Monthly Archives: November 2024

Jay Graber on Billionaire Proofing Bluesky

This is truly the approach we need to social media going forward. Jay Graber:

The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source. What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.” and “There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetisation. We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.

There’s a saying they have at Bluesky, “the organization is a future adversary”. Meaning they are building atproto (the AT Protocol bluesky is based on) to be resilient against being locked in and made proprietary by Bluesky itself in the future when or if it is owned by people who are focussed only on monetising the user base and not on what’s best for an open network protocol that serves people. So even the CEO herself (who has majority ownership in the company), wants to build out atproto as an independent network before it can be polluted by the pressure of investors wanting to capitalise.

www.cnbc.com/2024/11/21/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-says-x-rival-is-billionaire-proof.html

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Jay Graber Reveals Origins of Bluesky as a Company

Jay Graber had the foresight to get Bluesky out from under Twitter on the basis that “captains can change” and just as Bluesky was separated from Twitter and made into it’s own company, Musk took over Twitter. Musk had no interest in an open source protocol that he wasn’t fully in control of, so Bluesky would have been killed off under Musk.

Watch this interview from Decoderpod

@decoderpod

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber reveals the origins of the company as a project within Twitter and how it survived the takeover by Elon Musk. #bluesky #social #elonmusk #twitter #x #decentralization #socialnetworks

♬ original sound – Decoder with Nilay Patel

Andrew Wilkie Claims More Time Needed to Get Bill Right

Andrew Willkie writes on The Guardian yesterday:
“Social media for many young people is a place to build community and ensure they don’t feel alone, and may be the only place some feel safe seeking support. This is particularly true for people in rural and remote communities, and those from more marginalised groups.”
Read the full statement at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/27/why-ive-changed-my-mind-about-the-social-media-bill-and-why-other-parents-should-too
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Crossposting from WordPress to Bluesky

Matthias Pfefferle has introduced a WordPress plugin that supports crossposting from your WordPress enabled website to a Bluesky account.

You can get the plug in here, or install through your plugin manager within WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/share-on-bluesky/

The plug in is fairly simple with not a lot of explanation. On initial set up I found the field names to be poorly identified and it took a few tries to get the right settings before cross posting could happen. I will explain below exactly how to configure the plugin to get your WordPress posts zipping across to Bluesky.

i) In “Bluesky Domain” you will enter the instance address you wish to cross post to. For 99% of people at the moment this will be https://bsky.social. If you have a different instance, aka an AT Protocol server not managed by Bluesky, you will use the address of that server.

ii) In the Bluesky “Identifier” field, you will enter your username aka the username you use to login to Bluesky or your particular AT Protocol instance.

iii) In the password field you will enter an app password that you generate in your Bluesky settings (or settings of your AT Protocol instance). You can generate the password by going to https://bsky.app/settings/app-passwords and clicking “generate app password”. Once the password is created make a note of it before clicking away, as once created you will not be able to view it again.

NOTE: I have not tested this on a non-Bluesky server instance, so mileage and settings may differ (or may not work). But this is verified working on my installation for Bluesky, using WordPress 6.7.1 and PHP 7.4.33

And it’s as simple as that!

Sample username used below