death

i wrote down the process of resolving an at:// URI step by step. turns out, it's a great way to learn how the AT protocol works!

Reply to @danabra.mov

"bluesky has no algorithm"

it does! it has many algorithms. it has as many as you want, in fact — and any developer can make their own.

there is also a default Discover algorithmic feed (which probably should be renamed to For You) that we maintain.

the difference is just you're not stuck with it

log in with your internet handle

love that shit

found on wikipedia: the capture of russian explorers by samurai of the tokugawa shogunate in 1811

i want to do a little ✨ ama about atproto ✨ in this thread. no question is too simple

if you’ve been curious about atproto but don’t know much (anything?) about it, ask any question and i’ll try to explain it in my own words.

(+ would love to hear from friends who aren’t very active on bsky)