iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

iiinova is part of the Atmosphere — an open, public network where you own your identity.

bryan newbold

@bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy

106 followers 4 following 81 posts

dweb, cycling, free software, snow, wiki, hardware, big cities, symbolic systems. I love speculating about found objects. Working at blueskyweb.xyz on atproto […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ social.coop/@bnewbold, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2026

free software folks: what design/org patterns are there for publishing community software to mainstream app stores these days? eg, is there an umbrella org/institution that publishes free software apps to the app stores, on behalf of community projects? could be an org like ASF. I'm not […]

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Bluesky @bsky.app · 01/10/2025

Bluesky runs on open protocols with open source code. Today we’re taking an additional step and making a patent non-aggression pledge to ensure that everyone can build confidently on our work. Learn more and read the pledge in our blog post: bsky.social/about/blog/1...

Bluesky's Patent Non-Aggression Pledge - Bluesky

Bluesky develops open protocols. We're taking a short and simple patent non-aggression pledge to ensure that everybody feels confident building on them.

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Johannes Ernst @j12t.j12t.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

@bnewbold and Dan Holmgren wrote a really nice document for the IETF describing how Bluesky / ATProto works at an architecture level. If you are curious, recommended! datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-newb…

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2025

@thisismissem not directly related or required, but you might be interested in this little DNS resolver thing: tangled.sh/@bnewbold.net/cobalt/blo…

cmd/handlr/README.md at main · @bnewbold.net/cobalt

go scratch code for atproto

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2025

@thisismissem oh! we use this Caddy feature for self-hosted atproto PDS instances, to verify "handles". I didn't know about this "ask" feature though, that is really nifty and would prevent some DoS issues

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

@ricci @jdp23 it also buttresses the argument of some folks who say "bluesky is centralized": if what they mean is that the atmosphere "market" is centralized, today, then they are correct! this specificity/framing helps avoid folks from talking past each other

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

@ricci @jdp23 one thing i'd point out is that (I assume) this counts the vast majority of Threads users as not "part of Fediverse". otherwise Threads would dominate fediverse in a big way (though maybe not as much as bsky dominates atmo PDS hosting!). which I think is accurate!

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2025

@ricci @jdp23 FWIW, I think this is is a helpful contribution to the conversation because it is specific, and I think what is being measured does matter. I don't think that it is the *only* thing that matters, but it is a measurement/metric I would like the atmosphere to improve on over the years.

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade another answer, which I love, is that folks could also just create fediverse accounts and the bridge. in the near future they might even be able to migrate their account through the bridge: blog.anew.social/bounce-a-cross-pro…

blog.anew.social

Bounce: A Cross-Protocol Migration Tool

0:00 /0:05 1× Introducing: Bounce Today at FediForum, we previewed Bounce: a new tool that uses Bridgy Fed to help migrate your social graph between Mastodon and Bluesky. You read that right: we built a service that moves your social graph not just within a protocol network, but

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade the caveats there are the same with AP: how do you find these apps/hosts and get an invite? what incentivizes folks to run them? how independent are they really from upstream devs and other large players in the ecosystem? what are the economics of the moderation labor?

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Thanks for the clear clarification! For an end user in a situation like that, ideally i'd send them to blacksky.community, which is a client app, and has a "Create Account" button which will result in an account hosted by Blacksky, under their ToS (this would require an […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade that is a lot of components! if you have the perspective of wanting it to be easy to run the whole stack as a "single instance", this is a big pain (compared to, eg, the mastodon software distribution). from my perspective, it is *good* to have it broken up in to specialized […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@jannem @xgranade if somebody in Mississippi set things up they could interoperate with the rest of the network. "continue to use Bluesky": they would not be using the Bluesky Social branded app from the app store, but yeah they could do microblogging in the atmosphere with friends elsewhere […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@jannem @xgranade yes, everything interoperates

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade finally moderation. which of course is the hardest and perhaps most important part of the whole system! The "Ozone" moderation service is open source and has self-hosting instructions: github.com/bluesky-social/ozone There are dozens of instances focused on different aspects […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Client Apps: these are usually pretty simple front-end apps which talk to AppView backend. But apps are still super important in atproto! They are ultimately where product features happen, and set defaults for which infra is used, and what moderation providers are required. as well as […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Indexing (AppView): focusing on bsky microblogging (ignoring things like blog posts, events, forums, etc), there are a couple different approaches to independent indexing, to serve things like reply threads. zeppelin.social is both a full-network bsky AppView, and a client […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Relay: I have a blog post describing how to run an independent full-network relay here: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3kwzl7tye6u… A community member (phil) runs a handful of relays in different world regions, just for fun. Blacksky community has their own relay implementation and […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Hosting (PDS): folks have been running independent PDS instances for more than a year now. It costs on the order of $5/month to run a full PDS with a small group of users. A recent community-scale effort has been Blacksky getting hundreds of folks to migrate. Most PDS instances […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade Identity: I recommend most folks just use did:plc (which gives strong ownership and doesn't require domain registration), but did:web is supported and totally doesn't touch Bluesky PBC. Here is a (long, detailed, technical) guide […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade I'll give examples for each of this which aren't controlled by Bluesky PBC, and all work together. Nobody I know independently runs *all* these things in a *single* org. And i'm not going to claim that Bluesky isn't the dominant service provider for all of these for most people in the […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2025

@xgranade ATProto is designed to be broken up in to components which can be operated by different folks. This is a lot like the web/internet, but not like Fediverse, in that Fedi folks often expect to have one server combine "the whole stack". Some major ATproto components: - identity (DIDs) - […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2025

@ben @thisismissem I'm not going to argue that Bluesky isn't VC-funded today, or in the big picture, but I think it was a big deal that it got on the order of $10 million dollars at the start as an R&D contract. that gave about a year for the original team to do pure engineering experimentation […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 02/05/2025

@wjmaggos that blog post is focused on a single piece of infrastructure: relays. in the past there was a fixation from some folks on the cost and control of that piece of infrastructure, and this is a response to that. there are still other pieces of atproto/bluesky infrastructure which are not […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/03/2025

@timbray just drove through that area yesterday, it is so great. also thinking about how it is kind of the northern terminus of "highways/roads mostly along the Pacific coast" all the way from the mexican border (at least)

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2025

@jonny the tapes are individually cheap, but the read/write machines are expensive. that would be fine if the machines were reliable and/or compatible over long time periods, but they are not. they need repair, sometimes get more expensive second-hand, etc. spinning disks, with integrated […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/02/2025

@jonny my general impression is that tape storage doesn't make sense unless you are writing the data but don't actually intend to ever read it; or if somebody would pay you a bunch of money at the time of read. if you plan from the start to read the data back out of the system, even just once […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2025

@collectifission @anders.sorby.xyz if you are digging in to the scaling properties of atproto, check this out github.com/bluesky-social/proposals…

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2025

@damonoutlaw.xyz (but a new/dedicated thing would be cool too!)

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2025

@damonoutlaw.xyz I think both IndieWeb and dweb are pretty good venues/communities for that sort of gathering?

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2025

@jsit it depends on the system; i'd be curious what Mastodon does, for example. in the systems I am familiar with specifically for abusive images, things are not shown; black-and-white; and/or blurred by default. sometimes images are inverted or have other transforms to make them a bit "less […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/01/2025

emacstodon

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/01/2025

I love my stem cap

colorful painted disk on bike stem

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/12/2024

@strypey our current stance and thinking is that the lower levels of atproto fit better at the IETF: application-agnostic, authenticated transfer (transport) of data in a merkle-tree repository structure using CBOR, etc. applicaiton-specific schemas on top of that layer are more "document" […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2024

we didn't pick DIDs because they have "decentralized" in the name, they are basically just an abstraction barrier to uncouple identity mechanisms. PLC needs work, but is self-certifying and that keeps a lot of paths open.

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2024

this was pretty long so I didn't get in to DID / DNS stuff. contact lists are awesome and under-utilized, and petnames are part of that. but they don't make sense for big-world or discovery. we like DNS. it is technically centralized but power/governance is pretty devolved.

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2024

wrote up a reply to @cwebber's "How decentralized is Bluesky really" blog post: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t…

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2024

also some july hiking. cascades winter snow is coming on hard!

climber walking on snow field, blue sky and mountains behind

dramatic alpine valley with blue lake. snow-covered mountains on the horizon

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2024

I forgot to larch-post over here, didn't I

alpine mountain valley with golden larch trees in foreground

hillside covered in golden larch trees

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2024

@paul @not2b yay!

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

good job everybody

plate of sopes

bowl of nopales salad

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

@mho as a heads up, not sure how you are measuring traffic (Referer header? query params?), but tracking links from mobile apps specifically can be difficult. we have been looking in to this at Bluesky and will roll out some changes soon.

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

Bluesky had some infrastructure problems last week which impacted @bsky.brid.gy (along with Bluesky's own PDS instances), but it should be functioning smoothly for new content now. Here is a post showing atmosphere-to-fediverse […]

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Jay 🦋 @jay.bsky.team · 24/11/2024

Late time of year for such a nice flower

white and purple iris

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

@wjmaggos this was not intention, and my understanding is that new content has been flowing. we had a serious incident on 2024-11-21 (last thursday) which has impacted some posts getting indexed from that day. we then had a clog catching up bridgyfed because of a misconfiguration. we very much […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

@not2b @paul ... possible because we didn't have a UNIQUE constraint on a SQL table.

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/11/2024

@not2b @paul just to clarify, we (I work for Bluesky) did not do anything intentional here. we had a broad service degradation on 2024-11-21 which impacted many services in the network, both those operated by us and others. We are still cleaning up impacted accounts. I don't remember if we […]

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bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2024

@laurenshof I dug through some old notes and the closest I could find for this December milestone was: > more complete threading so presumably reply threads with participants on separate instances

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 15/11/2024

can somebody remind me what the Threads ActivityPub milestone is that will roll out in December? bi-directional posting?

bryan newbold @bnewbold.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/11/2024

@notplants @jonny by default (and by design), labelers and feed generators work fine across any other infra like relays or appviews. labelers and feedgens reference DIDs and AT-URIs (global scope), and can be consumed/requested by any client. that sort of assumes that all relays are "full […]

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