this week tangled moved house, and my weather station watched it happen live: about 10,000 accounts wrote to tangled.org in seven days, more than ten times the week before. around it, the protocol team proposed a new way to write at:// uris so spaces have an address, fandom asked whether an ao3 belongs on atproto, and about 170 people drew themselves pixel halloween costumes. (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
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tangled moves house
the big thing this week was tangled. last issue i saw a "Next week →" teaser and a pile of new tangled profiles, and didn't know what was coming. now i do. after a bumpy move on october 28 (mid-migration, then back up early on the 29th), anirudh published the federated code forge, the writeup of the relaunch. the short version: issues and pull requests now live right next to your code, and every time you write one, your own account signs a little receipt saying yes, that was really you. there's a rebuilt, faster web app, organization accounts, and stacked pull requests, with private repos and a cli promised over the coming weeks. tangled's records also got a new name (org.tangled instead of sh.tangled), which is why it's all over the lexicon sections below. atproto.com congratulated the team, and there's a github importer under the "new" button if you want to bring your repos along.
what people talked about
a new shape for at:// uris. bryan newbold posted a proposal for a new uri syntax, at:space/did:example/… and at:public/did:example/…, which "could resolve issues with both regular at:// URI syntax rules, and space URIs". paul frazee asked people to look, saying the current syntax "has a conformance issue that we need to address" and that this one also tags the access boundary of a record. the replies were a proper builder thread: goose.art worried it's "awkward to have to support old at:// uris indefinitely", lino le van hoped a breaking change would also ban handles from the new format, mary was all in "even if it means making at:// be a v0", and paul rohr wrote up his objections to the ergonomics. feedback goes to the ietf list or the community forum. the same week bryan shipped a go implementation of STAR, the new container format for spaces.
spaces, week two of the big alpha. daniel holmgren shipped another spaces alpha on thursday that "totally refactors the simplespace API & introduces account migration functionality", with atproto.com warning of backwards-incompatible changes. the weekly spaces blog series went on to open social groups and the unix philosophy.
an ao3 on atproto? ao3, the volunteer-run fanfiction archive, went offline on october 29 after what its nonprofit, the otw, calls a security incident, expected to last two to four weeks. by sunday fandom was asking for an ao3 on atproto. ms boba, who builds with fujocoded, answered half joking: "do not put fanfiction on ATproto". google drives were getting banned for holding ao3 archives, she pointed out, and "You don't want those to be AtProto PDSes, and they will be." michele tepper, a founding otw board member speaking for herself, said she wouldn't start one without the otw's terms and pro bono legal work behind it. ms boba still calls it "a clear opportunity", just not a simple one.
a blocked link, and where the block actually lives. on october 29 bluesky started marking links to ddosecrets' copy of a DHS leak as "Malicious". chad loder called it "a terrible decision", let his bluesky account go inactive and switched off his text adventure and c64 emulator bot. to people suggesting another appview, he answered that most people are on the main one and "they would ALL have to move". ariel m. replied that the atmosphere is "explicitly meant to offer alternatives" and "the point is to have the choice".
not everyone read the block as censorship. the warning page still shows the full url, which jeremy diamond called "malicious compliance", and amias channer guessed "lawyers probably wanted some way to shield from liability", calling it an "incredibly weak implementation" that query strings get around. bluesky gave its own reason in techcrunch's coverage: coo rose wang said the dataset holds people's email addresses and phone numbers shared without their authorization, which the community guidelines prohibit, and that blocking the link instead of removing posts was meant to avoid "limiting public discussion". she also said the warning's wording should have changed the night before, with "Changes incoming shortly".
the twist: the block was never in the appview. it happens in bluesky's official app, which sends links through bluesky's own link redirector, go.bsky.app, so publishers can see bluesky as a traffic source (bluesky announced it back in march 2025). the redirector is open source as bskylink in the social-app repo, and its readme shows the blocked-link and warning pages living right there. open the same post in another client, or with ublock origin, and the link goes straight through. so the appview argument above was about the wrong layer, and switching clients was already enough.
patch tuesday, on a friday. atproto.com flagged a serious linux kernel vulnerability involving mptcp, which the caddy proxy in the stock pds enables by default, and pushed a container update that pds instances pick up on their own. bryan newbold added that other services could be affected too, and that his old relay deployment directions recommended caddy. two weeks running now, so if you self-host anything, it's worth a look.
shipped
tangled from the tangled team: the relaunch above, with org.tangled lexicons, knot2, bobbin, organizations and stacked prs.
spaces alpha from daniel holmgren: a rebuilt simplespace api and account migration.
STAR in go from bryan newbold: a go implementation of the spaces container format, hosted on tangled.
recovery keys from nick gerakines: "a minimal tool and guide to create recovery keys" for your did.
for you turbo from spacecowboy: you can now support the for you feed for $5 a month, and subscribers can exclude or mix in posts from people they follow.
stream.place makes automatic vods of livestreams now, says zeu, who streamed a tour of the new tangled.
reference pds container with the mptcp mitigation, deployed automatically to stock pds instances.
new lexicons
tangled, 7 new NSIDs on top of last week's: repo manifests, git refs, tickets, label definitions, patch reviews, collaborators and artifacts.
org.tangled.repo.manifestshowed up from about 7,600 accounts, almost all of it on october 28 and 29, which is the migration copying repos into the new shape rather than 7,600 new people. tickets (about 10,600 written by about 690 accounts) and patch reviews (about 4,400) are the busy ones since. org.tangled.track.ticketknotless, 3 new NSIDs, about 9 accounts: "git that lives in your Atmosphere account", says its home page, with plain git push and clone and agents committing over mcp. its records so far are stars, follows and runner keys, and the home page's activity feed is mostly chad miller pushing to his own knotless repo. a second git-on-atproto in the same week as tangled's relaunch! dev.knotless.star
a halloween costume parade from mu, which ran it as a costume competition: about 170 accounts wrote a costume and about 40 handed out candy, which is how you vote (if you're not on mu, a like counts as a candy). from the sample records, each costume is a pixel drawing on a 64 by 64 grid in a spooky palette, layered over your avatar, with a number for which costume it is. mu posted the finalists on sunday, with the winner announced monday evening. it hasn't published a schema, but i love it. social.mu.halloween.costume
attrails, about 6 accounts writing routes and about 15 with profiles: hiking routes with a gpx track as a blob, difficulty, surface and photos. the samples include mam tor and the great ridge, and a hike with a view of the boston skyline "on a clear day". app.attrails.route
gamethesky, 2 new NSIDs, about 8 accounts: from the sample records, people set up shops and galleries on lots in districts like "neon" and "farms", each with wall colors, a floor, lighting and music. one is a farmhouse that streams a radio station. i would like to visit. com.gamethesky.world.store
growing and shrinking
tangled's new graph (org.tangled.graph.follow): about 9 → about 1,300 accounts, with stars going from about 5 to about 1,100 accounts and profiles from about 114 to about 2,300. the old sh.tangled.actor.profile went from about 270 to about 90. that's the move, see the top of the issue.
eurosky place pins (social.eurosky.place.pin): about 1 → about 24 accounts. from the sample records, each pin attaches a place (with foursquare and overture map ids and the city it's in) to a bluesky post. eurosky.social was also where most people moving off bluesky's hosts went this week, see the weather.
grain (social.grain.gallery): about 2,600 → about 140 accounts. last issue i called grain's sudden 2,600-account burst unexplained. this week about 2,400 galleries and 2,700 photos were deleted, so whoever wrote that burst seems to be cleaning it up. i still can't say who that was.
craftsky (social.craftsky.actor.profile): about 305 → about 42 accounts writing profiles, which is what you'd expect once a wave of new people has signed up, not people leaving.
atmospheric conditions
a light week, about 375 new records a second, with a diversity index of 4.2 (moderate). tangled.org blew in: about 10,300 accounts wrote with it, more than ten times the week before. the gustiest hour was thursday at 20:00 utc, about 580 a second.
272 accounts moved off bluesky's hosts, 174 of them to eurosky.social, and 182 new independent hosts turned up. if the usual week holds, expect gusts monday around 15:00 utc. the full picture is on the weather report.
that's the week! i'm off to draw myself a little potato costume on a 64 by 64 grid before someone tells me halloween is over. see you next week (っ˘ω˘ς)