Bluesky Report – #108
Northsky is a new cooperative that is building their own space for the trans and queer community on Bluesky/ATProto, multiple apps are starting to work towards financial sustainability, and more.
The News
Northsky announced
Northsky Social is a newly announced [northskysocial.com] cooperative that is “working to build a digital space designed around active moderation and user safety for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.” The Canadian cooperative features a group of people from Bluesky’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community that have decided to build their own place on ATProto, serving the trans and queer community.
The first part of the Northsky project focuses on data hosting. Northsky is providing their users with managed PDS hosting. Users can transfer their data from a Bluesky-managed PDS to a Northsky-managed PDS. Northsky focuses on all their infrastructure being hosted in Canada, outside of the US. The anti-trans climate in the US is given as the main reason [bsky.app] why Northsky is first going with PDS hosting. Even though it does not contribute to Northsky’s goals towards better moderation, it is something that Northsky can help their community with right now.
Northsky is building out their own custom tooling to help people with this transfer. The current tools [whtwnd.com] for transferring an account to a different PDS require technical know-how, and Northsky is building tools to make it accessible [bsky.app] for the layperson. Northsky is also making their customers aware of, and helping them, with registering recovery keys [bsky.app]. Setting and storing a recovery key allows people to always gain control of their account using that key. This is one of the features of ATProto that has been hidden so far, and also currently requires technical knowledge [whtwnd.com] to set up. One of the challenges for Northsky is that Bluesky PBC currently does not allow accounts to migrate back to their PDSes. This means that if an account starts using Northsky, they’ll permanently have to either use Northsky or find another PDS provider service. Bluesky PBC seems open [bsky.app] to changing this however.
In their announcement, Northsky talks [bsky.app] about building safer digital places, and addressing [bsky.app] “the gaps we see in moderation by implementing tooling and processes focused on keeping our users safe.” These plans cannot be met with just PDS hosting, and need moderation systems, and Northsky’s own appview as well. Northsky says that this will be phase 2 of their project, with more details to be shared later. The social dynamics of moderation are much more difficult than providing hosting services, so the real challenge for Northsky to build safer places will come later.
In Other News
This weekend will be the ATmosphere [atprotocol.dev] conference in Seattle. The event is sold out, but there will be remote livestreaming available. The conference has a busy schedule [atprotocol.dev] with two full days of talks. For Europeans there is another ATProto conference upcoming: AHOY! [ahoy.eu] This single-day event will be held on April 24th in Hamburg, Germany, and tickets are now available. The first two announced speakers are the developers of Skyfeed and Tangled, and more speakers are already scheduled to be announced soon as well. As a note: I’m involved with helping organise the AHOY! conference, and hope to see many of you there!
Multiple apps in the Bluesky/ATProto ecosystem are taking the next step towards professionalising and are working towards financial sustainability. Spark is an upcoming ATProto short-form video platform, and they launched a fundraiser this week. The organisation of four people incorporated into a Public Benefit Company (PBC) recently, and are now looking to raise 100K USD via a crowdfunding campaign [sprk.so]. Bluesky video client Skylight is also now incorporated [bsky.app] as a PBC. The creator of Bluesky client deck.blue announced [bsky.app] they’re working full-time on deck.blue, and can financially sustain themselves on the Patreon subscriptions. Bluesky video client Flashes is launching [github.com] a fundraiser for bringing the app to Android, and will include an optional $1.99/month subscription to keep the apps financially sustainable.
The most recent update [bsky.app] to the official Bluesky app contains a separate inbox for DMs and 3-minute videos. Bluesky has long had an issue with DM spam, although the team has been working [bsky.app] to reduce this issue. The new DM inbox contains chat requests from unknown accounts where they can be accepted or rejected. This makes spam DMs less intrusive. The other update is that longer videos are now allowed on Bluesky, from 1 minute to 3 minutes, and from 50mb per video to 100mb per video. Notably, the option for longer videos put Bluesky even more in direct competition with Spark, an upcoming video platform on ATProto: Spark advertises [bsky.app] its higher limits of 3 minute videos of 300mb as a unique feature, and of the reasons why they went with its own lexicon instead of using Bluesky.
Altmetric is a platform that tracks online engagement on scientific research across social networks. They observe [bsky.app] that Bluesky has become a major platform for sharing scientific publications. Publications from 2025 are shared more on Bluesky than on X [bsky.app], and that overall volume of conversation about research is getting close to equal in absolute terms to X as well, even though Bluesky has an order of magnitude less active users than X does.
Bluesky PBC is pivoting [bsky.app] into a t-shirt company. Last week CEO Jay Graber wore [fediversereport.com] a tshirt to the SXSW conference with the text “Mundus sine caesaribus” meaning “A world without Caesars”. The Bluesky community demanded the shirt as merch, and the first batch sold out in 30 minutes. A few days later the company brought the shirts back into stock [bsky.app], and COO Rose Wang said [bsky.app] that the company had more money coming in from the shirts in a single day as they did from two years of selling custom domains.
Bluesky PBC has set up an EU representative office in Belgium, as part of mandatory compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Bluesky PBC made the news last November when a spokesperson for the European Commission called [fediversereport.com] out Bluesky PBC for not following some of the compliance requirements for the DSA. The DSA mandates [www.euronews.com] that all platforms that are active in the EU register their EU headquarters, and now Bluesky PBC has a point of contact in Belgium for the specific purpose [bsky.social] of contact with EU Member states and agencies.
Fast Company ranked Bluesky PBC at number 17 on its list [www.fastcompany.com] of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2025. Alongside the ranking, they featured an interview [www.fastcompany.com] with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
Timeline [fediversereport.com] app Surf [bsky.app] is an upcoming app to build and browse custom feeds across different protocols and platforms. It allows you to browse content from platforms such as the fediverse, Bluesky, Threads, YouTube and more, customised into whatever topic or feed you want. Surf’s latest updates [bsky.app] allow for significantly better integration with Bluesky: you can now log into the app with your Bluesky account, have a unified home timeline [bsky.app] for both your Bluesky and Mastodon account, and engage and post from the Surf app onto Bluesky. The app is build by Flipboard, and is currently in private beta.
And some Bluesky/ATProto software that caught my eyes:
- Wamellow is a third-party tool for Discord that allows for a variety of social media services to be further integrated into a Discord server. Their latest update [bsky.app] to the Discord integration allows people to like a Bluesky post that has been posted on Discord by reacting with the
emoji within Discord. - Bluesky video client Skylight now has an in-app [bsky.app] video editor. One of the challenges facing Bluesky media client apps is in how they’ll distinguish themselves from the official Bluesky apps. Having an in-app video editor is such a feature, where Skylight now can provide a meaningful value add over using the Bluesky app to watch videos.
- ATProto.im [bsky.app] is a client for Bluesky DMs, built in the style of the old AIM chatting platform.
- Dragonfly [bsky.app] is a new Bluesky client for MacOS desktop and the iPad.
The Links
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https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-108/
