Update after the Bluesky crash:

We decided to reset/refresh the cursor, because given the unstable situation on the Bluesky side we were unable to catch up with the backlog without a major architectural rebuild. We learned a lot, though, and will consider that rebuild for the near future.

So feel free to report, and we will check each report and fix the labeling, but we can only do that once a day. And please don’t report older posts, there are millions of them. Thank you.

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Hello. We are aiming to label posts automatically, which works well, but Bluesky has to show the labels, which does not yet work reliably. So we are focusing on getting that fixed, and will only be able to handle reports manually once a day. Also, please notice that we focus on fresh posts.

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That part of the workflow is unreliable, unfortunately. Until Bluesky fixes those issues, we are putting a workaround in place, but this is also still in testing and we will need some time to get it to run reliably and with sufficient performance.

Thank you for your patience.

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Appreciate the feedback. Please consider that we are still in the live testing and bug fixing phase. If Bluesky isn’t currently crashing, we are labeling more than 99.9% of fresh posts successfully. However, for the labels to actually become visible, we have to rely on the Bluesky AppView.

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Never mind that. What a mess.

What a day, huh?

Relaunched the labeling service now, will first try to digest several (currently 8) hours of accumulated backlog, but unless we can catch up significantly within the next 2-3 hours we will reset the cursor to the current firehose head, prioritizing fresh posts.

Update:

Service relaunched from fresh firehose cursor. Still analyzing the cause of the interruption, but labels should now start appearing again.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Experiencing some unplanned service downtime. Apologies. Will be relaunching asap.

This is probably a bug, apparently there are similar cases where that picture appeared without the user‘s knowledge (see below):

Typo/Correction: ≈3.34m posts.

You are welcome.

Alt Text Labeler Statistics Update:

In the past 24 hours, ≈3.44m posts were created on Bluesky, 17% of which included images. Only 27% of image posts had alt text.

During that time, the labeler

• published ≈415k labels
• with 90.5% avg label visibility*

*within 5 minutes after post creation

Thank you. This is our fault. The post has a label, but it is not visible. We currently have about 10% of such cases (out of all labels applied). We are working on this.

I have republished the label manually, should be visible now.

Hi, we still have some small percentage of labels which are applied to eligible posts, but are not visible in the AppView. Looking into it, as they say.

However, this should not affect reposts. If you can, please share a link or a screenshot so we can validate this.

Thank you.

Alt Text Labeler Statistics Update:

In the past 18 hours, ≈2.5m posts were created on Bluesky, 16% of which included images. Only 27% of image posts had alt text.

During that time, the labeler

• published ≈290k labels
• with 90% avg label visibility*

*within 5 minutes after post creation

Damn, Butch, you live like this meme but Max and Roxanne are standing in front of the Utopia city

Missing alt text image hidden by alt text labeler

With an image in the post, there can be no link card, and therefore no thumbnail.

Again, thank you for your feedback, and this opportunity to clarify.

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Ok, thanks. That is a post with an external link - without link card and thumbnail - and an image that has no alt text, and therefore has been labeled. As far as we know, you can either post a link with a link card (and a thumbnail, if there is one) or an image in the same post, but not both.

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Do you have a link or a screenshot, so we can validate? Atm we are not even filtering for thumbnails in embedded links, so this shouldn’t happen.

There seems to be a general issue with thumbnail images in embedded external links, however, hence the confusion, perhaps.

So, should we use a separate label for videos then, or no label at all?

Hello. We label posts that have no alt text. Still testing, but testing live now.

Bluesky Screenshot, Post by Zohran Mamdani (with "Missing Alt Text Label") Text: The hungry red panda at the Prospect Park Zoo? Adorable. The HungryPanda delivery app scamming small businesses? Not adorable. So they will be paying $580,000 back. We'll keep pursuing companies that take advantage of New Yorkers, and we'll keep asking if we can pet a red panda just for a second.

Blacksky Screenshot, same post by Mamdani, but with a 2-part picture of the NYC Mayor in front of the red panda compound at Prospect Park Zoo, captioned "The delivery app HungryPanda will be held accountable for scamming small businesses. Were making them pay back the $500,000 they stole. The hungry red panda behind me will be held adorable."

Hi, apart from some general label visibility issues we are currently only publishing labels on the Bluesky AppView (via Ozone), see screens below. Still need to explore how we can publish to Blacksky and other AppViews at the same time. Would love to compare notes if and when. Thx

We had some issues with rate limits earlier, but the new architecture solved that. Right now the biggest issue is label visibility, we are at around 70% atm but we can surely fix this somehow.

Thank you ændra, for the shoutout and for your help in getting to where we are with this.

Experiencing some stability and label visibility issues atm, but we‘ll get there.

Thank you.

Thank you. What exactly do you mean: Is it alt text for videos that screenreaders cannot process, or labels?

Seems to work now, we are catching almost all posts. Appreciate your feedback.

We are still testing at scale, but the results look pretty good, so we decided to communicate.

Further labels (e.g. "Misleading Alt Text", labels for GIFs and videos etc.) will be evaluated when we are happy with stability and overall performance.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thank you.

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