This is the second part of this week's news, you can find yesterday's report here, with news of Ganders fundraiser and how atproto governance is in the process of being housed at the IETF.
Semble
Semble.so is a new knowledge sharing platform on atproto, build by the Cosmik Network team. It allows people to create collections of links, organise them into 'collections', and see what other people having been gathering. Semble takes clear inspiration from platforms like are.na or Sublime.
The platform is launched in alpha, and in the Lab Notes the team give an overview of other planned features, including further integrations with other atproto platforms such as Bluesky and Leaflet, which they discuss in more detail here:
I've been using Semble quite a bit over the last few days, and I'm really enjoying it. Sharing interesting links and seeing what other people are sharing is a style of social networking that fits with my style more than microblogging, so its nice to have a place for that now.
I'm especially interested in how this space of interoperability between different platforms like Semble and Leaflet will evolve. There is a large amount of potential here, and the openness of atproto allows for rapid experimentation.
Other people are excited to build on this too, and here are some 3p extensions for Semble
So excited by @cosmik.network progress. And because we can just do stuff, I made some @raycast.com and Chrome extensions to help 🧑🔬 folks share knowledge on Semble even faster #ATscience #AcademicSky 🧪 marginalia.leaflet.pub/3m5gcukfzhc2p 🧶 @tangled.org repos in the post, and thread #ATproto
I made 2 extensions for Semble: Add new Cards in Google Chrome, then recall them with Raycast - Marginalia
Some thoughts on moderation
Bluesky suspended the writer Sarah Kendzior for three days, saying that she broke the rules last month by posting a death threat.
I don't hold a strong opinion on the case itself, but I do think two things are worth flagging here:
First is head of T&S Aaron Rodericks stating that Bluesky making a public statement is part of a shift towards being more transparent:
Here's a shift towards being more transparent - bsky.app/profile/safe...
The account owner of @sarahkendzior.bsky.social was suspended for 72 hours for expressing a desire to shoot the author of an article. The post, made 11/10, stated: "I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die." 1/2
Second is that Gizmodo thought this case to be worthwhile enough to write an entire article about it:
I'm not particularly interested in litigating whether the suspension was justified. What interests me is that this made it into Gizmodo, specifically because Twitter's cultural relevance partly came from its role as an assignment board for journalists. If a writer getting a 3-day suspension on Bluesky can now generate enough feed chatter to prompt a full Gizmodo article, then that signals to me that Bluesky is starting to take over that function from X.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang also commented that they'll be more open and share more information about mod decisions going forward. But I think another part of why this is important is somewhat hinted at in this post by Wang:
Our goal is to enforce policies so people can have a good time, learn something. If you don’t like our policies or trust our decisions, there will be other places with other policies you can go soon. We exist to provide choice. We’re working as quickly as we can to decentralize fully.
One of the goals of atproto is to have multiple providers of moderation that people can choose between. This will inevitably result in provider A making a different decision than provider B. In such a context of plurality staying silent on decisions simply is not an option, especially when it is unclear if the difference in choice is because the TOS is different or the interpretation of the alleged violation is different.
On a related note, Rodericks also wrote about Bluesky's moderation process this week:
Every system we build—from Ozone to stackable moderation—is an attempt to improve one of those three axes: accuracy, speed, or alignment. But we'll never reach perfection on all three simultaneously. That's the trade-off every moderation team in the world faces.
Sure why not, lets bite some people
Wafrn and Red Dwarf are two projects/platforms that are interoperable with Bluesky, while being fully independent, as well as not following the protocol architecture that Bluesky follows. This gives them more flexibility to add their own features.
released three new experimental features for reddwarf.app today. you can now send and receive bites, and also view posts from bridgy/wafrn with their original formatting
My main interest here is in seeing platforms develop that are both interoperable with Bluesky and Bluesky's lexicon, while also adding unique features. How interoperability works in such cases is not yet fully defined, and it is just developers experimenting and figuring out what works best.
(another example of interoperability with Red Dwarf)
And an interview with the developers of Wafrn:
And an explanation of how Wafrn's integration with Bluesky works:
Music streaming with Plyr.fm
Another new atproto platform this week: music streaming with Plyr.fm. It has the basic functionality of a Soundcloud-clone, but executed well on the design and features.
Static sites on your PDS with wisp.place
Wisp.place is a new platform that allows you to host a static site on your PDS. Your PDS contains the site, while wisp.place reads the site from your PDS and servers it through a CDN.
I think using the PDS to host the data of a static site is a highly under-explored part of atproto, and I expect to see more experimentation in this field. Personally I hope to have some time in the next few weeks to hack together something similar for my own personal site as well.
A more technical description of wisp.place here:
Some links
An excellent long-read interview with Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold:
Lots of good insight in there, and one I'll highlight:
But broadly, I can say that the AT Proto development community is just great vibes, and really smart, thoughtful people. I really like that.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee has some thoughts on protocol design, and is looking for feedback. It is about a fairly technical part of atproto, but it does have meaningful consequences, as Frazee points out. Recommended for people who have opinions about protocols to take a look at this, there are some interesting tradeoffs involved here.
Alex Benzer, head of product at Bluesky, wants to know if people are interested in a Twitter archive importer:
if we built a twitter archive importer so you could find people you know from twitter on @bsky.app, would y'all use it?
To get a sense of what the wider culture's perception of Bluesky is:
BlueSky shoutout on Abbot Elementary!
New features and design for event planning app Smoke Signal: