bluesky-social / social-app

The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android

Bluesky Social App

Welcome friends! This is the codebase for the Bluesky Social app.

Get the app itself:

• Web: bsky.app
• iOS: App Store
• Android: Play Store

Development Resources

This is a React Native application, written in the TypeScript programming language. It builds on the atproto TypeScript packages (like @atproto/api), code for which is also open source, but in a different git repository.

There is a small amount of Go language source code (in ./bskyweb/), for a web service that returns the React Native Web application.

The Build Instructions are a good place to get started with the app itself.

The Authenticated Transfer Protocol ("AT Protocol" or "atproto") is a decentralized social media protocol. You don't need to understand AT Protocol to work with this application, but it can help. Learn more at:

• Overview and Guides
• Github Discussions 👈 Great place to ask questions
• Protocol Specifications
• Blogpost on self-authenticating data structures

The Bluesky Social application encompasses a set of schemas and APIs built in the overall AT Protocol framework. The namespace for these "Lexicons" is app.bsky.*.

Contributions

While we do accept contributions, we prioritize high quality issues and pull requests. Adhering to the below guidelines will ensure a more timely review.

Rules:

• We may not respond to your issue or PR.
• We may close an issue or PR without much feedback.
• We may lock discussions or contributions if our attention is getting DDOSed.
• We're not going to provide support for build issues.

Guidelines:

• Check for existing issues before filing a new one please.
• Open an issue and give some time for discussion before submitting a PR.
• Stay away from PRs like...
  • Changing "Post" to "Skeet."
  • Refactoring the codebase, e.g., to replace MobX with Redux or something.
  • Adding entirely new features without prior discussion.

Remember, we serve a wide community of users. Our day-to-day involves us constantly asking "which top priority is our top priority." If you submit well-written PRs that solve problems concisely, that's an awesome contribution. Otherwise, as much as we'd love to accept your ideas and contributions, we really don't have the bandwidth. That's what forking is for!

Forking guidelines

You have our blessing 🪄✨ to fork this application! However, it's very important to be clear to users when you're giving them a fork.

Please be sure to:

• Change all branding in the repository and UI to clearly differentiate from Bluesky.
• Change any support links (feedback, email, terms of service, etc) to your own systems.
• Replace any analytics or error-collection systems with your own so we don't get super confused.

Security disclosures

If you discover any security issues, please send an email to [email protected]. The email is automatically CCed to the entire team and we'll respond promptly.

Are you a developer interested in building on atproto?

Bluesky is an open social network built on the AT Protocol, a flexible technology that will never lock developers out of the ecosystems that they help build. With atproto, third-party integration can be as seamless as first-party through custom feeds, federated services, clients, and more.

License (MIT)

See ./LICENSE for the full license.

P.S.

We ❤️ you and all of the ways you support us. Thank you for making Bluesky a great place!

social-app's Issues

Ensure the "loading" spinner on the home feed doesn't ever get stuck

This appears to happen when loading finishes too quickly, leading the spinner UI to get into a confused state.

Failed image upload runs into cache issue on reupload attempt

There's some state that's created during the process of publishing a post with images attached. If the post fails to actually upload, that state conflicts on subsequent attempts to upload.

To reproduce, modify the publishing flow to throw an error right before the post record is created, then try to reupload. You will see an error about a file already existing.

Deleting posts

Post deletion is complete, but currently has a number of issues:

• After deleting, the UI needs to consistently update so that it's clear something has changed. (Eg if on the screen for the post, make sure the view refreshes.)
• When you navigate to or visit a deleted post, the "404" needs to produce an intelligible UI state and not look like an error.

[APP-482] Add Bluesky as a "share to" target

null

_APP-482

Detect permissions issue for photo upload & warn

In particular, the app needs to:

• Only request permissions when the user is expressing intent to upload a photo
• Inform the user if permissions are not available

UX/UI pass: font sizes, touch targets

Do a pass in which the font-sizes are made more consistent and perhaps a bit denser, while also increasing the sizes to touch targets.

Improve photo resolution

Photos are unbearably grainy. I'd categorize this as a bug and not an enhancement because it's bad enough to violate basic user expectations of photo quality.

Do a pass on the repost/upvote animations

They're a bit easy to miss because they happen too fast

Remove jank (weird repositioning) during home feed refresh

Main menu no longer covers the full screen

Make sure the "link embeds" space correctly in all cases

Social metadata on bsky-app links

The bsky.app website needs to host social metadata for content. This means fetching information from the ATP network and hosting it in the page. Doing so enables links shared in other social apps to show a preview of the content.

Malformed cursor error occurs at random

"Bottom sheet" / "Modal" sometimes appears in blank state

This appears to occur when:

1. Edit profile flow is completed
2. Post composer is used

Image uploader in post composer

Add an image uploader tool to the post composer.

Should support:

• Image cropping
• Up to 4 images
• Ability to remove images from draft after adding

Image cropping can be a v2 if needed.

DNS username flow

Deleted post shows up in feed

The other day I deleted a post to re-post a different version (something I do quite often), and saw the old deleted version show up in my feed. When I clicked on it, it gave me a "post not found" message, but still hung around in feed.

Need to replicate.

Confirm email during signup

Account switcher

Push notifications

Ensure no UI actions are needlessly waiting on the network

This includes:

• View/screen transitions (always render a skeleton/loading view)
• UI actions (upvote, repost, etc)

[APP-481] Export/backup my account

CAR file export tooling should do the trick here.

And an accessible option to do so in settings for the user

_APP-481

Update to React-Native 0.70

Improve cold boot time

Check into techniques for reducing the React Native cold boot time

Implement pagination in all views

Currently pagination is not being provided for:

• Liked by
• Reposted by
• Followers list
• Follows list
• Members list

Handle failure states better in the "link embed" control

The website https://www.socialroots.io/ managed to show a spinner for a long time, as well as an empty state in one case. Make sure this control is consistent!

Create "retry" logic for login/account-create for fetching the service document

If the service document fails to fetch during login, it needs to give a screen for attempting to refetch it.

Improve domain regex used in composer

Two detected issues:

• "e.g." detected as domain
• Filenames ("foo.jpg")

Posts should include more reply targets than the immediate parent (all users replied to)

Photo zoom goes straight to center

Users usually expect to be able to zoom in and then nav the zoom window around a picture. Ours only zooms in on the center.

Migrate my account

Users getting signed out for no reason

[APP-478] Font improvements

Let's do a pass over fonts, ideally with an external product designer with some expertise here, and refine.

My opinion is that post text is too large relative to name/handle. Can copy Twitter's ratios here. Smaller post fonts allow more information density on the feed.

_APP-478

Create embed for links in posts

Tasks:

• Create an embed card by fetching info on the receiver side
• Create an embed card by fetching info on the publisher side (should replace receiver side)
• Include an image in the embed

Privacy policy and ToS hosting for services

Blocker for app store review.

This requires an update in the PDS and the frontend:

• PDS: Add a route, or update getAccountsConfig, to host these documents. Introduce some config for the admin to set the TOS and Privacy Policy.
• Frontend: Fetch these documents and provide links & a viewing UI.

Duplicate posts in feed

Duplicate posts show up in the feed due to how we handle replies. If there are multiple replies to the same post, we need to figure out how to only show the original post once. Otherwise popular original posts take over a user's entire feed.

I think a post trending in scenes might also get pushed to the feed twice -- there might be more than one avenue causing the duplicate post issue.

[APP-11] Can't copy & paste in posts

I've looked into this and discovered that text-selection in React Native isn't easy, which is unfortunate. We should either use a custom native element to support text-selection, or we should add an easy flow to copy the full text of the post.

Profile bios get cut off

Saw Feross's bio ends in "..."

This violates user expectations because there's no way to see the rest of it, and no preview that tells you it'll look like this.

Instead, the bio field should tell the user when they've run out of characters, and impose a hard cutoff.

Make the "danger" color in the character countdown less light

Add compression to image uploads

Odd line-height spacing due to emojis

Shutdown my account

Create a profile link in left nav shelf

You can get to profile from your picture, but there should be the word "Profile" that navs you there too.

Add reply prompts to threads

Need to refresh feed on account change

Photo crop is unwieldy

The photo crop technically works, but it's awkward and unwieldy. I think it's fine to leave crop up to users, but we should try to make it nicer.

My main complaint is it's hard to resize the default square crop box, especially horizontally. Often I'll take a screenshot and pre-crop it down to just the line of text I want. This produces a long rectangular picture, and the default square crop box only gets the very center of it. It's then very hard to drag the left & right edges of the square crop box out to fit my horizontal screenshot.

Improve the positioning and aesthetic of the "toasts"

Blank black screen related to photo touch target

Sometimes scrolling over or clicking on a photo will cause a blank black screen to pop up.

Show what's being replied to in composer

The composer needs to embed a view of the reply topic

[APP-477] DMCA flows

Need tools for:

• Reporting DMCA violations (app)
• Handling the full DMCA report & appeal process (app & admin)
• Applying moderation labels accordingly (protocol)

_APP-477