A recent incident involving the outage of a community-built statistics API, bsky-stats.lut.li, has highlighted the fragility of centralized dependencies within the Bluesky ecosystem. The API, which was used by other community tools such as @stats-of.bsky.social, went down without warning, forcing developers to scramble for alternatives.
The developer of @stats-of.bsky.social, @j4ck.xyz, announced that they have switched to a new API, bsky-search.jazco.io/stats, which is maintained by @jaz.bsky.social. While this is a positive development in the short term, it underscores a larger issue: the reliance on a small number of community-built tools and services to provide critical infrastructure for the Bluesky network.
As the Bluesky ecosystem continues to grow, it is essential that we encourage the development of a more resilient and decentralized infrastructure. This includes supporting the creation of multiple, independent APIs and services, as well as promoting the use of open standards and protocols that will allow for greater interoperability between different tools and services.
The recent outage of bsky-stats.lut.li should serve as a wake-up call to the Bluesky community. We must work together to build a more robust and resilient ecosystem that is not dependent on a small number of centralized services.