Beginning Phase 2 of Northsky

Welcome to the Northsky Newsletter!

Phase One: PDS + Migration is now on auto-pilot, so we’re moving onto exciting new endeavors for Phase Two, including our own App, Moderation Labeler, Private Data and more!

Migration Report

We have sent out ~1,050 invites and have ~280 users on our PDS so far. That’s an migration rate of around 26%. Of the migrated, we’ve had a number of support requests for for migration assistance and all were either resolved or are in the process of being resolved. (If you still need help, use our support form.)

We’ve been able to improve the clarity and simplicity of our migration website over time, and have been able to reduce support requests quite a bit finding that now less than 5% of users need migration assistance.

We’ve also released the source code for our migration frontend and backend on GitHub.

We’ve got 6,123 more waitlisters (and growing) to vet and invite, and we’re moving on that as fast as we can, sending out invites each week!

We don’t currently have the spare bandwidth to let everyone know what position they are in the queue, but if you feel you’re at imminent risk of your account being taken down by Bluesky, let us know using this form and we will consider accelerating your migration.

Survey about your Discord Communities

Like many of you, we’re members of 2SLGBTQIA+ communities on Discord, and we wanted to do some social investigation and ask y’all how concerned you are about the global Age Verification rollout Discord is planning? If there’s any way that Northsky can help you or your communities on Discord, we want to know. Tell us using this survey!​

The overall ATproto ecosystem is developing rapidly, and while there might not be a 1:1 Discord competitor at this time, there are several apps and technologies evolving. Roomy.Space is a promising ATproto-based one in alpha (no private data yet) and is usable with a Northsky account.

Furthermore, Northsky is currently developing our own Private Data solution called Stratos, that we plan on sharing with the rest of the “ATmosphere”, because we know the inherent value of privacy to our community. (More on Stratos below...)

Overview: Phase 2 of Northsky Social

Here’s what we’re doing in Phase 2 of Northsky’s development:

• Discover Northsky Feed
• Moderation Team + Labeler
• Northsky App + IndieApp + Mobile Apps
• Stratos Private Data

IndieApp + Northsky Appview

Many of you have been asking, will Northsky have it’s own app? Yes! We’re going to have an app that is similar to the Bluesky’s experience, but we’re going to do a bit more than that too.

In this forum, we discuss the need for a shared and maintained community app codebase that is kept up to date with ATprotocol changes, but also allows for more componentization of features, more experimentation. Developers through the ecosystem could experiment more with features and lexicons, without having to maintain their own app frontends.

We figured, since we’re going to be offering and maintaining our own app as part of our mission, we might as well do so in a way that invites collaboration from others looking to try experiments tweaking the app interface and offering new features. We’re calling this initiative IndieApp.

Beyond IndieApp, we’ll be releasing our own Mobile Apps in time so you can use Northsky more conveniently from your portable devices, and also standing up our own Appview (backend) so that we all can talk to Link again, and be more fully independent from Bluesky moderation. Similar to Blacksky our long term goal is to be able to operate independent of the Bluesky ATproto infrastructure to serve our community if it comes to that and these two services make significant strides to get us there.

Stratos Private Data

Recently Evelyn, one of the Northsky Directors, published a post on why private data is so important for communities and described our planned model for “shared private microblogging” where users are able to make posts that are private and only visible to specific groups. We’re continuing to work on developing Stratos and wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how it would work for Northsky.

The plan has diverged a bit from what was outlined in the post as we are building this for the broader ATproto community as a whole in a way that allows anyone to run their own stratos service that an appview can use to display private posts. Currently we plan to implement support for “arbitrary” boundaries that we call domains which can be defined by either a list of users (sourced from a user list) or PDS. A PDS domain in our case would be Northsky and so in practice, when you make a post with the Northsky app you would be able to declare your post for Northsky only and as a result, anyone on Northsky would see it while those not on the Northsky PDS wouldn’t be able to see it even if they had the ID for the underlying record. This means we are targeting true data privacy rather than hiding in plain sight by using a different lexicon. If you’d like to know more keep an eye out for a session by Evelyn at Atmosphere Conf where she will share further details on Stratos!

Known Issues / Notices for Northsky Users

2FA is not available on our PDS yet. We were waiting on a certain PR to get merged by Bluesky, but it looks like that’s not happening. As such we are currently investigating other solutions and will share details as soon as we have settled on one. We understand how important MFA is to our account security.

Also, if you’re noticing your northsky account getting added to All PDS Repos (filtered) by shodan.northsky.social, that’s just a stopgap for getting added to the Northsky Discover feed. That will go away in the future.

Chat with us!

We want to hear from you! As we build out Northsky and think about the future, we want to know what things you're interested in having us build. We're committed to building in the open and that involves listening to our community to determine what's most important for all of us.

You can get in touch with us in these ways:

Start a discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/NorthskySocial/discussions (good for proposals, FAQs, and feature requests)

Skeet at us @transrights.northsky.social on Bluesky.

E-mail us at community@northskysocial.com​

Chat again soon,

The Northsky Team