Northsky Update #7: Outage Reporting, ATmosphereConf Talks, and 2FA Enabled!

Welcome to the Northsky Newsletter!

What to do when outages happen, 2FA now available for your accounts, and what we did at ATmosphereConf 2026!

What to do when there's an Outage

As we're sure you're aware, Bluesky is experiencing a prolonged outage.

As a Northsky user, if you notice your hybrid Northsky / Bluesky experience isn't performing correctly, what should you do?

You can check these two Status websites:

• Northsky Status: status.northsky.social
• Bluesky Status: status.bsky.app​

In the above incident, checking these pages would reveal that Northsky systems were operational and the Bluesky's API nodes were unresponsive. The Bluesky Status page itself has been intermittent throughout this outage.

We're taking the following steps to improve our response to Outages:

• Working towards becoming more independent from Bluesky by running our own Apps and Appview.
• Adding outage notices to our Website and Migrator frontend.

If there's an issue with Northsky's services, we will likely already be aware due to our internal alerting systems, but you're always welcome to submit an issue via our support form and we'll investigate.

2-Factor Authentication is now available!

We'd previously mentioned that 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) was disabled due to a shortcoming of the reference PDS implementation that requires Bluesky to merge this pull request.

We got tired of waiting for this to happen, so we've implemented a PDS Gatekeeper solution to enable 2FA via E-mail.

To enable 2FA on your account: Go to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> E-mail 2FA -> Enabled.

⚠️We highly recommend enabling 2FA for your safety and the safety of the entire Northsky community.⚠️

Thank you for your patience and trust as we worked towards resolving this shortcoming!

Northsky participation in ATmosphereConf 2026

We were so busy preparing for ATmosphereConf 2026, that we forgot to celebrate our 1-Year Anniversary as an incorporated Community Service Cooperative, so first...

🎉Happy 1-Year of Northsky Social Cooperative🎉

...now onto ATmosphereConf news!

What were we so busy doing? We had our Directors, Members, and even Volunteers participating in ATmosphereConf 2026 in various capacities, which we'll highlight below:

​@aendra.com, one of our coop members, gave a talk called "Journalism must create its own algorithms" which you can watch here. She also participated in a panel about "How and Why News Organizations Should Build on the ATProtocol" viewable here.

​@kandake.africa, one of our directors, gave a live demonstration of our upcoming Stratos permissioned data solution for the ATmosphere. This will let Northsky users post Northsky-only posts, and other configurations across other boundaries in the future, including spanning multiple PDS. Watch the demo for a sneak peek!

​@hilk.eu, one of our volunteers, gave a talk called "An artist dreaming in the Atmosphere: visions about community, sustainability and creativity" which you can watch here.

​@lucca.northsky.team, another one of our directors, also participated as one of the conference organizers and helped plan the entire event, recruit and manage volunteer staff, and also plan the official afterparty (where we did our best to spread queer joy!)

We also had other members and volunteers in attendance at the conference, and were able to do a lot of networking and building connections with other developers in the ATmosphere. Meeting the Blacksky team was definitely a highlight, as their work has always been inspirational for us.

Blacksky's @rude1.blacksky.team gave a great talk called "Groundings with my Siblings: Lessons Learned Building for Community" which you can watch here, and @drkalyncoghill.blacksky.team unveiled Acorn in "Creating a Safer Web: Blacksky's Moderation Tool". We definitely want to check out Acorn for ourselves and see if it'll help our volunteer moderation team!

Overall, we found participating in this community conference extremely beneficial, and we hope that you'll start seeing those benefits too as we team up with other like-minded groups to improve your experience in the ATmosphere!

You can browse all of the ATmosphereConf talks using Evelyn's fun gamified vod browser, or the boring way here.

We look forward to participating in next years ATmosphereConf, too!

Missing Info from last Newsletter

2 Sections of our previous Newsletter post were accidentally left out, where we cover the Discover Northsky Feed and how we're Ramping up our Moderation Team and Labeler. You can read the missing info about those topics here.

The short version is:

• You can start using our Discover Northsky Feed if you'd like, which is just our PDS users posts chronologically. (Opt-out Link)
• We are in the very early stages of our W.I.P. Moderation Labeler, which you can help us test by subscribing to our labeler and sending in reports. Please only send in valid reports that violate our Community Guidelines. We highly recommend reading our full post here if you start using this while it is still a work-in-progress.
• ⚠️Reports will process slowly. Labels will change and may or may not be applied consistently. This will improve over time, but we’re starting slow and learning! You can always send us feedback via our Support Form.⚠️

Known Issues

✅RESOLVED: 2-Factor Authentication via E-mail is now available for Northsky-hosted accounts. Go to Settings -> Privacy and Security -> E-mail 2FA -> Enabled. We highly recommend turning this on for your safety and the safety of the entire Northsky community.

ℹ️If 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 Discover Northsky feed. That will go away in the future as we evolve our Feed offerings.

Need to report an issue? File one via our support form.

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.

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 the ATmoshere.
• E-mail us at community@northskysocial.com​

Chat again soon,

The Northsky Team