Bluesky

 Bluesky  is a public-benefit LLC and project run by Jay Graber and initially proposed by Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” and has Twitter-like features.

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

Bluesky's CEO is Jay Graber. The board of directors includes Jay Graber, Jack Dorsey, and Jeremie Miller. They each have equal voting power.

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

Why
(stub section)

Why use or syndicate to Bluesky?

It's another interesting social web protocol experiment that has goals of decentralization and prioritizes user identity and migration (accounts and posts).

...

How to use your domain

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

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)

Features
(stub)

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


 * create & delete posts (edit?)
 * note
 * photo
 * domain as identity / username
 * API / Protocols
 * see: 2023-05-05 The Bluesky Team: Federation Architecture Overview
 * ... please expand!
 * ... please expand!

Aaron Parecki

 * uses his short domain  as his Bluesky handle since 2023-03-06, and has been syndicating his posts to Bluesky since 2023-03-06
 * Since 2023-05-01, removing the  part of Bluesky URLs to his posts will redirect to the canonical post on aaronparecki.com. For example
 * redirects to
 * redirects to
 * redirects to

Ryan Barrett

 * has a profile: https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.repo.listRecords?user=snarfed.bsky.social&collection=app.bsky.actor.profile, posts https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.repo.listRecords?user=snarfed.bsky.social&collection=app.bsky.feed.post

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

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.

capjamesg
publishes manually to Bluesky every so often. He is working on a few open-source projects related to Bluesky:


 * pyatproto: A Python package with abstract methods for interacting with the Bluesky API.
 * bsky.link: A link wrapper service that generates a minimal, embeddable version of a Bluesky post, ideal for embedding in journalism and blogs. Example posts:
 * https://bsky.link/?url=https://staging.bsky.app/profile/aoc.bsky.social/post/3jureynmuos2i
 * https://bsky.link/?url=https://staging.bsky.app/profile/jamesg.blog/post/3jttk3dwqkk2e

Jacky Alcine

 * uses his main domain  as his handle (since ???).
 * Currently, all cross-posting happens manually

Ana Rodrigues

 * with her domain  as handle.
 * Currently, some cross-posting happens manually. Still debating if where all posts will live.

Marty McGuire

 * with his domain  as handle.
 * Cross-posting a small set of things manually, like This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition

Vika

 * uses one of her domains,  as a handle since 2023-06-15.
 * POSSE is currently done manually, but Bluesky adoption may be a driver for better syndication support in Kittybox.

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:
 * IndieAuth: Support signing-in with IndieAuth: #646 Add support for authentication with IndieAuth

Tools

 * Generate embeddable links featuring Bluesky posts: https://bsky.link
 * Real-time stream of every post in Bluesky: https://firesky.tv/ (presumably as long as it can keep up)

Terminology

 * "Skeet": 2023-04-27 The Verge: They’re ‘skeets’ now / Paging Lil Jon!

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


 * "How it started" blog post
 * More details

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:
 * announcement of their report into “relevant work” https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1352302818418446337
 * "One of the goals when we announced bluesky was to develop a grounded understanding of relevant work that many talented people in the decentralization community have been doing. Today, we want to share an update on this." @bluesky January 21, 2021
 * the report itself https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/twitter.modular.im/981b258141aa0b197804127cd2f7d298757bad20

Organization
2021:
 * https://twitter.com/jack/status/1427315839666118662
 * "Jay will be leading @bluesky! Another step towards decentralizing Twitter and social media.  Now we can move much faster, and through code." @jack August 16, 2021

Code
2022:
 * "Twitter’s decentralized, open-source offshoot just released its first code" - The Verge

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

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

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

Articles

 * 2023-05-02 The Verge: Bluesky showed everyone’s ass / In many cases, literally. "The question What’s it really like over there? is essentially what is driving user growth. From inside these garden walls, among the 55,000 users, I can tell you it’s absolutely wild."

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

Not Twitter controlled
Note: 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

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