Alternate Bluesky Social App and/or AppView

Resources & Learning
1

There are a handful of forks of the Bluesky social-app, which is written in React Native for web, iOS, and Android.

These may or may not re-use the Bluesky AppView for content, or be configurable to use different ones.

These are “Bluesky clients” in the sense that they are typically deployed as web front ends.

Blacksky

Fork of Bluesky customized for community use. Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.

Features — Today

Blacksky ships everything you expect from the upstream Bluesky client plus community-specific defaults:

  • @blacksky.app moderation service is the default and cannot be disabled, providing strong anti-harassment filtering out-of-the-box
  • Blacksky: Trending feed replaces Discover as the landing feed
  • New @blacksky.app users sign up on the Blacksky PDS and receive *.blacksky.app handles

Witchsky

The Witchsky client is a fork of (Kitty, deer.social, then) social-app that adds:

  • Color themes (defaults to orange), including of other forks & clients
  • Buttons to open original bridged posts (from the fediverse) and in PDSls
  • The ability to redraft skeets (posts are called skeets btw)
  • Clear indicators of if you’re mutually following someone
  • Options to disable all visual numerical metrics (like follower, like, etc. counts)
  • Square avatars for everyone (not just labelers) and buttons
  • Better defaults, like forcing alt text for images and hiding similar account recs.
  • Clickable handles for real domains (besides .bsky.social subdomains)
  • Automatic PDS resolution based on handle at sign-in
  • Trusting your own preferred verifiers (and to operate as one)
  • Re-attaching disconnected quotes
  • A toggle to disable redirects through go.bsky.app
  • Other features mentioned in the README

Not based on social-app

Red Dwarf

A Bluesky client that does not use any AppView servers, instead gathering data from Constellation and users’ PDSs.

Impro

A Bluesky client aiming for feature parity with social-app with less restrictive blocking, further nested quotes, and theming options to change the highlight color of the UI.

Outdated Bluesky social-app forks

Catsky

Branded fork of social-app with a Catppuccin mocha theme and automatic PDS resolution based on the handle entered at sign-in.

Bluenotes

A rebranded fork of the Bluesky social-app with a Community Notes feature.

Deer Social

A social-app fork with added features, which many other forks were based on. The GitHub README goes into detail on features and approach:

As a rule of thumb, the best features for deer.social are ones that have a disproportionately positive impact on the user experience compared to the maintenance overhead. Unlike some open source projects, since deer.social is a soft fork, any features (patches) we add on top of upstream social-app need to be maintained.

Without an overriding motivation, opinionated features should exist behind a toggle that is not enabled by default. This allows deer.social to cater to as many users as possible.

Deer Social (ayla)

A deer.social fork (based on another now-defunct fork called Kitty, which is also what Witchsky was based on) with everything its predecessors had, but a bit more updated, and with:

  • Image thumbnail/full-size format selectors
  • Pronouns, join month/year, and website on profiles

Gsheps

A branded fork of social-app that uses npm in place of yarn.

Gems

Fork of social-app customized for cryptocurrency wallet attachment.
Solana Attached Wallet, Swap powered by https://jup.ag/

3 Likes
Listing Bluesky Social App forks
3

I don’t think any of these supports OAuth though? And most won’t have independent chat & video features, and may even be using the bsky AppView

4

Hey @psingletary.com are you able to edit the wiki top post and add these links with some details?

(I may need to look at permissions again, just let me know if wiki editing works)

1 Like
6

updated pinned wiki

arrgh extra characters

1 Like
7

Amazing, thank you so much!

8

I am working on adding Ouath support to Bluenotes.

2 Likes
9

Impro is a Bluesky client that aims for feature parity with social-app! It uses the Bluesky AppView behind the scenes. GitHub - improsocial/impro: A Bluesky web client (Note that it’s not a social-app fork, although I think this is true of red dwarf as well)

4 Likes
10

I added Impro to the original wiki forum post at the top of the thread, also separating out social-app forks and custom bluesky clients.
(really feel like there should be an ATProtocol-based version of https://blueskydirectory.com/, but you should also probably submit it there when you think it’s ready.)

3 Likes
11

I have talked to the Limeleaf co-op that maintains the directory and to the Bluesky team that might support the conversion to it being atproto based. We’ll see.

Thanks for your contribution @xan.lol !

1 Like
12

Hi, I just found this post today and this is really informative, and I appreciate it!

I am also maintaining my soft fork on https://green.leafwind.tw

The purpose is to serve Traditional Chinese (mainly Taiwan) as a local community, so I removed all the fat language files and replaced the default feeds for more suitable recommendation.

Another goal is to maintain a minimum fork so that the App view can be more faster and less security issue, so I am also learning on how to disable features, but after weeks of struggling, I realized that it’s not trivial, either removing codes for iOS and Android, or removing a single feature can leads to a lot dependency issues to resolve. :smiling_face_with_tear:

Looking at this post, there are a variety of different changes but seems no one is applying a systematical way on modularizing these features.

I am wondering if anyone can point me to some relevant forks, or relevant threads so that I can dig more? :grinning_face:

1 Like
Intermediary Maintained Sandbox Appview