AT Proto Revamped Docs; bsky; Feed Me

Before last week, an invitation code was necessary to join Bluesky. This gave it a somewhat exclusive “prep school” feel/experience. However, this month, Bluesky removed the invite barrier, allowing anyone interested to sign up freely. This change led to a significant spike in new users, with over 856,000 people joining the platform on February 7 alone, just a day after the invite-only requirement was lifted. This increase brought the total number of Bluesky users to more than 4 million, doubling the user count in just three months. It’s now nearing (or has surpassed) 5 million.

Right before this grand re-opening, Bluesky folks made good on promised efforts to support actual federation. There are also scads of great clients, including a Tweetdeck-esque clone. And, each account is also an RSS feed, meaning you can “follow” folks from your RSS reader vs. engage with the platform via a client app.

Yes, it’s still VC-funded. No, they have no obvious plans for to how to pay the bills outside VC-funding. Yes, moderation challenges still exist. Yes, the deplorables have arrived now that the exclusivity wall has been torn down. No, it has not degraded into a Hadescape. Yes, more journalists, scientists, technologists, members of the arts, and useful bots have emerged to give the place a more “lived in” and “familiar” feel.

I will not be able to convince Mastodon-purists to head on over there. But, for any remaining folks who have not already taken the plunge, we’ve got three, quick sections that may help you get there and stick around a while.

(Nothing I did prompt-wise helped Perplexity make a decent TL;DR section, so no TL;DR today.)

Reading time estimate: 5 minutes

AT Proto Revamped Docs

In 2023, building things to interact with Bluesky felt (to me) pretty clunky. Due to the way the AT Protocol works, there are lots of i’s to dot and t’s to cross for each message (each object associated with each message is, to put it in very simplistic terms, “authenticated” or “verifiable”).

Now that some time has passed, there are scads of tools and libraries to help with building this that work with this platform.

Most can be found at the revamped documentation home where there is information on how to work with Bluesky/AT Proto for many programming language ecosystems. Particularly helpful is the Communtity Showcase. There, you’ll find projects in many other ecosystems and some inspiration for what you can do. Honestly, it kind of feels like the early days of OG Twitter, as we all started whacking the API to see what cool things we could build.

You can even get started with just a web browser! ændra, a Senior newsroom developer on Data Journalism Development at the Financial Times, has a spiffy series of Observable notebooks that use the JavaScript APIs to wrangle Bluesky data.

bsky

mattn has been masterfully hacking on/with Go for quite a while, and has one of the nicest CLI tools — bsky — for interacting with the Bluesky universe (skyverse?). Just go install github.com/mattn/bsky@latest from anywhere you have Go installed (Go is very straightforward to install) and you have access to the bsky command.

After grabbing a new app password and doing the auth dance in bsky you can read your timeline and individual posts or threads, submit posts (with images), follow, delete, etc. Almost all the commands have formatted or JSON output. And, after a PR from me this past weekend, you can also search Bluesky from the command line. Part of my $DAYJOB is monitoring the internet for new information on activity related to new vulnerabilities. These tend to be tagged with CVE (
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifiers, so now we can automate some of these searches (example output is in the section header).

mattn’s Go code is very well-organized, and the bsky CLI could use a couple more commands implemented (if anyone is interested in a reason to poke at the AT protocol).

Feed Me

Bluesky’s feed is reverse-timeline like all baseline social media sites should be. However, it becomes much more useful with feeds. While it has a baked-in feed discovery and management page, you can roll up your sleeves and run your own, or use services such as Bluesky Feeds and Skyfeed.

For the latter, Paul Musgrave has a nice guide for how to get started.

For me, one of the best “feeds” has been to take a short-list of folks I follow on Bluesky and stick them into Inoreader. That way I’ll never miss a post.

FIN

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