Möwe #4 — Nobody Is Looking at the Same Bluesky

August 1–7, 2026

Observation

On the night of August 4 the Japanese-language timeline turned on itself. Open a post, and a name sits under it: so-and-so liked this. "ホントに(○○さんがいいねしました)が表示されてる…戦をはじめたいのか…？" — it really does say who liked it, do they want to start a war? "迂闊になんでもいいねできなくなった" — now I can't like things carelessly.

Nothing in the data had changed. A like on this network is a public record. Anyone can read it off anyone's PDS, and always could. What changed was one line of display, and that line was not handed to everyone. It is on some people's screens and not on their neighbours'. Nothing in the interface tells you which side you are on.

Curated Posts

The night people noticed — August 5, 17 likes, and dozens of posts saying the same thing that week. The vocabulary is imported from X, but the order matters. The dread came first: it belongs to the years when every like on Twitter was visible to everyone, and X made likes private in 2024 in answer to it. The AT Protocol has been through neither step. Likes here were never hidden, and never unhidden.

Two people worked out what they were looking at — moja.blue investigated, then corrected himself: "以前からそういう仕様だった" — it was always like this. He overcorrected. The next day 河童教授 (@pkappa0) posted a screenshot. Under the timestamp: "3 いいね", and below it two avatars and a sentence naming them. moja.blue's screen carries a bare "1 like" and nothing else. "この表示は初めて見ました" — I have never seen this display before. At the same hour, two people were looking at different Blueskys.

It was a prototype — merged on July 13. The feature is called known likers, and the pull request opens by saying what it is: "Note: this is a prototype. It's gated behind post_thread:known_likers:enable while we evaluate the UX. Not intended for a general rollout in its current form." Only likers the viewer follows are named, sampled from the 100 most recent likes. On August 5 someone filed "Please roll back 'Liked by'": it is clutter, and if I care who liked a post I will click the number. The unease was not only Japanese.

The screen you are handed, and the screen you write — the same week, the same person moved from the other side. On August 6 he created a feed called Ø. " ゼロフィードはいいねもリポストもリプライもついていない投稿が流れる " — the zero feed carries posts with no likes, no reposts, no replies. " ひとたびいいねやリポストやリプライがつくと、その投稿はフィードを卒業する " — the moment a post gets any of them, it graduates out. The day before, he had spent an hour posting single verbs. 待つ matsu, wait. 乗る noru, board. 座る suwaru, sit. 眺める nagameru, gaze. Almost every one of them drew zero likes. He built a way of writing that collects no response, then a place that collects only the posts nobody responded to.

Proposition

Bluesky's promise is that selection happens at the reading end. Issue #3 was about exactly that: through the Kumamoto earthquake, people covered for a missing publisher with feeds they wrote themselves. Anyone can write a feed. That part holds.

This week exposed the layer underneath it. You write the feed; the client is handed to you. known likers is a prototype behind a gate, the gate decides what your post page looks like, and no part of the interface reports which side you are on. It took two users comparing screenshots to establish what was on their own screens. Reader-side sovereignty assumes the readers are looking at the same thing. That assumption came apart this week over one line of text, in a feature its own authors marked as not ready.

The same week supplied the counterweight. The gate cannot be chosen; the feed can be written. Ø does not filter on content. It filters on the absence of a measurement: a post leaves the instant anyone reacts to it. You cannot change the screen you are handed. You can build the other one all the way down to refusing to count.

Nobody is looking at the same Bluesky. The one page that stays in your hands is the one you wrote.