The Girl Who Could Ruin Everyone's Fun

Hi,

Is this working??? Hello???

Oki I'm bad at writing blog posts but I feel like rambling about my feelings!!!

More seriously, I wanted to bring some perspective to what it's been like developing in this ecosystem for the past year. Especially because while I don't think I've done anything deeply complex engineering wise, I've at least helped everyone a little by providing tools we all use.

It started with cleanfollow back in June 2024.

I didn't care much for CSS back then.

But it worked and solved a pretty major request among Bluesky users: "How do we remove followers?"

Oh wait no it didn't solve that one... But many thought it did and you can't imagine the pain I went through trying to hunt down every mention of it to clarify what it actually did (until I eventually gave up).

Still to this day, I see it regularly shared and while I don't track any usage stats, I feel confident claiming it's one of the most used third party tools.

Which means...

If I was to inject malicious code...

Now obviously, it's an open source project, and it's entirely client-side, so it would be easy to detect. And it would really hurt my reputation, and the trust people put in me. Well kind of, because most of them don't know who I am, and never bothered checking who was behind it.

It still would do a lot of damage until word spreads out.

OAuth scopes will alleviate some of those concerns, and limit the potential consequences of developers going rogue. So it's fine, we're working on it. Also maybe you simply don't use it, or it's being replaced by a better alternative.

Soon after, I announced the Pronouns labeler.

Pretty popular. Over 80k accounts labeled.

Fun fact: Did you know labelers are really just "moderation services" similar to the one Bluesky uses to label spam accounts, or call bitdizzy rude.

At any moment, I can apply the !hide label to an account and anyone subscribed to the Pronouns labeler won't be able to view the profile, or read any posts, until they unsubscribe from it.

Once again, it's possible to detect, clicking the Learn More above will show you a prompt with the source of the label.

Still, that'd be a bit of a headache to figure out for many. They will be confused, and for at least a small period, everyone will miss posts, struggle to use the site, even access their own profile.

There is at the moment no way to remove those permissions from a labeler.

I'm so powerful...

However, if you're reading this, you might mostly know me for PDSls.

You've used it. Everyone is using it right now.

It's much more than a record browser, or a repo browser, it's even a PDS browser, it can query labels, it can stream jetstream and the firehose, it can create, edit, and delete records, check the PLC logs, or backlinks turning it into a meta client with meta appview features.

I'm kinda proud of it. I managed to fit a lot into a simple UI while keeping the codebase fairly maintainable and compact. (With a lot of help from mary thanks to her amazing atcute library)

As I'm writing this, the site is getting a lot of attention since it allows you to investigate records from repositories that might be taken down at the appview level, and query the moderation labels.

It's rather disheartening to me. I see this as a protocol tool to be primarily used by developers, or to learn more about how atproto works. It's very gratifying to hear feedback and see how much it helps people to build this little ecosystem and all kind of apps that could make the internet a cooler place.

BUT HAVE YOU HEARD THEY SUSPENDED MY FAVORITE SHITPOSTER???

I do not care.

I joked earlier by posting this mockup of PDSls with a Wikipedia style donation prompt at the top.

I obviously can't bring myself to doing it. I don't want to ruin the fun for everyone. But I easily could if I wanted to.

They don't know who I am yet I have the ability to impact the Bluesky experience of many with a few lines of code.

(For a bit, because let's be honest, it wouldn't be so difficult to recover from it)

I just see so much animosity targeted at the Bluesky (PBC) team as if they are the only actors in this play. They don't realize I'm also a part of it, albeit not by choice.

You're using this social media and you're unhappy about decisions made by them so... You use my tools to share knowledge and investigate on the matter? Great, you're now also one of my users.

Long gone are the days when only the few Bluesky employees had total control over the network.

You might say "AKSHUALLY they have control over 99% of the users through the mushroom PDSes and the PLC directory, and 99% of the activity since almost everyone only uses Bluesky". And sure, but also look I can nuke your entire repository next time you log into PDSls and you won't know until it's too late.

It's less about control and more about trust. A lot of trust is given to this one French girl to cooperate and continue being a benevolent contributor in the midst of all this.

Don't worry, I'm fine.

I love atproto. I would never hurt it.

Just...

Don't hurt the people I care about.