I saw the freeourfeeds.com announcement yesterday, which proposes raising $30M to build out the AT Protocol - the protocol that would allow Bluesky to be federated. The goal is to foster an ecosystem of federated and interconnected apps.

However, I don’t think this is necessary or the best focus for the community right now. In my view, Bluesky’s core value to users comes from:

• The existing community of users
• Bluesky’s Trust and Safety work
• The moderation tools available, and the community block/mute lists that people share
• Users’ personally curated block/mute lists built up over time

Notably, Bluesky’s growing popularity isn’t primarily driven by its federation possibilities.

Here’s what makes Bluesky truly exciting: app developers can leverage all these valuable features right now. There’s no need to wait for a foundation to be funded or for the AT protocol to be fully built out. Bluesky already exposes these crucial elements through their API. They’re also finalizing OAuth support (as detailed at docs.bsky.app/blog/oauth-atproto), which will make building apps on their API even more straightforward.

If I weren’t focused on Groups.io, I’d build a WhatsApp replacement on top of the Bluesky API. It wouldn’t be complicated. Similarly, creating an Instagram alternative would be quite feasible.

The key advantage? Use Bluesky as your identity provider. One of the most challenging aspects of running a user-centered service is handling trust, safety, and moderation - Bluesky gives you this infrastructure for free.

Admittedly, building on another service carries inherent risks. However, I believe the current climate makes these risks worthwhile. We’re in an era of widespread dissatisfaction with existing social services, which could provide tailwinds for new alternatives. Even if Bluesky were to restrict their APIs in the future, you would have already bootstrapped your service by then.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and build!

I recently developed a new open-source tool called gitcommit to streamline the process of writing Git commit messages. This command-line assistant leverages Claude AI to analyze your staged changes and suggest clear, descriptive commit messages that adhere to best practices.

Key Features:

• Contextual Analysis: Evaluates your staged changes to understand the context.
• Message Suggestions: Provides well-formatted commit message recommendations.
• Interactive Workflow: Allows you to accept the suggested message, edit it in Vim, or request a new suggestion.
• Comprehensive Committing: Supports committing all changes with the -a flag.
• Validation: Ensures that edited messages meet formatting standards.

Installation:

To install gitcommit, execute:

go install github.com/wingedpig/gitcommit@latest

Setup:

Obtain an API key from Anthropic at https://console.anthropic.com/. Then, set your API key:

export CLAUDE_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Usage:

• Show Help:

  gitcommit -help
  

• Commit Staged Changes:

  gitcommit
  

• Commit All Changes (Including Unstaged):

  gitcommit -a
  

When you run gitcommit, it will prompt you for an initial commit message, analyze the changes, and suggest an improved message. You can then choose to accept, edit, or reject the suggestion.

gitcommit is released under the MIT License. Contributions are welcome; feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

You can find the project on GitHub: https://github.com/wingedpig/gitcommit

I hope this tool proves helpful in your development workflow.

I’m not great at CSS and, like many others, find that positioning elements on a web page can range from tedious at best to utterly frustrating at worst. Fortunately, ChatGPT-4 is pretty adept at stuff like this. I’m not saying it’s perfect every time, but usually, I can arrive at an answer after a few iterations.

I use ChatGPT for this in two primary ways. The first is by asking it to create a stand-alone page with the necessary elements and styling. I can then load that page into Chrome and continue iterating with ChatGPT. This approach has worked well, especially when I’m developing a new web page.

However, I often need to modify existing web pages, which can be quite complicated. These pages often feature both an external stylesheet and intricate inline styles. The challenge lies in conveying this information to ChatGPT so it can suggest improvements. I’ve tried pasting just the relevant section of HTML, along with any referenced parts of the external stylesheet, but this method is tedious and may miss critical positional information from higher up in the page hierarchy. Pasting the entire web page and stylesheet is not feasible, as the data is just too large.

To address this, I’ve developed a JavaScript function that calculates the computed styles for a set of elements and writes those styles directly into the elements as inline styles. This allows me to use the Developer Tools inspector to copy the relevant element tree. Pasting that into ChatGPT gives it all the positional information it needs to assist me.

Here is the function to iterate over an element and its children:

Note that I limit the inlining to only the relevant positional styles and try to avoid including default values. To use it, call inlineStyles() on the element at the top of the tree that you wish to edit.

I’ve just started using this technique, but it already proved quite helpful in resolving a tricky issue on the Groups.io chat page this evening.