loading . . . **Bluesky Report – #119**
Answer anonymous questions with Navyfragen, more academic research on Bluesky, and view cool art on Bluesky in a 3D gallery.
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## The News
Navyfragen is an anonymous question inbox, build on ATProto. It functions similar to the popular NGL app, where people can ask anonymous questions to someone. The person with the inbox can decide which questions to answer, and the answers are then automatically shared to Bluesky. Navyfragen follows a similar visual design to NGL, where the questions are shared as an image with the answer in the body of the post. The app is simple to use: log in with your ATProto account, and share the inbox link. From there, other people can anonymously ask questions.
Grain is a ATProto-powered photo sharing platform that launched recently. Grain is quickly becoming a full-featured ATProto platform, with the ability for new people to sign up outside of Bluesky now in beta. Grain also takes an interesting approach to the social graph that I have not seen before. Grain does not import a user’s social graph from Bluesky, your followers and followees are unique to Grain. However, Grain gives you multiple feeds: a feed for accounts you follow on Grain, as well as a feed for accounts you follow on Bluesky.
Pew Research Center finds that Bluesky is catching on with news influencers. News influencers are “individuals who regularly post about current events and civic issues on social media”, and have at least 100k followers on the Big Tech platforms. Pew finds that the number of news influencers with a Bluesky account in their research doubled from 21% before the US 2024 election to 43% in spring 2025. Furthermore, they find that, while total active users on Bluesky slowly dropped in the first quarter of 2024, the number of news influencers on Bluesky who are actively posting, increased during that same time period. That Bluesky is left-leaning politically is no surprise, and also shows up in this research: 69% of left-leaning news influencers are on Bluesky, while 15% of right-leaning news influencers are on Bluesky.
A new academic paper studies how the migration of academics from Twitter to Bluesky functions. They find that “information sources drive migration far more powerfully than audience”, meaning that it is the people you follow who determine platform migration, not your audience and followers. The paper also finds that “simple contagion drives two-thirds of all exits”, where people will move to Bluesky when they see another academic they follow also move to Bluesky. Shock events, such as downtime at Twitter or radical new policy positions, account for 16% of exits. Moving to Bluesky because of shock events is largely by politically disengaged scholars, Politically engaged academics mainly move to Twitter because of other academics they follow instead.
Sky Museum is a downloadable game that allows people to walk around in a 3D art gallery. Within the gallery you can view Bluesky feeds and posts, displayed as art pieces. Players can set their own feed to display as art within the gallery. Multiplayer is also supported, and you can host up to 32 players.
Storacha is a decentralised web3-based storage network on IPFS, that has added support for storing a backup of your PDS. This means that even if your current PDS provider goes down, you can still get all your data from the Storacha backup and move to a different PDS provider.
Bluesky PBC published a new proposal for ATProto’s Oauth. Currently, browser-based ATProto apps have to choose between being a simple app with short login sessions (where a user has to log in again after a day or so), or building a more complex backend infrastructure to handle authentication. The proposal introduces a simple server component that makes it possible for smaller browser-based clients to have full authentication features without running a server-side authentication system.
## Updates
* Bluesky will add more options for notifications soon, including the ability to turn off individual notifications, as well as getting notifications for likes on reposts.
* Smoke Signal developer Nick Gerakines has shared a “comprehensive Rust library for AT Protocol identity management, record signing, verification, and OAuth operations.”
* Popsky is a media review app on ATProto, that has added integration with Streamplace. This means you can now see who’s currently live streaming on Popsky.
* Leaflet is an ATProto-based writing platform, and it now allows you to set your own custom domain for ATProto-based publications written with Leaflet.
* Git collaboration platform Tangled has added verified commits, which allow people to cryptographically sign all their commits. Tangled also wrote a blog post about stacking and reviewing pull requests.
* ATProto Payment Identities – a blog post theorising how to integrate ATProto identity with a crypto-based identity.
* smolsky is a (paid, $1.99) app for MacOS to post to Bluesky directly from the menubar.
* Openmeet is an event planning app on ATProto, that has added various calendar integrations for import and export.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
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