Bluesky

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Bluesky is another project with Twitter-like features with its own protocols for and approach to open and decentralized social media that several IndieWeb community members POSSE to.

If you are looking for the open protocol being developed by Bluesky, see:

Why

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Why use or syndicate to Bluesky?

It's another interesting social web protocol experiment that has goals of decentralization and prioritizes user identity and data portability (both account migration and post migration).

...

How to

How to use your domain

The Bluesky blog has steps to use your domain name as directly your handle, either by setting up DNS TXT records or .well-known URL on your site.

Thread (on Twitter, ironic yes) showing people using their own domains for the bluesky identifiers: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/1650189488394756097

How to federate

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You'll hopefully soon be able to use Bridgy Fed to federate your personal site to Bluesky. Follow this GitHub issue for details.

How to POSSE

(stub - needs to be filled in, several IndieWeb community members are POSSEing to Bluesky, so let's document best practices for POSSEing to Bluesky)

IndieWeb Examples

Aaron Parecki

Ryan Barrett

Manton Reece

Manton Reece cross-posts most of his blog posts to Bluesky using Micro.blog's built-in support for Bluesky.

2023-04-29 Manton Reece: Getting started with Bluesky XRPC (archived)

I’ve done a little work now with the XRPC layer of the AT Protocol, supporting cross-posting to Bluesky from Micro.blog. This post is about what I’ve learned.

Ana Rodrigues

Marty McGuire

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill: I set up my account 2023-10-26 using gregorlove.com as my handle. I was going to wait for POSSE support, but when I saw Bridgy supported backfeed already, I decided to try it out. I'm currently manually cross-posting from my site.

First post:

Kelson Vibber

Kelson Vibber manually posts links to his new website posts on Bluesky, and plans to automate it eventually.

ben

ben: I set up my account April 2023. Setting up Bridgy in August 2024.

Dr. Matt Lee

Vika

Anthony Ciccarello

Anthony Ciccarello uses his domain as his handle and has been using Bridgy to cross-post since 2024-10-30. He includes a link on his homepage and instructions on his /subscribe page.

Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul Robert Lloyd uses his domain as his handle and has been using Indiekit to cross-post since 2025-04-14. He includes a link on his homepage.

Add yourself!

Add yourself here… (see this for more details)

Previous Examples

capjamesg

capjamesg used to publish manually to Bluesky every so often at https://bsky.app/profile/jamesg.blog/. He is working on a few open-source projects related to Bluesky:

Jacky Alcine

Features

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Bluesky has been roughly described as Twitter-like, thus has a similar set of features as Twitter.

IndieWeb Features

  • personal domain as identity: https://aaronparecki.com/2023/03/06/18/domains
    • "I'm glad to see that BlueSky supports custom domains! I have zero interest in sitting on a username in the bluesky namespace. Setting it up was roughly the same as pointing your own domain to a hosting provider, and a lot easier than Mastodon/ActivityPub!" @Aaron Parecki March 6, 2023

IndieWeb Requests

Requests to add support for building blocks to make the service more IndieWeb friendly:

Service Examples

microblog

micro.blog supports POSSE to Bluesky since 2023-04-24:

and is implementing support to directly federate with Bluesky, expected sometime in 2024:

Tools

Terminology

Data Storage

When you register on Bluesky, by default we'll suggest that Bluesky will store your data. But if you'd like to let another company store it, or even store it yourself, you can do that. You'll also be able to change your mind at any point, moving your data to another provider without losing any of your existing posts, likes, or follows. From your followers' perspective, your profile is always available at your handle—no matter where your information is actually stored, or how many times it has been moved.

AT Protocol

Main article: AT Protocol

"ADX" iteration of the protocol renamed to “Authenticated Transfer Protocol” — or the “AT Protocol.” https://atproto.com/

APIs

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Articles

FAQ

Not Twitter controlled

Q: Is Bluesky Twitter controlled?

A: In short, no.

A separate organization from Twitter was announced 2022-02-07. Twitter also has no equity or other involvement in Bluesky. Citations here. Notably:

Twitter’s funding of Bluesky is not subject to any conditions except one: that Bluesky is to research and develop technologies that enable open and decentralized public conversation.

– @bluesky on Twitter, Apr 25, 2022

In response to criticism & thread: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1204791506143457281

  • "Jack is many things, but an idiot he is not. He's whip smart. He knows we exist, he literally follows us.

    This is not an announcement of reinventing the wheel. This is announcing the building of a protocol that Twitter gets to control, like Google controls Android." @joinmastodon December 11, 2019

Criticism

Handwavy

  • https://twitter.com/hallam/status/1536338344665292803
    • "It is worth noting that this is the second hand wavy proposal Dorsey has come up with in the space of 12 months. BlueSky promised much the same.

      The Stolen Valor of calling it ‘Web/X’ should be a warning as should the fact that CryptoPonzi land is sinking today as Celsius rugs." @hallam June 13, 2022

Addictive

  • https://pagan.plus/@siin/111280543307154948

    "I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable.

Substitute for human interaction

Invasive privacy policy

  • https://pagan.plus/@siin/111280543307154948

    … then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate *some* of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we *need* these sites for access, for engagement, to make money. The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it. This *is* exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information *will* eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we *should not* worry about a surveillance state that *we* pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.

" @siin October 22, 2023

Company Structure

Bluesky is a public-benefit C crop, and project initially proposed by Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media”, hired Jay Graber as CEO, and has a board of directors that include both of them and Jeremie Miller. They each have equal voting power. For more info see:

History

After early funding from Twitter, it was spun out as its own company before Elon Musk acquired Twitter. It now operates independently, and is entirely employee-owned.

Citations for the above: https://snarfed.org/bluesky-corporate-ownership-and-structure

Announcement

2019:

  • tweet thread announcing the project https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106
    • "Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵" @jack December 11, 2019

Report

2021:

Organization

2021:

Code

2022:

New Organization

Formed Bluesky PBLLC, a Public Benefit LLC as an independent organization.

Also see this post by Ryan Barrett for details on corporate structure, ownership, governance, and history, along with a few technical design decisions:

See Also

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