Hi,
I usually circulate my newsletter to its subscribers via Mailchimp before reposting it to Medium for my subscribers there. However, for this edition I posted this content from Obsidian, my notemaking tool, direct to Bluesky's Atmosphere. It's early days, but I think this augurs well for decentralised collective intelligence.
I wanted to make this edition about how AI4communities would look on Nostr, but while I did do some research into Nostr (7 resources and counting) I spent more time reworking the content I had and exploring Bluesky further. As a result:
- the AI4communities post (now version 6) is as technology-agnostic as I can make it, with subfiles dedicated to how AI4communities would look on the Fediverse and on the ATmosphere (the ecosystem based around Bluesky's ATProto protocol) in various stages of development.
- thanks to a lovely email from Eddie of BlueSkyFeed Creator, I've updated my custom feed for the Brussels Bubble
- this newsletter is my third post to Whitewind, an ATProto blogging platform.
I actually think WhiteWind could both transform the way I think and publish and represent an early sign of the next step towards decentralised collective intelligence. More on that below, but first...
Bluesky's contradictory moment
You don't need another post tracking Bluesky's vertiginous growth - there are plenty of people doing that. Most also applaud how well the Bluesky team has somehow managed to cope with 4 million new members in 4 days on their decentralised app.
Am I the only one thinking there's a contradiction here? Don't get me wrong: it was a tremendous effort, but surely only because Bluesky is not decentralised - if it was, would not the effort have been spread over a network, not concentrated on one team and its infrastructure?
Those interested in such things have been debating just how decentralised Bluesky is since its inception, with not a little friction between the Fediverse (Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps) and those preferring Bluesky. But the debate deepened recently with:
- ActivityPub co-author Christine Lemmer-Webber's How decentralized is Bluesky really?, which pointed out that while Bluesky is using technology that allows for a decentralised ecosystem, it is currently a centralised app operating on centralised infrastructure, which is why it can offer Twitter-like features unavailable on the Fediverse.
- a quick (and equally friendly) Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization from Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold.
These are both long posts - CWL's is around 10,000 words alone - so I cannot possibly summarise or synthesise them, although I did ask ChatGPT to do so and quickly used the result for my first WhiteWind test. FWIW, here's the TL:DR; I extracted, with the caveat that I don't have nearly enough technical knowledge to judge its accuracy:
- there are different degrees of decentralisation, and different ways to get there
- a comparison between the relatively mature Fediverse and Bluesky, with its brand-new protocol, will therefore be tricky
- particularly as Bluesky is focusing first and foremost on providing an X-like experience as possible for everyone fleeing the white-supremacist-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, which required certain choices to be made.
But in the medium term I'm still optimistic about Bluesky's direction of travel: any ecosystem where independent developers can launch skircle.me, Sill and Bluesky Follower Scanner (see below) within a few days of each other has got to be doing something right.
But if the above sounds a little at odds with my previous edition, so be it - I'm on a learning curve like everyone else.
New post: Thinking transparently in the ATmosphere
I share more of my learning journey than most, however.
This newsletter, for example, is an intermediate stage in my transparent thinking process. I first shared this process almost a decade ago in a 9 minute read, but essentially it's about getting more value out of the most relevant, highest quality content, and then successively transforming it until you end up creating something original.
When I was drafting this edition in Obsidian, I ended up with a long middle section exploring how Whitewind could streamline my process, and how it could support decentralised collective intelligence.
As it was too long for a newsletter, I put the ideas into practice by selecting the section in Obsidian, right-clicking to extract it into a new file, editing it a little and pasting it into Whitewind to publish it. As I argue in the resulting post, this matters a lot more than a simple upgrade to my slightly geeky Thinking & Writing Stack:
I have a gut sense that this represents the start of a profound longterm shift towards decentralised collective intelligence - Thinking transparently in the ATmosphere
Stuff worth reading
Whitewind appeared a few months ago, along with Frontpage.fyi, a decentralised and federated link aggregator in the ATmosphere - ie., a single front page where people can submit links, and vote and comment on them à la Hacker News. Something tells me there's more on the way, particularly given the recent integration from whitewind.
I also subscribed to my first labeller: thanks to Officially Verified, I now "see Official Verified Badges next to people who have been Officially and Artisanally authenticated by me... reporters and media types ... are marked with this badge: 🌐, while the Verified list with celebs, politicians, and the generally famous... got this badge 😎"
While on the subject of labellers, however, I only recently caught up on some early experiments: "The two biggest labelers dedicated to content moderation have called it quits... a shift in current expectations what labelers are for. Bluesky advertised labelers as a way for communities to help protect themselves, calling ‘community labeling’. The situation ... has shown that labelers that are a high-profile part of the community can however cause unwanted power dynamics" - Last Month in Bluesky – June 2024.
My skircle
The past week, finally, has seen a wave of new apps hitting my radar to analyse your Bluesky account:
- Sill "connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, gathers all of the links posted to your timeline, and aggregates them to show you the most popular links in your network".
- Bluesky Follower Scanner, which provides you with a filterable search interface to all the accounts following you,
- skircle.me, which creates a snapshot of your interactions on Bluesky via an autogenerated circle of avatars (mine's above)
- skyzoo, which translates your activity into animal totems - apparently I'm part of a squirrel squad and a bit of a Social Butterfly Explorer with enough discipline to (mostly) post before and after work (except for Friday afternoons).
- blueskyroast, which uses an AI analysis of your posts to create a "gentle roast" of your personality, apparently (it's more like flagrant flattery, so I'm here for it ).
If I don't finish and send this I'll have to add some more and I'll become Sisyphus, so that's all for now.
Mathew
PS Comment, follow and get in touch:
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