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Laurens Hof
@[email protected]

Last Week in Bluesky – 2025jan.a

The year has only just started, and already the owners of the current Big Tech social networks have made it abundantly clear why open social networks matter. While it was never really true that networks, such as Twitter, were neutral platforms, we could at least collectively agree to that polite fiction. But in 2025, social networks are political, and have political alignments. Over the holidays I’ve taken some time away from all of my socials, and it’s been nice to have some space for reflection. Two articles came out this week that touch on some of my thoughts. The first is Henry Farrell’s ‘We’re getting the social media crisis wrong’, in which Farrell says: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” He takes the perspective of information and how it shapes beliefs, but his core observation is powerful and worth repeating. In effect, social media is a tool of collective sense-making. We have let a few tech billionaires control our tools that we globally use to collectively make sense of the world, and it turns out that has some negative consequences, to put it mildly.

This is why I care about social networks, because they are one of the main tools that we use in 2025 to come to a collective understanding of how the world works. I think that it is bad that these extraordinary powerful tools are in the hands of a few fascist billionaires, allowing them unprecedented control over how society sees and understands the world. The value of open social networks is in creating new forms of governance for our collective sense making tools.

Bluesky Won’t Save Us by Katharina Alejandra Cross touches on more of the risks that having access to collective sense making tools bring, as well as the issues that Bluesky has to truly be a different place. I agree with all the major points here: Being on X is a severe risk for many reasons, but a major one is that it warps your perspective of collective thought, shaped by a fascist billionaire. Bluesky has struggled to adapt to what it wants to be exactly, and while it is clearly a much better place than X, it has not yet provided a good answer to the tension between building a safe (centralised) platform and a decentralised open protocol. Cross writes: “Our best hope, then, is that Bluesky acts as a halfway house—most especially for politicians, journalists, academics, influencers, and other people who clearly spend way too much time online to their detriment.” I also hope that Bluesky acts as a halfway house, although maybe in a slightly different way than Cross is talking about here. I think we need to invent new types of social networks that better serve their role as collective tools for sense-making. Bluesky is a good step in the right direction, but I think we can do more than ‘decentralised microblogging’. ATProto can provide a powerful substrate for people to experiment on with new forms of social networking, and I’m excited to see what 2025 will bring for that.

The News

Business Insider reports that Bluesky is now valued at 700 million USD, and that they are close to finishing another funding round, this time led by Bain Capital Ventures. It is not known how much money Bluesky would raise in this new round. The previous funding round, the series A, was led by Blockchain Capital for 15 million, just barely 3 months ago. The series A did not provide a valuation for Bluesky. The series A also was just before the massive inflow of new users following the results of the US election, and Bluesky has doubled its user base in the 3 months since, from 13 million to 26 million. The new inflow of users also led to significant extra costs for Bluesky, which quadrupled its moderation team from 25 to 100 people, as well as the additional technical costs that comes with the growing user base. Bluesky got critiqued during the previous funding round for Blockchain Capital’s ties with cryptocurrency. In Blockchain Capital’s investment thesis they describe investing in a ‘vision of social infrastructure’ more than investing into a specific product. Crypto-themed VC funds tend to be more open to investing into lower-level internet infrastructure. Bain Capital Ventures seems to be a more generic VC fund: it does not have the connections to crypto that a significant part of the Bluesky user base finds noxious, but does not have a clear indication of a willingness to invest in social infrastructure over products either.

Bluesky has recently added Trending Topics as a new feature to their app. When you hit search on the app, you’ll now see a list of the most talked about topics. The feature is also visible in the Discover feed. Trending Topics has been a long-requested feature, and especially the Brazilian community was asking for it a lot during their time on Bluesky in fall 2024. The technological underpinning of how Trending Topics work on Bluesky is noteworthy: every trending topic is a custom feed. Every time a new topic is trending, a new custom feed gets created, giving the team better control over the topic. It also allows for new possibilities that have not yet been explored, such as archiving and documenting feeds after the trend is over, or other options that have not yet been explored. One of the more interesting trends on Bluesky is the emergence of (some) custom feeds as digital places, with Blacksky as the most notable example. I am interested in seeing how Trending Topics also being custom feeds interacts with that dynamic.

Graze is a tool for people to create their own custom feeds on ATProto. It has an extensive feature set allowing for a great amount of customisability, complex logic and the ability to moderate content that appears in a feed. Graze recently published their plans for monetisation. Graze says that the project is experiencing explosive growth, and is escalating quickly from a small gamble, with the tool now serving over 170k unique people every day. Graze expects that they can host 90-95% of custom feeds for free, and view it as a priority to keep making feeds as accessible as possible. Operating the infrastructure for custom feeds is not free however, and Graze plans to make money as follows: they will allow feed operators to run sponsored posts in their Graze feeds, at a cost specified by the feed operator. Feed operators are free to run their own sponsored content or find their own sponsors. If feed operators decide to monetise their custom feed, Graze will take a cut of the transaction. Graze has not specified yet how that transaction cost will be determined.

Bluesky has seen a large increase in the number of bot and spam accounts in recent weeks. There are roughly three groups of bots active: porn and romance scams, inauthentic accounts posing as Democratic defenders, content farms, and Russian disinformation networks. The Bluesky team has finally managed to crack down on the current spam wave. As spam is an eternal cat-and-mouse game between spammers and moderation, the reprieve is likely temporarily however. The spam has significant impact on how community moderation functions, as the tools that are available are not up to the task of handling such a massive inflow of reports. More automod functions are needed for community labeling projects to deal with the spam.

The Analysis

There are multiple connections between these four different news stories. Early in 2024, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave an interview with The Verge, in which she talked about potential ways for Bluesky to make money. She described the idea of marketplaces that Bluesky could operate, such as marketplaces for algorithms. While she did not go into much detail on this, the basic idea seemed to be that people could create valuable systems (algorithms, moderation layers, custom feeds) and sell access to those systems to other people. Bluesky could then potentially operate these marketplaces, take a cut of every transaction as payment for providing the infrastructure, and make money this way. What we are seeing now with Graze is some version of this idea: Graze provides a marketplace for custom feed operators to put sponsored content in their feed, and Graze takes a cut of every transaction as payment for operating the infrastructure. It shows the interesting challenge for Bluesky PBC that is ahead: in an open system it is not actually guaranteed to be the first one to build marketplaces and become the default/largest operator of such a marketplace. If the potential is high enough, other organisations might just get there first.

There has been a lot of conversation about whether or not Bluesky will have advertisement in the future. The large majority of these conversations, and even remarks by Bluesky CEO Graber herself, imply a direct connection between people seeing advertisement when they open the Bluesky app, and the actions of Bluesky PBC. People assume that if they were to see ads on Bluesky, that is because Bluesky PBC put those ads there. The plans by Graze however show that this assumption is not always correct. In the near future, any ads people will see on the Bluesky app will likely be outside of the control of Bluesky PBC. Instead, the trend is towards ads being connected to the community/place/feed that shows the advertisement. I think this has a lot of implications for how we conceptualise advertisements on social networks that are hard to fully grasp right now, but certainly something I’m keeping an eye on.

One factor that has contributed to the bot spam in recent weeks is the inflow of a specific type of accounts, often called resistlibs in a derogatory manner. This is a group of people who identify as Democrat, and want to resist the Trump presidency by being active on social media. A defining characteristic is that they tend to engage in follow-back campaigns such as the ‘NoDemocratUnder1k‘ hashtag, where they follow all accounts that have that hashtag. Using Starter Packs this group can very quickly build up accounts that are followed and follow tens of thousands of people. This behaviour is easily hijacked by bad actors however, it is easy for spam networks to make accounts that look similar to resistlibs. Following Starter Packs, participating in follow-back culture and using the right hashtags makes it particularly easy for spam networks or other bad actors to build up large accounts on Bluesky. This has contributed to the influx of spam and bots on Bluesky recently, although it is far from the only factor.

The Links

Reading

How Jay Graber Is Making Sure Bluesky Never Turns Into Elon Musk’s X – Emily Baker-White/ForbesThe Biggest Challenges Create The Biggest Opportunities – Mike Masnick/TechdirtAs academic Bluesky grows, researchers find strengths—and shortcomings – Kai Kupferschmidt/ScienceBluesky Proves Stagnant Monopolies Are Strangling the Internet – Ryan Cooper/The American ProspectIn the social media wars, Bluesky is destroying Truth Social – Henry Chandonnet/FastcompanyThe age of Sports Bluesky is upon us – Devin Raab/Announcing AwfulBluesky’s Rose Wang on Subscriptions, Creator Monetization, and More – Buffer/Buffer Chat

ATProto links

Editors note: I’m experimenting with alternating the weekly newsletters with prioritising Bluesky and prioritising ATProto. I’ve found that especially ATProto tech needs more context. If you are an ATProto dev, here are some interesting tech to check out. And if you are not, next week I’ll give some more context on what is happening in the wider ATmosphere

Recipes.blue is a recipe manager build on ATProto.Plonk.li is a pastebin clone that stores your pastes in your PDS, and shows a timeline of all pastes.Atpaste is another pastebin clone, that ties in with ATFile by using the same lexicon.Skywatched is a movie review site on ATProto.Tech Talk: Building Long Form Blogging with WhiteWindAn experiment in an online video sharing network that combines ATProto with storacha.network.

Bluesky Tools

ByeSky allows you to filter the people you follow, for example by removing all non-mutual follows.UnfollowPack allows you to unfollow entire Starter Packs with one click.Hopper is a tool that lets you customize the websites and services used to view AT-URIs.Convert a Bluesky post to Markdown or HTML.Uksnowmap uses hashtags to display an interactive map of the UK to display where it is showing. The tool has been around for a while, and has now fully transitioned from Twitter to Bluesky.BlueskyTimeline allows you to embed a Bluesky timeline on your site.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online.

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-bluesky-2025jan-a/

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