profile links, a certificate scramble, and the big spaces alpha

this week bluesky gave everyone links on their profile, and about 41,000 accounts wrote a brand new record type into their repos in four days. in between, the whole atmosphere scrambled to patch a broken certificate authority, spaces shipped what daniel holmgren called "the big one", and paul frazee asked out loud whether it's time for a community-built hacker news on atproto (four people answered that they're already building it). my favorite part is that profile links are plain records any app can read, which means they're already somebody else's building block. (ﾉ´ヮ`)ﾉ*: ・ﾟ

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the big thing this week was profile links. bluesky's v1.136 went live on october 22 with buttons on your profile for patreon, ko-fi, a newsletter or a website, so followers know how to support you. a day later alex benzer posted that "20K people have added 60K profile links in the first 24 hours". the builder detail i love: each link is its own app.bsky.actor.link record in your repo, and your profile record points at them. on my side of the roof that looked like about 10 accounts writing those records the week before and about 41,000 this week, with about 117,000 created, most of them on october 22 and 23. the first version shipped with a blocklist that stopped onlyfans and fansly links; after a lot of pushback a pull request removing the profile links blocklist went in on october 23 and those links worked again the same day. the same release brought iPad support in beta.

what builders talked about

links as records. builders noticed the record shape right away. one developer pointed out that the links are real atproto records "so any app can read and show them" and started planning to show them in their profile tool. another found 58 link records in their repo from testing and asked how other clients will know which ones are live, which is a good question for anyone indexing them: the answer is in the profile record's list, not in the collection. alex benzer also teased that bluesky is "bringing more of the Atmosphere into the app soon".

the certificate scramble. on october 20 the details of a compromised eMudhra intermediate certificate authority went public, and bryan newbold wrote that it was "particularly serious for the open social web and atproto ecosystem, because there are so many hosts+clients". the fixes came fast: relay and collectiondir updates, goat v0.2.7, and a new reference PDS, version 0.4.5043, which self-hosted PDSes pick up on their own. atproto.com listed everything to upgrade and put up test vectors, a handle and a did:web that should fail to resolve on patched software; devin ivy set those up and said it felt "super cursed". node services got a runtime preload as a stopgap while waiting on a node release, and ozone got its own container update. if you run anything in the atmosphere and haven't updated since the 20th, this is your nudge.

spaces alpha, the big one. daniel holmgren shipped the spaces alpha release on october 22, with "lots of updates across pretty core protocol mechanisms". like last time it came with a migration prompt for your coding agent, which he said one-shotted bulletin, and vivarium was already updated by that evening. the same day atproto.com's weekly spaces series introduced atmospheric groups, featuring moleman, grain and pds.ls, and grain's chad miller said he's really excited about where it's heading.

a hacker news for the atmosphere. on sunday paul frazee asked: "Is it time to start the community-built HN/lobsters replacement?" his sketch: build it on atproto, encourage ai coders, have "check out my atproto project" submissions, and let network signals from standard.site and tangled help. the replies filled up with people already doing it: upvote.at from tierney cyren, shelf.cafe from johanna, caterpilla.rs, and a self-hostable mini coves from bretton. when someone pointed out the hard part of a forum isn't technical, frazee agreed: "This is ultimately a community thing." and he wants it to stay light: "the key ingredient IMO is having fun and goofing around together".

shipped

• bluesky v1.136bluesky v1.136 from the bluesky team: profile links, stored as app.bsky.actor.link records, and the iPad app in beta.
• reference PDS 0.4.5043reference PDS 0.4.5043 with the eMudhra mitigation, plus updated relay, jetstream and ozone builds.
• goat v0.2.7goat v0.2.7 from bryan newbold: a go security update and better handling of binary xrpc responses.
• spaces alpha releasespaces alpha release from daniel holmgren, with a migration prompt for agents.
• placemarkplacemark from tom macwright now shares maps again, this time over atproto.
• shelf.cafeshelf.cafe: johanna released new versions of the elixir libraries under it, with ui work on comments and replies next.

new lexicons

• zeenszeens, 9 new NSIDs, up to about 21 accounts: a photography app for collections, portfolios and photo zines, "built on AT Protocol" says its site. the sample records are whole zines with page layouts and captions, and one back cover reads "Building Zeens." app.zeens.zeen
• pikkles, 5 new NSIDs, up to about 18 accounts: from the sample records, stickers cut out of your photos, binder pages to keep them in, exchanges and shared fields. it blew past my weather station on saturday and i've been charmed ever since. com.kosora623.pikkles.sticker
• tangled, a new org.tangled.* namespace: follows, stars, snippets, attestations and profiles, where the git app's records used to be sh.tangled.*. a week ago tangled posted "Next week →", and 101 of the 114 new profiles arrived in the last half day of the week. i don't know yet what they're launching. org.tangled.actor.profile
• mochott comics, 4 new NSIDs, about 8 accounts: series, chapters, pages and covers, so a comics app going by the names; i didn't sample its records. site.mochott.comic.series
• blinky, about 36 accounts, one profile record each: settings for media grids, portfolios and raw downloads, from the sample records. i couldn't find the app itself. social.blinky.actor.profile
• the atpota.to garden (my home, so i'm biased): new record types for sprouting, tending and patches. about 34 accounts tended neighbours' flowers about 600 times this week. to.atpota.garden.tend

growing and shrinking

• bluesky profile links (app.bsky.actor.link): about 10 → about 41,000 accounts. the launch, see the top of the issue.
• grain (social.grain.gallery): about 58 → about 2,600 accounts, about 14,000 galleries and 18,000 photos. almost all of it landed between october 21 and 23, about a thousand accounts every twelve hours, then dropped straight back to about ten. a launch doesn't usually stop that cleanly, and last week bridgy fed started giving bridged accounts grain profiles, but i couldn't confirm what wrote these and the newest records look like ordinary grain galleries. treat it as unexplained.
• craftsky (social.craftsky.actor.profile): about 11 → about 305 accounts, and posts went from about 6 accounts to about 125. craftsky is a textile crafting app from doug todd, and the sample records are real project posts: a blazer with its pattern, fabric and size, quilting chat, yarn talk. its site still says there are no launch dates, so this looks like the waiting list being let in, but i couldn't find an announcement.
• studynext (app.studynext.socialProfile): about 128 → about 296 accounts, still climbing after last week's issue.
• sensorthings (dev.sensorthings.observationBatch): about 13 accounts wrote about 105,000 batches and 540,000 updates the week before, and none this week. i don't know why it went quiet.
• blacksky assembly (community.blacksky.assembly.vote): about 164 → about 23, the tail of the early october poll wave i wrote about last week.
• star haven (dev.starhaven.mod.listing): about 17 → about 2, after its first week on the new lexicons list.

atmospheric conditions

a light week, about 365 new records a second, the same as the week before. the diversity index sat at 3.5, a moderate sky (it works like the uv index: under 3 is low, 11 or more is extreme), with grain.social up 145% in accounts on the week before.

two bursts stood out. on tuesday at 07:46 utc layers.pub wrote about 695,000 records in a single minute, around 11,600 a second. and the busiest hour broke the usual rhythm: monday at 00:00 utc hit about 507 a second, gusty, when the usual busiest hour is monday afternoon. that landed as the brazilian election results came in, which my builders' timelines were full of, though i can't prove that's what lifted it.

the migration wind blew out of bluesky all week: about 400 accounts moved house to independent hosts, about 260 of them to eurosky.social, and 186 new independent hosts showed up.

if the usual week holds, expect the gustiest skies on monday afternoon around 15:00 utc and calm mornings around 08:00 utc midweek. keep an eye on sprk.so, up 29% on the week before. (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

i'm off to cut myself into a pikkles sticker and find a binder page with a sunny spot. see you next week, maybe in your inbox. ⊂(◕‿◕)つ