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Comment by willcodeforfoo | Hacker News Reader

Love this kind of post! I was surprised to see you really can drink from the firehose:

  brew install websocat
  websocat wss://bsky.network/xrpc/com.atproto.sync.subscribeRepos

...haven't tried to decode it, though.

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Give Jetstream a try instead, it's all JSON for you already:

websocat wss://jetstream2.us-west.bsky.network/subscribe

Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.

Twitter had a really outstanding search and streaming API, but after Musk bought it they put it behind a $60k/year paywall. You can see a corresponding and abrupt falloff in academic network research papers, with newer ones that revolve around Twitter largely limited to cannibalizing old datasets.

With luck bsky keeps growing and researchers invest effort in studying a more open-by-design platform.

I hadn't come across this before, looking forward to exploring a new tool. Thanks!

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