Openvibe combines Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr into one social app

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Openvibe

Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, Threads: Since Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, the app formerly known as Twitter, usage of X alternatives has continued to grow as people embrace decentralized social networking. Unfortunately, keeping up with all the new networks has not been easy, as they currently rely on different protocols that don’t interoperate. That’s a problem a new app called Openvibe aims to address. From a single interface, Openvibe allows you to stay connected with friends and followers across Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky and soon Threads, in a combined timeline. It also offers the ability to cross-post to multiple networks at once.

The company’s mission is to offer a friendly, “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web for new users, according to CEO Matej Svancer.

The Czech Republic-based team had originally begun work on a Twitter client called Tweetoshi in 2022, but after Elon Musk bought Twitter, they shifted their focus to the open social web, as many of the app’s earlier adopters had made the switch. Earlier efforts involved work on a Nostr-powered app called Plebstr, which has now merged into Openvibe.

However, the company’s users complained about the multiple open social protocols to choose from and how they could not communicate with one another across networks.

“We also experienced this problem ourselves, and Openvibe is an answer to that,” Svancer says. “Although there are some existing bridges, they require additional servers, mirror accounts, opt-in, etc. We don’t think this is the ideal way forward. With Openvibe there is none of that — and you can connect your already existing accounts. Openvibe’s goal is to lower the barrier for new users coming to this space. I believe the open social space can challenge legacy social media, but only if it’s united.”

Image Credits: Openvibe

The product addresses a growing need among users for tools that will help them keep up with the increasingly fractured social web, where numerous startups and projects are taking on the tech giants. In addition to the open source project Mastodon, a decentralized open social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol, there are also startups like Bluesky, now with 6 million users and built on the modern AT Protocol, as well as the decentralized social protocol Nostr, currently favored by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Smaller startups have also tried to take on Twitter/X, including Spoutible and Spill, though some earlier efforts like Post and T2/Pebble have already failed. Still, the space continues to heat up, most recently with the launch of a Twitter and MySpace mashup known as noplace, aimed at Gen Z.

Meanwhile, seeing the direction the social web was heading, Meta embraced ActivityPub for its newest social network Threads.

The overabundance of choice, however, has also led to the emergence of new aggregation tools that combine social feeds with news sources, like RSS feeds. The former developer of Twitter client Twitterrific, the Iconfactory, is now working on an app called Tapestry to help people keep up with the fray, while newsreader app Reeder’s developer, Silvio Rizzi, is working on something of a Reeder replacement that will include social sources.

Ahead of these potential competitors comes Openvibe, a simple aggregator for the open social web.

Image Credits: Openvibe

To use the app, you’ll log in to your existing accounts on the supported networks. Afterward, you’ll instantly be following all your friends in a combined timeline. The app also features a combined trending section and cross-posting support.

You can follow federated Threads profiles through the app’s Mastodon integration, but now that the Threads API has been made available, Svancer plans to add broader support for Threads in the future, starting with cross-posting.

While a version of Openvibe had been in development before now, the latest release added Bluesky support, which is why Svancer waited until now to promote the launch.

The team of four includes Svancer, two developers and one designer. The pre-seed stage startup is backed by angel investors and NYC accelerator Wolf, which Openvibe attended last year.

Openvibe is available as a free app on iOS and Android, but plans to experiment with a desktop version. The app will later introduce a subscription plan to generate revenue.

Openvibe combines Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr into one social app

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Openvibe

Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, Threads: Since Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, the app formerly known as Twitter, usage of X alternatives has continued to grow as people embrace decentralized social networking. Unfortunately, keeping up with all the new networks has not been easy, as they currently rely on different protocols that don’t interoperate. That’s a problem a new app called Openvibe aims to address. From a single interface, Openvibe allows you to stay connected with friends and followers across Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky and soon Threads, in a combined timeline. It also offers the ability to cross-post to multiple networks at once.

The company’s mission is to offer a friendly, “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web for new users, according to CEO Matej Svancer.

The Czech Republic-based team had originally begun work on a Twitter client called Tweetoshi in 2022, but after Elon Musk bought Twitter, they shifted their focus to the open social web, as many of the app’s earlier adopters had made the switch. Earlier efforts involved work on a Nostr-powered app called Plebstr, which has now merged into Openvibe.

However, the company’s users complained about the multiple open social protocols to choose from and how they could not communicate with one another across networks.

“We also experienced this problem ourselves, and Openvibe is an answer to that,” Svancer says. “Although there are some existing bridges, they require additional servers, mirror accounts, opt-in, etc. We don’t think this is the ideal way forward. With Openvibe there is none of that — and you can connect your already existing accounts. Openvibe’s goal is to lower the barrier for new users coming to this space. I believe the open social space can challenge legacy social media, but only if it’s united.”

Image Credits: Openvibe

The product addresses a growing need among users for tools that will help them keep up with the increasingly fractured social web, where numerous startups and projects are taking on the tech giants. In addition to the open source project Mastodon, a decentralized open social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol, there are also startups like Bluesky, now with 6 million users and built on the modern AT Protocol, as well as the decentralized social protocol Nostr, currently favored by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Smaller startups have also tried to take on Twitter/X, including Spoutible and Spill, though some earlier efforts like Post and T2/Pebble have already failed. Still, the space continues to heat up, most recently with the launch of a Twitter and MySpace mashup known as noplace, aimed at Gen Z.

Meanwhile, seeing the direction the social web was heading, Meta embraced ActivityPub for its newest social network Threads.

The overabundance of choice, however, has also led to the emergence of new aggregation tools that combine social feeds with news sources, like RSS feeds. The former developer of Twitter client Twitterrific, the Iconfactory, is now working on an app called Tapestry to help people keep up with the fray, while newsreader app Reeder’s developer, Silvio Rizzi, is working on something of a Reeder replacement that will include social sources.

Ahead of these potential competitors comes Openvibe, a simple aggregator for the open social web.

Image Credits: Openvibe

To use the app, you’ll log in to your existing accounts on the supported networks. Afterward, you’ll instantly be following all your friends in a combined timeline. The app also features a combined trending section and cross-posting support.

You can follow federated Threads profiles through the app’s Mastodon integration, but now that the Threads API has been made available, Svancer plans to add broader support for Threads in the future, starting with cross-posting.

While a version of Openvibe had been in development before now, the latest release added Bluesky support, which is why Svancer waited until now to promote the launch.

The team of four includes Svancer, two developers and one designer. The pre-seed stage startup is backed by angel investors and NYC accelerator Wolf, which Openvibe attended last year.

Openvibe is available as a free app on iOS and Android, but plans to experiment with a desktop version. The app will later introduce a subscription plan to generate revenue.

Openvibe combines Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr into one social app

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Openvibe

Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr, Threads: Since Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, the app formerly known as Twitter, usage of X alternatives has continued to grow as people embrace decentralized social networking. Unfortunately, keeping up with all the new networks has not been easy, as they currently rely on different protocols that don’t interoperate. That’s a problem a new app called Openvibe aims to address. From a single interface, Openvibe allows you to stay connected with friends and followers across Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky and soon Threads, in a combined timeline. It also offers the ability to cross-post to multiple networks at once.

The company’s mission is to offer a friendly, “easy-to-use gateway” to the open social web for new users, according to CEO Matej Svancer.

The Czech Republic-based team had originally begun work on a Twitter client called Tweetoshi in 2022, but after Elon Musk bought Twitter, they shifted their focus to the open social web, as many of the app’s earlier adopters had made the switch. Earlier efforts involved work on a Nostr-powered app called Plebstr, which has now merged into Openvibe.

However, the company’s users complained about the multiple open social protocols to choose from and how they could not communicate with one another across networks.

“We also experienced this problem ourselves, and Openvibe is an answer to that,” Svancer says. “Although there are some existing bridges, they require additional servers, mirror accounts, opt-in, etc. We don’t think this is the ideal way forward. With Openvibe there is none of that — and you can connect your already existing accounts. Openvibe’s goal is to lower the barrier for new users coming to this space. I believe the open social space can challenge legacy social media, but only if it’s united.”

Image Credits: Openvibe

The product addresses a growing need among users for tools that will help them keep up with the increasingly fractured social web, where numerous startups and projects are taking on the tech giants. In addition to the open source project Mastodon, a decentralized open social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol, there are also startups like Bluesky, now with 6 million users and built on the modern AT Protocol, as well as the decentralized social protocol Nostr, currently favored by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

Smaller startups have also tried to take on Twitter/X, including Spoutible and Spill, though some earlier efforts like Post and T2/Pebble have already failed. Still, the space continues to heat up, most recently with the launch of a Twitter and MySpace mashup known as noplace, aimed at Gen Z.

Meanwhile, seeing the direction the social web was heading, Meta embraced ActivityPub for its newest social network Threads.

The overabundance of choice, however, has also led to the emergence of new aggregation tools that combine social feeds with news sources, like RSS feeds. The former developer of Twitter client Twitterrific, the Iconfactory, is now working on an app called Tapestry to help people keep up with the fray, while newsreader app Reeder’s developer, Silvio Rizzi, is working on something of a Reeder replacement that will include social sources.

Ahead of these potential competitors comes Openvibe, a simple aggregator for the open social web.

Image Credits: Openvibe

To use the app, you’ll log in to your existing accounts on the supported networks. Afterward, you’ll instantly be following all your friends in a combined timeline. The app also features a combined trending section and cross-posting support.

You can follow federated Threads profiles through the app’s Mastodon integration, but now that the Threads API has been made available, Svancer plans to add broader support for Threads in the future, starting with cross-posting.

While a version of Openvibe had been in development before now, the latest release added Bluesky support, which is why Svancer waited until now to promote the launch.

The team of four includes Svancer, two developers and one designer. The pre-seed stage startup is backed by angel investors and NYC accelerator Wolf, which Openvibe attended last year.

Openvibe is available as a free app on iOS and Android, but plans to experiment with a desktop version. The app will later introduce a subscription plan to generate revenue.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber speaks at the Knight Foundation's Informed conference

Bluesky CEO confronts content moderation in the fediverse

by with No Comment Tech

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber speaks at the Knight Foundation's Informed conference

Image Credits: Marco Bello and Eva Marie for the Knight Foundation

The panel on stage at the Knight Foundation’s Informed event is Elon Musk’s nightmare blunt rotation: Techdirt editor Mike Masnick, Twitter’s former safety lead Yoel Roth, and Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who have come together to discuss content moderation in the fediverse.

It’s been more than a year since Musk showed up at Twitter HQ with a literal sink in tow, but many social media users are still a bit nomadic, floating among various emerging platforms. And if a user made the choice to leave Twitter in the Musk era, they likely are looking for a platform with actual moderation policies, which means even more pressure for leaders like Graber to strike the fragile balance between tedious over-moderation and a fully hands-off approach.

“The whole philosophy has been that this needs to have a good UX and be a good experience,” Graber said about her approach to running Bluesky. “People aren’t just in it for the decentralization and abstract ideas. They’re in it for having fun and having a good time here.”

And at the start, users were having a good — really good — experience.

“We had a really high ratio of posters to lurkers. On a lot of social platforms, there’s a very small percentage of people who post, and a very large percentage of people who lurk,” Graber said. “It’s been a very active posting culture, and it continues to be, although the beginning was extremely high, like 90-95% of users were all posting.”

But Bluesky has faced some growing pains in its beta as it figures out what approach to take to delicate content moderation issues. In one incident, which Roth asked Graber about on the panel, users discovered that Bluesky did not have a list of words banned from appearing in user names. As a result, users started registering account names with racial slurs.

“At the time last summer, we were a really small team, like less than ten engineers. We could all fit around a conference table,” Graber said. When content moderators discovered the issue with slurs in usernames, the team patched the code, which is open source, so users could see the implementation of the word lists happen in real time, which sparked further debate. “We learned a lot about communication transparency and being really proactive…. One of the reasons we’ve stayed in beta so long is to give ourselves some space to get this right.”

Since then, both Bluesky’s userbase and its team have grown. Bluesky hired more engineers and content moderations, while its total number of users increased from about 50,000 at the end of April 2023, to over 3 million this month. And the platform still isn’t open to the public.

“It’s fair to say that about half of our technical product work has been related in some way to trust and safety, because moderation is quite core to how this works in an open ecosystem,” Graber said.

For platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, content moderation challenges become even more complicated when you add in the variable of the fediverse.

Once the AT Protocol is fully up and running, anyone will be able to build their own social network atop Bluesky’s infrastructure — Bluesky, as a social network, is just one app built on the protocol. But this means that as new networks crop up on the AT Protocol, the company will have to decide how (or if) it should regulate what people do on the platform. For now, this means Bluesky is building what it calls “composable moderation.”

“Our broader vision here is composable moderation, and so that’s essentially saying that on the services we run, like the app, that we set a baseline for moderation,” Graber said. “But we want to build an ecosystem where anyone can participate [in moderation], and third party is really first party.”

Graber explains the complicated concept further in a blog post:

Centralized social platforms delegate all moderation to a central set of admins whose policies are set by one company. This is a bit like resolving all disputes at the level of the Supreme Court. Federated networks delegate moderation decisions to server admins. This is more like resolving disputes at a state government level, which is better because you can move to a new state if you don’t like your state’s decisions — but moving is usually difficult and expensive in other networks. We’ve improved on this situation by making it easier to switch servers, and by separating moderation out into structurally independent services.

So, Bluesky can mandate that copyright infringement and spam are not allowed, but an individual app built on the protocol can make its own rules, so long as they don’t contradict Bluesky’s baseline. For example, Bluesky allows users to post adult content, but if someone were to build a more family-friendly server on the AT protocol, they would have the right to ban adult content from their specific server — and if someone on that server disagreed with that decision, they could easily port over their account to a different server and retain all of their followers.

“One of the issues that we have right now is that, when you just have what Twitter or Meta gives you, and maybe just a few options or checkboxes, that’s not really algorithmic choice,” Masnick said. “That’s not really composable moderation. That’s not getting you to the level of really allowing different entities to try different things and to experiment and see what works best.”

Users can also choose to use third-party feeds to view content, instead of just choosing from a “recommended” and “following” tab.

“Rather than telling people decentralization has all these benefits in the abstract […] it’s a lot more powerful to just say, here, there’s 25,000 custom feeds that third-party developers have built, and you can just choose from them,” Graber said.

But since it’s such early days for Bluesky, this composable moderation philosophy hasn’t really been tested yet. Meanwhile, companies from Cloudflare, to Substack, to Mastodon have reckoned with what to do when dangerous communities organize on your platform.

“Let’s say somebody takes all this code you’ve been publishing, and the AT protocol, and they build a new network. Let’s call it NaziSky,” Roth told Graber. “What do you do?”

Mastodon faced such an issue in 2019, when the far-right, Nazi-friendly social network Gab migrated to its servers after being kicked off of GoDaddy. Mastodon’s founder condemned Gab, but said at the time that decentralization prevented him from actually taking action — so, users had to take matters into their own hands. Individual Mastodon servers blocked Gab’s server en masse, making it impossible for Gab members to interact with others on the website. But still, Mastodon has to reckon with its open source code being used to power what it calls a “thinly (if at all) veiled white supremacist platform.”

“This is one of the trade-offs of open source, which is that there’s a lot of benefits — stuff is open, anyone can collaborate, anyone can contribute, anyone can use the code,” Graber said. “That also means people whose values drastically diverge from yours can use the code, grab it and run with it.”

Like what happened on Mastodon, Graber thinks that the user base will ultimately set the tone for what is considered acceptable behavior on the platform.

“It’s a pluralist ecosystem. There’s lots of parties out there, and when they unanimously decide that something is outside the Overton window of the norms of communication, then that becomes sort of the social consensus,” Graber said. “If a whole parallel universe emerges, that’s possible with open source software, but those communities don’t necessarily talk if the norms are so drastically divergent.”

Then again, dominant and centralized social platforms like Facebook and X have shown the dangers that can emerge when just a few people are in charge of these moderation decisions, rather than whole communities.

“Unfortunately, you can’t turn a Nazi into not a Nazi. But we can limit the impact of the Nazis,” Masnick said. “Let’s limit their ability to wreak havoc. I think that leads to a better place in the long run.”

Bluesky rolls out automated moderation tools, plus user and moderation lists

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/what-is-bluesky-everything-to-know-about-the-app-trying-to-replace-twitter/

Bluesky is now open for anyone to join

by with No Comment Tech

Blue sky with clouds illustration, representing Bluesky social

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk’s X.

Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads’ 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon’s 1.8 million?

Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky’s code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.

“What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you’re not bottlenecking change on one organization,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. “The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product.”

This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there’s not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.

The literal elephant in the room is Mastodon, the open source, decentralized social network that’s been around since 2016, years before Bluesky existed. While the platforms share similar goals, they use different protocols, making it difficult for the platforms to work together. While some communities have found a home on Mastodon, others have been deterred by the network’s confusing onboarding process and technical terminology. That’s where Bluesky’s strategy diverges.

“The whole philosophy has been that this needs to have a good UX and be a good experience,” Graber said on a panel last month. “People aren’t just in it for the decentralization and abstract ideas. They’re in it for having fun and having a good time here.”

Bluesky’s commitment to an intuitive user experience doesn’t mean it’s slowing down on the technical end. The company also shared today that it will introduce an experimental version of open federation later in the month. Developers will be able to build their own separate servers, like how Mastodon has thousands of different instances. Like on Mastodon, Bluesky users will be able to choose what server to use, and if they ever change their mind, they can migrate to a different server without losing all of their posts, followers and following lists.

Another upcoming update will allow individual users or organizations to create their own content moderation services, which other users can subscribe to.

“For example, a fact-checking organization can run a labeling service and mark posts as ‘partially false,’ ‘misleading,’ or other categories,” Bluesky wrote in a blog post. “Then, users who trust this organization can subscribe to their labels. As the user scrolls through the app, any labels that the fact-checking organization publishes will be visible on the post itself.”

This all sounds great, but of course, the question will inevitably arise: What if a bad actor creates a moderation service or a server that has tangibly harmful consequences? That’s a big challenge for these decentralized platforms (or, “the fediverse”) to figure out.

“The analogies here are really just, this is how the web works,” Graber said. “So what you do when people are building things on the web that could be dangerous? There’s different levels of intervention. First of all, don’t promote it, don’t send it out to more eyeballs. And then you can disconnect from it, don’t link out to it. So make it less discoverable.”

This is more of a hands-off approach, which also relies on users to take advantage of Bluesky’s customizable moderation tools to determine what online safety means to them. But that might be a lot of responsibility to place on the individual user. In more extreme cases — like the dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — the team behind the AT Protocol will step in to eliminate the violative material entirely.

Bluesky has a long way to go, but it’s already defied the odds — in a slightly altered timeline, it may not even exist at this point. In Dorsey’s vision, Twitter would have eventually migrated to the AT Protocol, but he ended up stepping down as CEO, and then Musk later stepped in and changed the platform’s priorities and values. Graber couldn’t have possibly anticipated that plot twist, but a year before the acquisition, she just so happened to spin Bluesky out from Twitter and into its own public benefit corporation. So now, Bluesky is a project that used to be part of Twitter, which is now competing with X, the company that also used to be Twitter. And if you’re eager to see how that all plays out, then it’s a good thing the platform just opened to the public.

As Bluesky opens to the public, CEO Jay Graber faces her biggest challenge yet

Bluesky CEO confronts content moderation in the fediverse

Bluesky butterfly logo and Jay Jay Graber

As Threads deprioritizes politics, Bluesky's CEO touts custom feeds and user choice in social media

by with No Comment Tech

Bluesky butterfly logo and Jay Jay Graber

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Meta is in hot water after announcing plans to remove politics from its recommendations across Instagram and Threads, its new Twitter-like app for text-based posts. That leaves a window of opportunity for the startup Bluesky, whose CEO Jay Graber recently explained that Meta’s decision is emblematic of the types of problems that could emerge when you have “one algorithm run by one company,” and how Bluesky’s app is different.

“It’s sort of a black box, the company can do whatever they want, and users don’t really have a choice,” Graber said in response to a question about Meta’s censoring of politics during an interview on the Techmeme Ride Home podcast. “The goal of building in algorithmic choice at the start with Bluesky was so that you can always choose what kind of feed you’re going to get. You can control your scroll,” she added.

On Bluesky, Graber said, users could choose to have a highly political social experience, by following politically themed custom feeds and trending topics, or they could choose to filter out politics entirely.

“Two people using the same Bluesky app could — one be having a very cozy, quiet experience, no politics, just seeing their friends’ posts and maybe like, pictures of moss and cats,” Graber suggested. “And then somebody else could be following trending topics, Super Bowl discourse, politics, whatever is going on.”

Or, as Graber herself does, they could switch back and forth between different modes, based on what it was they wanted to see at the time.

Unlike with centralized platforms, like the Meta-operated Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, or even the Elon Musk–run X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky presents a different approach to social media. It’s more like the open source Twitter competitor Mastodon, in that it will also offer a decentralized social networking service, albeit one powered by a different networking protocol — the AT Protocol, instead of ActivityPub, which Mastodon integrates with.

Although Threads, too, plans to integrate with ActivityPub, Meta’s moderation decisions will ultimately apply to everyone using Threads, even if it becomes one node on the larger federated network that includes Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered apps. And at over 130 million monthly active users as of Meta’s fourth quarter, Threads would dwarf the rest of Mastodon, which currently has around 1 million monthly active users, its website says.

Bluesky, meanwhile, is already bigger than Mastodon, having nearly doubled its user base since opening its doors to the public last week. The app today is closing in on 5 million users (it’s at 4.86 million, currently) and is working to enable federation later this month, the company earlier said.

But its bigger draw to users may not be which protocols it uses for social networking, but the ease with which users can customize their experience — something that’s more lacking on Mastodon, which has struggled with usability. Up until its September release, for instance, Mastodon users couldn’t even search for posts; they had to rely on hashtags.

Bluesky aims to offer hashtags, too, Graber said. “It actually is on its way,” she said in the interview, referring to hashtags’ introduction.

But on Bluesky, hashtags won’t be just a way to surface terms and trends; they can also power custom feeds, the CEO noted. Thanks to Bluesky’s API, developers have built custom tools, like SkyFeed, that let anyone — even non-developers — build their own feeds using a graphical user interface.

“You can start building custom feeds that do things — based off lists, based off hashtags, based off words, based off regular expressions, based off machine learning,” said Graber. “And these tools are getting better and better and creating more options for people who want to be creative, have an idea for a feed, but don’t know how to code.”

As election season nears, the promise of customized, personalized social media could appeal to a cohort of users who want a Twitter alternative — X is going in a different direction involving payments, shopping, and creator content — but one where the rules aren’t dictated by one person, or, in the case of Meta, created in fear of punishment by lawmakers and regulators.

Bluesky is now open for anyone to join

Instagram and Threads will no longer ‘proactively’ recommend political content

The 'vote Trump' spam that hit Bluesky in May came from decentralized rival Nostr

by with No Comment Tech

Former President Trump in front of an American flag

Image Credits: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Decentralized social networks aren’t immune to botnet-driven spam, as a recent spam attack on Bluesky demonstrates. Earlier this month, a flood of posts reading “remember to always vote Trump” showed up on Bluesky’s network posted by accounts with random names and default avatars.

The spam didn’t originate on Bluesky, though. Instead, it reached Bluesky by first crossing over two other decentralized networks: Mastodon and Nostr. To do so, the botnet leveraged “bridges,” or pathways built between the networks that make them interoperable.

Though the spam attack occurred on May 11, a postmortem by a data scientist only published a few days ago, gaining the event increased attention. As the blog Conspirador Norteño explains, the accounts that spammed Bluesky had been created via the social networking protocol Nostr.

Nostr’s protocol powers apps like Damus, Nostur, Nos and others. It is also currently the network of choice for Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey because of its popularity with Bitcoin users. At Twitter, however, Dorsey had backed the project that later spun out to become the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky. But he has since left its board, saying he thinks the Bluesky team to now be repeating the same mistakes he and others made at Twitter. Dorsey today regularly engages on Nostr, which he finds to be a more open protocol.

It may seem strange, but even though Nostr and platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky are all decentralized networks, they don’t actually talk to one other. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol, which is now also being adopted by Meta in Instagram Threads, and other apps and services including Flipboard and open-source Substack rival Ghost.

To allow posts from one network to pass through to another, bridges are being built. Already, that’s been a point of contention between some decentralized social networking users as different groups have argued about how the bridges should be built while others question whether bridges should even exist in the first place.

The latter group could now point to this recent event as an example of the downsides of bridges, as the botnet smartly leveraged bridges to spam another network.

According to the analysis of the attack, the Nostr spam was sent first to Mastodon via the bridge Momostr.pink. Then, another bridge called Bridgy Fed sent the content from Mastodon to Bluesky.

“Fingerprints of this process appear in the Bluesky versions of the posts, where the account handles have the format npub.momostr.pink.ap.brid.gy,” wrote [email protected] on Substack. “The first portion of this (from npub until the first dot) is the public key of the Nostr account, while the remainder (momostr.pink.ap.brid.gy) contains some indications as to the tools used to bridge the posts (Momostr and Bridgy Fed).”

The botnet was able to post the “vote Trump” spam continuously until Bluesky took action against the spam accounts. The dataset for analysis was incomplete because Bluesky began removing accounts while the data was being gathered. Still, from what was collected, it seems that at least 228 accounts managed to post 470 times in a matter of just six hours. Around half of those were “vote Trump” posts while others posted “hello world” with a random adjective sandwiched in between the two words.

Bluesky mitigated the attack fairly quickly and took down the spam accounts. The company hasn’t yet responded to requests for comment about whether it will change its approach to spam or bridges.

As the site The Fediverse Report pointed out, this sort of spam attack was possible because Nostr makes it particularly easy to create new accounts. The incident once again raises the question as to what the fediverse — that is, decentralized social media — actually is. If you join Bluesky, are you consenting to be part of a network that includes Nostr content? Does Bluesky’s network include Mastodon, because a bridge has been built?

These are questions that don’t have solid answers as of yet.

Bluesky now has DMs

by with No Comment Tech

white clouds in blue sky

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is officially launching DMs (direct messages), the company announced on Wednesday. Later, Bluesky plans to “fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line,” it also said.

The launch comes two weeks after the social network teased it would soon be introducing direct messaging capabilities. Up until now, all conversations on the platform have been public, so the launch of DMs allows users to chat privately while still remaining on the social network.

To access the new feature, users can start a private conversation with someone within Bluesky’s “Chat” tab. DMs are available on Bluesky’s mobile and desktop applications. For now, the feature only supports one-to-one messages, not group messages, however.

The new feature brings Bluesky’s user experience more in line with X (formerly Twitter). The launch also gives Bluesky a competitive edge over Meta’s Threads, which currently doesn’t offer native DMs (you can, however, share a Threads post to your Instagram DMs).

By default, only people you follow can send you DMs. You can change your settings to allow DMs from no one, only people you follow or all Bluesky users.

Bluesky has seen notable success despite launching without some of the core features available on X. The company has been building out its service over the past year and has the potential to expand its user base as it brings more capabilities to its platform.

For instance, the social network recently started allowing users to personalize their main Discover feeds. Users can now click on “Show more like this” and “Show less like this” buttons to personalize the content that the platform shows them. The feature is somewhat similar to X’s “Not interested in this post” option.

Bluesky, which has grown to roughly 5.6 million users, has some more notable features in the pipeline, such as support for video and anti-harassment tools.