Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.
ねむ…
I've always known that dragging on the edge of a macOS window resizes it. Today I learned that starting the drag parallel to the window edge (say, dragging vertically on the right edge of the window) moves the window instead.
ATmosphere Report – #111
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber hints some more at Bluesky PBC’s plans for monetisation, on ATProto’s ethos, and more.
Note for regular readers: since 2025 I’ve experimented with alternating this weekly newsletter, with one with focusing on Bluesky and more of the cultural and social side of the network, and the other week on ATProto and the more technical side. For this week, I went back to a combination, with both news about Bluesky and culture, as well as some more technical ATProto news. I’d love to hear some feedback if you prefer the newsletters to keep alternating between Bluesky and ATProto, of if this week’s format of putting everything together is better.
And another reminder: Thursday April 24th is Ahoy!, the European ATProto and Bluesky conference in Hamburg. The conference announced some more great speakers this week! You can hear Bluesky developer Samuel Newman, Ændra Rininsland about building resilient queer spaces, Anirudh Oppiliappan about Tangled, a git platform on ATProto, Paul Sharratt, about Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency, Marc Faddoul about the Free Our Feeds campaign, and much more! I’ll be there as well, and doing some interviews with people. Would be great to meet you there!
The New Yorker published an extensive long read with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, about her personal life and what led her to this place. The entire article is worth reading, and gives a good insight into Graber, and how Bluesky came to be. I want to zoom in on one single sentence, where the article talks about how Graber thinks about making money with Bluesky PBC. The New Yorker writes:
“Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut.”
Bluesky PBC originally announced that they would have an optional subscription model back in October 2024, as part of their funding round. In December 2024 COO Rose Wang said that this was planned to be launched at the end of 2024. The period of late 2024 was also one of unrest within the Bluesky community, a significant part of the community was unhappy with how the company handled moderation regarding Jesse Singal. That translated into a vocal part of the community loudly proclaiming they would not want to participate in a subscription program for Bluesky PBC as long as the company would not take action to create a safer community. Since then there have been very few updates on Bluesky PBC launching a subscription model. This interview with Graber confirms that Bluesky PBC still is planning on launching such a service. However, Graber also couches it in an “eventually”, indicating that such a subscription model will likely not launch in the near future.
Graber also mentions Bluesky PBC making money by functioning as a marketplace. This is one of the core ideas on how she sees Bluesky PBC making money, and she has mentioned it interviews since at least early 2024. So far, Bluesky PBC has not actually build a marketplace yet. As the ecosystem develops, Bluesky PBC runs the risk of other organisations building marketplaces first. Custom feed builder Graze already contains a marketplace for ads. Graber’s example of people paying for access to Blacksky and Bluesky PBC taking a cut of the transaction seems to imply that other organisations will depend on Bluesky PBC for such a transaction.
But observing the actual behaviour of Blacksky Algorithms Inc, the company behind Blacksky, shows a different picture. Blacksky is building infrastructure to be fully independent from Bluesky PBC. The company already has their own PDS implementation, a grant to work on their own relay implementation, and announced a few months ago that their longer term plans are to also have their own frontend apps as well as their own AppView. Earlier this year, the Blacksky company transitioned away from being fiscally hosted by Open Source Collective to being an independent fiscal host, to save 10% in fiscal host fees, and Blacksky advertised the move as being fiscally independent. Together it paints a picture of Blacksky as a company that values their independence, both in technological as well as financial infrastructure, a company that will put in effort to avoid another organisation taking a cut of the transaction.
While not every organisation and community on ATProto will have the same characteristics as Blacksky, it shows some of the limitation of Graber’s proposal. There is a financial incentive to avoid Bluesky PBC taking a cut of transactions, and Bluesky PBC has provided all the tools with the openness of ATProto to make it as easy as possible to do so. Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser responded to the quote by Graber with a simple “👀”.
Turkish news agency Bianet reports that X users in Turkey are migrating to Bluesky, “after X has restricted visibility to dozens of accounts in the country following nationwide protests sparked by the detention of İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on Mar 19.” Censorship by the Turkey’s government is also reaching Bluesky however, and Bianet further writes:
“According to the Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), at least 44 Bluesky accounts have already been blocked in Turkey under the same Article 8/A of Law No. 5651. These restrictions were enacted by various judicial decisions, again citing concerns over national security and public order.
Despite the rulings, Bluesky has not taken any action to suspend or block these accounts, and they remain accessible from within Turkey. However, if the platform refuses to comply with Turkish court orders to restrict access to certain users, authorities may consider a full ban on the platform, a possibility that past precedents suggest is not unlikely.”
In order to comply with local regulations, Bluesky has set up moderation services for various countries. These moderation services are mandatory for accounts that are currently located within that country, but not for accounts that are outside that country. Bluesky has had local moderation services for Germany and Brazil for a while. Recently a local moderation service for Russia became active as well. Local moderation services for Turkey have been set up, but are not active yet.
Bluesky engineer Daniel Holmgren wrote about the ATProto ethos, based on his talk at the recent ATmosphere conference in Seattle. For technical people I can definitely recommend reading the entire article (and/or watching Holmgren’s talk). Holmgren describes the core ideas of ATProto as follows:
Atproto is situated as the synthesis of these three movements.
From this basis, atproto adds two core innovations: identity-based authority and the separation of data hosting from the rich applications built on top of it.
Holmgren also describes two other ideas that are underlying ATProto: The idea that structure gives freedom, and lazy trust. On structure, Holmgren writes:
“While there’s something empowering about the idea of being able to do anything, it’s also easy for this to fall into the tyranny of structurelessness – a collapse in coordination that prevents anything from actually getting done. Without structure in the network, energy that could go into novel development gets redirected into facilitating interoperation, fixing edgecases between implementations, building up defenses to bad actors or security issues from other parties, and trying to coordinate evolution without a clear leader.“
One of the main topics that I keep coming back to when covering the fediverse is in this tyranny of structurelessness. The recent news about Pixelfed’s vulnerability that affected other software, and the lack of responses by the affected servers, is a good example of this collapse in coordination between the different parties in the network.
Lazy trust is the idea that often, it is enough to know that every post and signature can be verified, without actually having to be verified on the spot. ATProto allows a cryptographic verification (the Authentification Transfer part in AT Protocol) that every post you see is the correct post as created by the author. But when a regular person opens up the Bluesky app, it is less important for them to know that the post at the top of their feed has been verified. Instead, it is often enough to know that the app they are using is staking their reputation on serving the correct data. Anyone can prove if a service is behaving correctly, since the data is locked open.
Two articles and observations on Bluesky’s culture this week. Adobe joined Bluesky this week, and got relentlessly bullied off the platform. The software company has been widely unpopular in broader culture for a while now, due to their monopolistic pricing practices, as well as their pivot to AI. Both characteristics which are widely unpopular on Bluesky as well, and when Adobe made their announcement post, they got heavily ratio’ed and yelled at. The company ended up taking down their post again. As Ryan Broderick points out in Garbage day, this does point to an issue for Bluesky PBC: advertising is one of the marginally few ways in which social media companies can make money at scale. Brand accounts are an integral part of advertising on social networks, and to make it work brand accounts getting bullied off the platform is slightly contra-productive. That said, the interview with Graber (see above)shows that she is currently not thinking about advertisement as a way to to make money with Bluesky PBC. Furthermore, the state of Bluesky’s culture is such that, if people believed that Bluesky PBC was considering advertising on the platform, brand accounts would likely get yelled at even more.
The second article is by Wired, ‘Bluesky Can’t Take a Joke’. It is about the shift in culture that Bluesky has experienced in the last half year or so, where the replies on popular posts tend to get obnoxious. One of the main complaints is that lots of replies tend to take a joke seriously. Another phenomenon is when a big account shares a piece of news, there is a group of people that sees that as an opportunity to yell in the replies about how bad Trump, Musk or any other conservative is, regardless of what the shared news is actually about.
Some updates on Skylight, the Bluesky client for shortform video:
WhiteWind development is paused for the foreseeable future, creator K-NKSM has said, due to changes in their personal life. WhiteWind is a blogging platform on ATProto, but it has not seen active development for quite a while. WhiteWind was one of the earliest AppViews on ATProto that used a different lexicon and built a platform outside of Bluesky. It has surprised me that no other blogging platforms on ATProto have sprung up so far. There is a wide market appeal for long-form writing, as people looking for alternative platforms.
PinkSea can now be selfhosted. PinkSea is an Oekaki board, a platform where people can draw pictures on the platform itself with simple tools and share them. So far, platforms that are building on ATProto mainly are a single app, and there have not been many cases yet where a new software platform (AppView) gets hosted by multiple providers. PinkSea is now a decentralised network in itself as well, with multiple other PinkSea instances out there. For some more information on PinkSea, creator Kacper “prefetcher” Staroń had an interview on the Software Sessions podcast this week.
Roomy is a group chat app that uses ATProto, and has opened up again for its second alpha testing version. Some new updates include the ability give rooms custom handles, similar to how ATProto uses custom handles, themes for the UI, wiki pages for chat rooms. For an introduction to Roomy, developer Zeu held a talk at the recent ATmosphere conference. Atproto.garden is one of the first communities to use Roomy, and it is a place for creators who are working on ATProto in some way.
The DAIR Institute released a paper on the role that social media plays in genocide, focusing on the 2020-2022 Tigray war. They are shared a 10 minute video explaining the context and their main findings. The organisation is warning that they are now seeing an “seeing an acceleration of the same type of warmongering on social media platforms that we documented at the beginning of the catastrophic Tigray war in 2020.” The reason I’m sharing this in this ATProto newsletter is the same reason what Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser says about the paper. Fraser points out that there are very valid “concerns about how atproto’s shape would fair any better at preventing this kind of thing“. I share those concerns, Bluesky and ATProto are aiming to rebuild a social network for the entire globe. And with that come some very difficult challenges, such as that people will use a social network to instigate war and genocide in a cultural context that is far removed from the people who are building the network.
Statusphere is the demo application by Bluesky PBC to help people start building their own ATProto app. Independent developer Baily Townsend has taken the Statusphere example and remade it in Rust. He released it as a full tutorial for people looking to get started on ATProto using Rust.
Custom feed builder Graze has added a new feature where people can share and reuse components of their custom feeds. For example, many custom feeds will want to use a NSFW filter, and now people can take someone else’s NSFW filter without having to build one themselves.
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.
How do we know that Big Tech doesn't care about your privacy? Your privacy isn't profitable to them. You're a product and make most of their money selling your data...which is the case for every "free" product and service out there. They work for their shareholders, not for you.
"Do protests work?
Yes, and… maybe not by themselves. But they’re a part of what works. Everything will work until it doesn’t, and even those things will stop working after a while. We need to do all of it."
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-build-a-better-mosh-pit/
よっこらどっこいし 
d43bfa95aa (upstream/main) Adds featured tab to web (#34405)
678c8dfeec Refactor `StatusCacheHydrator` (#34414)
5d817a758d Add dropdown to lists of accounts in web UI (#34391)
de19af3650 Extract `frontend_translations` helper to support module (#34400)
4c2f64907b Remove deprecated `Import` model (#34371)
e74d682b21 chore(deps): update dependency linzer to v0.6.5 (#34409)
a89ddcfd2d New Crowdin Translations (automated) (#34407)
うぅ
うにゅ…
My swear jar is now worth more than my stock portfolio.
Bluesky’s latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/blueskys-latest-update-adds-chat-reactions-and-an-explore-page-similar-to-x/
Bluesky's latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X | TechCrunch
Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it's not an edit
techcrunch.com · TechCrunch
Link author: 
Sarah Perez 💙@Sarahp@mastodon.social
最近晚上幾乎都哭完再睡
早上像個正常人畫圖做事，晚上就是一灘爛泥啊 
some people will tell you that you can't capture a docstring in a macro_rules! macro, because the meta fragment captures the entire attribute and you can't destructure it.
those people are all cowards.
![screenshot of Rust code, reading
struct_reflection! {
/// A 2D circle
pub struct Circle {
pub radius: f32,
pub center: [f32; 2]
}
}
fn main() {
println!("{}", Circle::DOCSTRING);
}](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/114/314/783/991/700/699/original/d595d20da2e8a579.png)
Bluesky’s latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/blueskys-latest-update-adds-chat-reactions-and-an-explore-page-similar-to-x/
Bluesky's latest update adds chat reactions and an Explore page, similar to X | TechCrunch
Social network Bluesky is rolling out a new version of its software, which adopts some of the features former X users have missed. Nope, it's not an edit
techcrunch.com · TechCrunch
Link author: Sarah Perez 💙@Sarahp@mastodon.social
ごろごろうとうと
おふとん
この時間帯本当に誰もいないね
If I light your house on fire and then douse the flames halfway through it burning down, I shouldn’t be praised for my firefighting skills
Anybody knows the origin of the name "compact closed" category? Is it related to topological compactness?
차단 기능의 밑작업으로… 차단 당하는 기능을 만들었습니다. Hackers' Pub 사용자 여러분은 이제 연합우주 내 다른 인스턴스의 사용자로부터 차단 당할 수 있습니다. ActivityPub의 Block 액티비티 및 Undo(Block) 액티비티를 수신하고 처리할 수 있게 되었다는 뜻입니다. 하지만 아직 차단을 하는 건 안 됩니다. 오늘은 일단 여기까지 하기로 하고… 차단 기능은 아마 내일이나 완성될 것 같군요.
It's Vote Compass time again! If you've always wanted to know which Canadian federal party you should vote for, now is your chance.
I'm disappointed in my result. I seem to have slipped slightly conservative on social issues.
It's Vote Compass time again! If you've always wanted to know which Canadian federal party you should vote for, now is your chance.
I'm disappointed in my result. I seem to have slipped slightly conservative on social issues.
がんばる
あしたは6時ごろにおきるつもり
さぎょうしてたらこんなじかん
うああああ
コーヒーうんまあ！
Would you like to be interviewed as part of the Rust Vision Doc data gathering process?
I am part of the team and would like to oversample people who wouldn't normally participate in such things
More info https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/04/04/vision-doc-survey.html
DNS queries aren't harmless
Permalink: https://wizardzines.com/comics/dns-queries-arent-harmless/
@neilNeil Brown would you enjoy young adult fiction? I've been reading lots of Philip Reeve / Mortal Engines stories lately.
PEP 750, which introduces t-strings to the Python language, has been approved! Template strings are the pythonic parallel to JavaScript's tagged templates.
Look for them when Python 3.14 ships later this year! 🎉
GNOME should automatically move windows to a new workspace if there are too many large windows in one workspace.
Pequeño update el 20 de abril oficialmente cierro esta cuenta, asi que los invito a que me sigan en mis otras redes para que en un futuro no se pierdan de mi contendio, muchas gracias por haberme acompañado aqui espero poderlos ver por allá
Atte
LuXiao
鯊鯊！
Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01064-5
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43627917
Garfield Minus Garfield
Link: https://garfieldminusgarfield.net
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43646095
Today's SMBC really speaks to me... #OpenSource
📢 App Version 1.100 is rolling out now (1/2) Chat reactions are here! You can now respond to chat messages (aka “direct messages”) with an emoji ❤️
Today's SMBC really speaks to me... #OpenSource
OK so
Toenail clippings aren’t a requirement for something to be a Lisp. In fact, Apple made one back in the day that was basically Common Lisp with Algol syntax: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)
It’s important that additional reader syntax has always been a part of Lisp family languages, and that it’s more about heritage and philosophy than aesthetics, when it comes to determining language families.
In fact, the original Lisp was never meant to just be toenail clippings: that was a lower level syntax intended for an initial prototype. But they found that it kinda worked well enough and just kept it that way for that iteration.
If I had to pick one thing that really defined what makes a Lisp, it’s a combination of dynamicity and ease of defining DSLs on the fly for every little thing. Two things that are really not uncommon today (thanks to Lisp and its more obvious descendants)
nixCraft 🐧
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) 
@
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
박준규
Evan Prodromou
@
@