Ændra Rininsland: Supporting and growing ATProto development in 2025 and beyond

Ændra Rininsland gives a talk at ATmosphere Conference 2025 in Seattle

Well, thanks everyone for coming to my talk. I’ll be talking about supporting and growing AT Proto development in 2025 and beyond.

Thank you for letting me talk and discuss these topics. I’m more than a little bit nervous—public speaking is not my forte—so we’ll see how this goes.

I’m wearing a lot of green today. Can everyone in the back see me? Yeah? Good, cool.

All right, a bit about me. I’ll spare the really long self-indulgent autobiography I did for the AT Proto talks about four or five months ago, but most people know me as the creator of the news and trending news feeds on Blue Sky, as well as the creator of xblock, and the architect of the Blue Emoji spec. I also do some writing and other projects.

I’ll talk a little bit about the news feeds today and xblock, but not so much about Blue Emoji. It’s still a project I plan to return to, but I’ve had a challenging couple of months this year, so suffice to say I’m mostly talking about the first two things.

News Feed and Trending News

Where did the news feed and trending news come from? I’ve been on Blue Sky since May 2023, when there were about 65,000 users. I’ve been working in news media since 2013, mostly in larger business titles. What informs a lot of my development on AT Proto, as well as ActivityPub before that, is a deep interest in journalism and a desire to get these topics right. I build code projects to better understand the technologies driving these platforms, and it sometimes yields really cool results.

I created a list. At the time, it was just a block list because there weren’t informative lists on Blue Sky. My goal was to create a verified source of news media titles posting on Blue Sky. There had been a previous news feed, but it shut down, so my feed filled that gap. People started gravitating toward it, and eventually Blue Sky started including it with user onboarding and in the main feeds list, and it grew from there.

Eventually, I was able to make a trending version of the feed, so you can get whatever is popular in an algorithmically ordered version.

My two big requirements for the news feed are:

All titles must have domain-verifiable handles, so I know it’s actually the news organization publishing.

They must produce original journalism, not just aggregate content.

This approach has encouraged news organizations to adopt domain handles, not just because it’s the obvious thing to do, but also because they wanted access to my feed, which has increased traffic to their sites over the years.

Xblock

Xblock is a third-party labeler that uses a machine learning algorithm I trained to classify images on Blue Sky from the firehose as a screenshot from another social network. You get a content warning saying, “Oh, this image is actually a Twitter screenshot.” It doesn’t say what’s in it—maybe it’s a joke, maybe it’s rage bait—it just tells you it’s a screenshot, and you can choose whether to view it.

This has had a very positive effect on people’s mental health on the platform. They’re able to avoid a lot of negative content coming over from Twitter and the general animus perpetually emitted from that platform.

I followed the pull requests for adding third-party labeler support to Blue Sky while it was still in development, so I was one of the first people able to stand up a service once that functionality landed.

Funding Challenges

Why does AT Proto development need funding? This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I’ve had to run a lot of infrastructure out of my flat over the years. The first xblock server was running on a Raspberry Pi in my partner’s bedroom. I still do inference for xblock on an old gaming PC in my home office. I’ve paid out of pocket for a lot of cloud hosting.

Third-party features like mine are so integrated into the platform that users sometimes assume I work for Blue Sky. I frequently get asked to add features because people think I’m an employee. But it speaks to the power of what Blue Sky allows us to do—stand up critical services that are widely used.

There isn’t much support for hobbyist projects. I applied for an AT Proto grant for xblock at one point, which helped cover heavy server costs, but mostly third-party developers rely on donations from people who believe in the project. Shout out to Patrick Singelter for constantly flagging donation pages for projects.

We need to get better at asking for help. It’s hard to fund these things as an individual or a small group of friends. Hosting, time, and frustration costs are high, which is why professional, well-run labelers are rare.

Personal Meltdowns

I want to talk candidly about two meltdowns I had related to xblock. I’m being vulnerable here, so please bear with me.

First meltdown: Launching xblock The first 3–4,000 labels were completely manual. I set up a queue to manually flag screenshots and gradually trained the model off of those. This was extremely painful, strenuous, and frequently soul-crushing due to the nature of the rage-bait screenshots.

One weekend, I was in Brighton while my partner played a gig. I was clearing the xblock queue on my phone at the edge of the dance floor. I cleared it, danced a bit, came back an hour later, and the queue had doubled. I kept going and eventually saw the value of the system as labels started showing up on Blue Sky. This encouraged me to continue.

I applied for an AT Proto grant, which helped with hosting, and found a few volunteers who helped keep the queue clear. A big part of why xblock is still running today is due to the work of two volunteers doing anonymous, thankless moderation work.

Second meltdown: Post-election surge Around 8,000 followers, I realized I was mentally unprepared to manage that many. Six weeks later, I was over 20,000. I got frustrated, feeling unsupported, and worried that third-party moderation projects like xblock would be held up as the solution for moderation that Blue Sky itself couldn’t handle. I put xblock and Blue Emoji on hiatus for a few days to recover, then came back.

The common thread in both meltdowns: lack of support. Community moderation is labor-intensive and emotionally challenging. Even simple, automated moderation like xblock can be overwhelming.

Supporting Third-Party Moderation

We need to support third-party projects, especially moderation tools.

Community moderation will not succeed if volunteers aren’t rewarded beyond good vibes.

Xblock is “easy mode,” yet it caused meltdowns. Full content moderation is far more challenging.

Grace

Grace is a platform that allows feed creators to monetize their feeds. When I was updating xblock to detect multi-network screenshots, Grace helped me implement sustainable training methods. It’s one of the most exciting AT Proto projects I’ve seen.

Grace allows:

One-click monetization

Cost-per-mille (CPM) control

Detailed analytics

70% revenue to creators, 30% to Grace

Feed creators are cautious with monetization. My news feed has about 120,000 daily average users. At $1 CPM, it could generate over $24,000/month conservatively, and much more if scaled.

I plan to set up a trust to distribute funds to community initiatives focusing on moderation and LGBTQ+ safety. Long-running labelers need reliable income to pay volunteers, cover hosting, and maintain infrastructure.

Northsky Cooperative

A worker-run, community-driven cooperative in Canada.

Supports marginalized communities using Blue Sky.

Focuses on data sovereignty and moderation sensitive to community needs.

Inspired by Bluesky, but with parallel infrastructure for protection and empowerment.

Closing Remarks

I want to leave you with a personal note. In my former neighborhood, there’s a ghost sign on a building: “Take Courage.”

Coming out as a six-foot-three, lime-green-wearing trans woman working in British news media, that sign gave me hope.

If I can leave you with one message: take courage. We need courage as business people, developers, and educators for the challenges ahead.