What is Hackers' Pub?

People seem to enjoy the new https://fedidb.com

I'll be adding more FediDB features later this summer.

#fediDB

You can help the #Fediverse grow by simply leaving a nice rating on the official and non-official apps for example! @Mastodon

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mastodon/id1571998974

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.joinmastodon.android

See if you can spot mine!😸♥️

Bluesky Report – #115

Independent ATProto infrastructure has been rapidly expanding recently, experiments with games on ATProto, and Graze offers developer grants.

I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition tomorrow!

Independent Infrastructure news

Over the last week, the effort towards decentralisation and running independent pieces of ATProto infrastructure has sped up significantly. There are now multiple relays that are publicly accessible. Other people also have made alternate AppViews that are Bluesky-compatible. Combined, this makes it now possible to fully use Bluesky without using any infrastructure owned by Bluesky PBC, and the first people have done so. To do so means using a separate PDS, relay, AppView and client.

Some of the updates regarding relays:

• Blacksky has built their own relay, using their own custom implementation. This relay is publicly accessible, meaning that other people can use this relay instead of the relay that Bluesky PBC uses.
• A writeup on how to set up your own relay by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold, for some 34 USD/month.
• Making relays cheaper has been due to the Sync 1.1 update, Bluesky PBC goes into more detail in a blog post what this entails.

And the updates regarding clients and AppViews:

• Two clients now support the ability for users to set their own AppView, Deer and TOKIMEKI.
• AppViewLite is another AppView for Bluesky that has been around for a while, that focuses on being cheap to run. It also heavily optimises for network data storage, with creator Alnkq running AppViewLite that contains full network data on a cheap 10 year old machine. So far, AppViewLite only worked with a custom frontend. An update this week now make it possible to use AppViewLite in combination with other clients.

Some further thoughts:

• The way ATProto works, is that it takes the software that runs a social network and splits it up into separate components, with each of those components being able to be run independently. This has made self-hosting any component possible since the beginning of the network opening up. But to tak advantage of this, and get to a state of full independence, it means running multiple pieces of software. This has created a bit of a catch-22 in the ecosystem: you could run your own relay, but without another independent AppView to take advantage of this, it is not super useful. You could run your own (focused on the Bluesky lexicon) AppView, but without a client that allows you to set your own AppView it is not particularly useful either. What happened now in the last weeks is that all these individual pieces are starting to come together. With Deer allowing you to set your own custom AppView, there is now a use to actually run your own AppView. Which in turn also gives more purpose to running your own relay.
• For building features in a Bluesky client that Bluesky itself does not have, a different AppView is needed. Now that these are starting to become available, there is new space to experiment with clients that have features that Bluesky does not have. Deer has already started going in this direction by allowing people to set any account as a trusted verifier, for example.
• There has been skepticism around Bluesky PBC’s claims regarding decentralisation, especially from people within the ActivityPub community. Part of this distrust has come from people applying a mental framework of how ActivityPub works to how ATProto works. In this framework, Bluesky being decentralised would mean that there are other software platforms that are interoperable with the Bluesky lexicon. I’ll be writing more about those different mental frameworks, and how that relates to decentralisation later. But for now these developments strengthen the claims of Bluesky PBC around decentralisation and building a network that is ‘billionaire-proof’.

In Other News

at://2048 is the game of 2048, integrated with ATProto. 2048 is a sliding tile puzzle game where players combine numbered tiles to reach the 2048 tile, that has gotten popularity years ago and has been reimplemented a number of times. What makes the at://2048 version stand out is that the scores of the game are stored on your ATProto PDS. This creates new features and challenges: it gives the game a more social element, with features like leaderboards. It also creates a new challenge, of how to verify that a score on someone’s PDS is actually legit. at://2048 is experimenting with verified badges to authenticate if a score is legit. Integrating games with ATProto is one of the areas that is under-explored, and this reimplementation of 2048 is worth watching to get a sense of how the integration of games with ATProto will further develop.

Bluesky differs from other social networks in one significant way, namely that users blocking each other is public information. This creates new dynamics, from people being able to see who have blocked them, to leaderboards of the most blocked accounts on the network. A new paper, ‘Self-moderation in the decentralized era: decoding blocking behavior on Bluesky‘, takes advantages of data on blocks being public to study user behaviour. Some of their findings: “users who receive a high number of blocks exhibit distinctive behavioral traits that set them apart from the general user population. These patterns are not necessarily linked to toxicity or misinformation, indicating that block-worthy behavior is more nuanced and complex than traditional moderation markers might suggest. Second, these distinctive traits can be effectively encoded and leveraged by machine learning models, suggesting the feasibility of early-warning or flagging systems able to assist moderation teams by surfacing potentially problematic users even before issues escalate.”

Custom feed builder Graze is giving out 5 grants of 1k USD for other projects in the ATProto ecosystem. Explaining why the startup is giving out grants, Graze says: “First, we want to help accelerate growth in the ATProto / Bluesky ecosystem. Projects that help *others* are vital. Second, we want to empower communities to sustain themselves. Third, we want to help give people & orgs direct access to their audiences. Broadly, those are *our* goals as an org.”

Bluesky in the media

• Time Magazine talks with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and COO Rose Wang after they both got recognised as rising leaders in the Asian Pacific Community by Gold House. On monetisation, Graber says “she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.”
• Wired published an article on how digital archivists are racing to save Black History while the Trump administration is trying to erase it. Wired talks with Blacksky’s Rudy Fraser, who describes “Blacksky as a living archive. Currently its database holds 17 million posts from Black users over the last two years”.
• How the San Francisco Standard uses Graze to hone their social media strategy – Graze

ATProto tech news

• The two developers behind Git collaboration platform Tangled, the brothers Anirudh and Akshay Oppiliappan, gave an interview on the devtools.fm podcast about Tangled. The platform also got various feature updates this week, and customisable profiles.
• Graze has made their ATProto authentication tool open-source and available for everyone to use. The ‘ATmosphere Authentication, Identity, and Permission Proxy‘ allows developers to easily add ATProto authentication to their software as a separate micro-service.
• WhiteBreeze is a self-hostable frontend for WhiteWind, allowing people to build their own blog on ATProto.
• ATProto Migrator is a tool to migrate your ATProto account to a different PDS. It does so via a web application, without people having to touch the Command Line Interface (CLI). This makes account migration more accessible, as other tools until now (such as goat by Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold) require people to use the CLI.
• Flashes is a Bluesky client focused on images, and they are experimenting with some new ways to deal with the limitations that come from using Bluesky’s data. A Bluesky post can contain a maximum of 4 images and 300 characters. Flashes has upgraded that limit to 900 characters and 12 images. It works by actually creating 3 separate Bluesky posts in a thread, and displaying this as a single post in the Flashes app.
• A guide on Publishing ATProto Lexicons.

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.

#bluesky

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-115/

Bluesky Report 115 - This week's news for #Bluesky and #atproto:

- Lots of new independent atproto infrastructure, with new relays, appviews, and more
- research on blocking behaviour on Bluesky
- Graze is giving dev grants to accelerate the ecosystem

https://fediversereport.com/bluesky-report-115/

Not new (2023), but this exemplifies Apple’s culture of arrogance and entitlement.

By their logic, the local electric company “facilitates” a large portion of my Apple-device use. They should claim that they created the platform that lets Apple devices exist, and demand a third of their revenue.

What about my ISP? Cellular provider? Router manufacturer? The wires in my walls? The pizza place down the street, for fueling my body as I type?

Institutional delusion.

From: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over-10b-from-us-app-store-comissions-last-year/

NEW: The Washington Post obtained internal cables revealing that the U.S. government is pressuring countries facing #tariffs to approve Elon Musk’s #Starlink.

The most #corrupt administration in history

If you're a writer/blogger/press, a friendly reminder that the 17th Year Anniversary of the #Fediverse [social] network (**not** Mastodon® social network) is fast approaching.

May 18, 2008

So, if you want to publish a new article, you can start today. There are a hundred possible angles and scopes for that article. 😉

https://fedia.io/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/2137627/The-17th-Year-Anniversary-of-the-Fediverse-network-is-upon

Anyway…

#MayIsFediverseMonth #FediverseDay #ActivityPub

I may be just a tad little bit too excited for #Eurovision 2025 next week!!!
🎤🤩💃🕺I put up flags from some of my favorite current and past entries.

Let’s go ERIKA VIKMAN from FINLAND 🇫🇮!!!

#ESC #ESC2025

Which AI "arena" is the one we can actually trust? https://lobste.rs/s/ukvcyk #ask #ai

#250508 qdbw '0'

#art #mastoart

What's the best social-media platform for organizing an #event, other than Facebook #Events?

@glyph You misspelled Staff Engineer.

Statement by the German Institute Taipei in response to the KMT's false claims about dictatorship and persecution in Taiwan

Taipei Times report: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2025/05/09/2003836586

#Taiwan #Germany #KMT #台灣

hey fedi, what's your favorite vegan milk?

i think i kind of like black and red together

PairDrop: peer-to-peer file sharing in your browser https://lobste.rs/s/yii8te #web
https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/PairDrop

はよはよ〜

ℹ️ Linux Tip: Did you know that hard drives perform better with btrfs? That's because the butter seeps between the disks and lubricates them to spin without friction, making them faster 👍

I keep calling it "the administration" but it's time to call it "the regime."

@glyph 💭(hyrum's law, but for phenotypes)

does anybody do atproto dev directly from their mobile phone? tablet doesn't count. this was a big "future of coding" prediction years back, curious if it happened

Definitely going to be the busiest #PyConUS for me to date: Language Summit blogger, sponsor presentation, two meet-and-greet Q&As, a couple short cameos, a regular track talk, emceeing and speaking at the security mini-track... I'm ready! :)

One of the symptoms of #ADHD is hyper-vigilance, sometimes described as "scanning behavior". That is to say, an evopsych[1] model of the motivational difficulty of ADHD is that in the ancestral environment, while having some people in your village who are able to keep focused on a task is good, you also want to have some people around who are constantly looking around to see what's goin' on everywhere, easily prompted by the environment

[1]: for the record, yes I know this means "pretend"

Okay, let's try this, for the first time ever. I'm Quin, and I'm looking for a job over the summer, possibly longer as long as it's part time (I'm a college student with the summer off). I'm mostly interested in #remote work, due to my complete blindness traveling to a workplace is more difficult, all be it not impossible. I just prefer coding from my bedroom. I'm a software developer and hacker (in the oldest and best sense of the word) who loves nothing more than figuring out a good challenge. I prefer low-level coding in C, C++, Rust, etc., but things like Python and Lua have their place too. My resume is here: https://quinbox.xyz/resume.html
#FediHire #fediHired

Web Browser telemetry https://lobste.rs/s/exup3x #browsers
https://sizeof.cat/post/web-browser-telemetry-2025-edition/

ABC News - President Trump strongly considering installing Fox News host and former prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as interim US attorney for DC. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-eying-fox-news-host-jeanine-pirro-top/story?id=121604820

Definitely going to be the busiest #PyConUS for me to date: Language Summit blogger, sponsor presentation, two meet-and-greet Q&As, a couple short cameos, a regular track talk, emceeing and speaking at the security mini-track... I'm ready! :)

on monday I thought, i should try putting some analytics on blog.hayman.net. I wonder if it gets more than a dozen hits a day.

tuesday: 85 hits
wednesday: 350 hits
today: 24,108 hits (so far)

(Someone posted a link to my steve@next.com story on hacker news, it turns out.)

Great news for the wafrn app !!

As a culmination of the big journey of the past weeks, the Wafrn App is now listed in the official @unifiedpush documentation as one of the apps that support UnifiedPush

Check it at https://unifiedpush.org/users/apps/

You can't walk the walk if you don't doc the docs.

Doing some fediverse research and discovered that @tkithrta黒ヰ樹 is attempting to "implement #ActivityPub using 16 different web frameworks" in a project called #StrawberryFields
https://gitlab.com/acefed #fediverse #fedidev

つなぎたい先のアクセスポイントが選択肢に現れないなあと思ってたけど今つながってるやつだった←

⭐ 5월 10일 페미니스트 대행진에 꼭! 참가해야 하는 이유 ⭐ 🌈 6/3 대선 전 페미니스트들의 요구를 보여줄 수 있는 마지막 페미니스트 대행진이니까! 🌈 6/3 대선 전 페미니스트들이 목소리를 낼 수 있는 마지막 페미니스트 대행진이니까!

the new pope has a b.sc. in maths which i suppose as the head of the catholic church it's good that he has a solid understanding of cardinals

Am I interested in watching a one hour video essay about a video game?

Yes. Yes, I have to admit, I am.

Am I interested in watching a two hour video essay about a video game?

Yeah OK. This better be good though.

Am I interested in watching a nine hour video essay about a video game?

You know what?

No.

We all have our limits.

#rustlang @fasterthanlimeamos

So finally, as promised unsynn v0.1.0 is out. Give it a good beating. It certainly has some rough edges. Development on more features already started.

I sneaked in some last minute additions to the macros:
* Type definitions in unsynn! are passed through.
* There is a minimal automatic doc generator. Currently for keyword! and operator!, this will be extended in future and will only augment user docs.

https://crates.io/crates/unsynn

Just rolled out some fediverse-related improvements:

- Now you can follow Write.as blogs from Ghost! There was a tiny bug with this that we just fixed. (WriteFreely PR: https://writefreely.org/pull/1373)

- We now support the `preview` property as a fallback for Articles. This will make your posts look much nicer as more platforms support it! (WriteFreely PR: https://writefreely.org/pull/1374)

#WriteAs #WriteFreely #WriteFreelyDev #Ghost #fediverse #ActivityPub

논해진 적 없는 합의는 이윽고 논할 수 있고 미루어진 합의는 언제라도 꺼내올 수 있고 실패한 합의는 합의의 부재를 인정할 근거가 된다. 가장 안타까운 결과는 합의를 해놓고도 어설프게 실천되어 기회만 전유되고 이룰 것은 이루어지지 못하는 것이다.

만약 그러할 수 없다면 서로의 다름을 인정하고 각기 서로의 길을 쉼없이 나아감이 타당하다. 그게 나쁜 게 아니다. 적어도 서로가 최소한 민주헌정의 적이 아님은 야8당연대가 이루어질 때 이미 확인되지 않았나.

@stefanoStefano Marinelli and it all started with something „wireless“ in 1977.

https://www.arminhanisch.de/2024/09/rueckblick-cbfunk/

(blogpost in DE/IT/EN)

@alisynthesisAlison Wilder

가령 진보당과 민주당이 단일화를 한다면, 진보당이 이재명의 이름으로 차별금지법을 공약할 수 있는, 쌍무적이고 강력한 연대가 되기를 희망한다. 나는 그것이 능히 가능하다고 믿는다.

연대성명이 조직된다면, 광장의 이름으로 추진해야만 할 정책들과 약속받아야만 할 미래를 반드시 확보하시기를 기원한다. 야5당연대에서 소수 3당이 결코 들러리로 남지 않음을 증명해달라.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:uabkr6tn7ru4b4e5e6udleuf/post/3lonrxpbmek2c

#Privacy & #DataProtection picks of the day (continued):

➡️ @noybeu - European group fighting privacy violations by corporations

➡️ @torprojectThe Tor Project - Non-profit network allowing anonymous internet use

➡️ @openprivacyOpen Privacy Research Society - Canadian non-profit developing FOSS to help protect privacy

➡️ @icd@mastodon.internet-czas-dzialac.plInternet. Czas działać! 🌎 (main) & @icd@video.internet-czas-dzialac.plInternet. Czas działać! (videos) - Polish group campaigning for privacy

➡️ @topioTopio e.V. - space for privacy - German non-profit helping people de-Google their phones

➡️ @d3D3 Direitos Digitais 🇵🇹 🇪🇺 - Non-profit in Portugal campaigning to protect privacy (in Portuguese)

2/6

Reservoir Sampling https://lobste.rs/s/r0axbc #math #scaling
https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/

San Francisco! Mark your calendars. I'll be discussing Trump, Tech and The Nerd Reich at the Commonwealth Club on July 14. Tickets available! You can also attend online. www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2025-...

Gil Duran on Trump, Tech and “...

OHGO Traffic Camera: (City of Columbus) Olentangy River Rd at John Herrick Dr

Camera View

Lat/Lng: 39.998535, -83.02588