Bluesky firehose served via the BGS, and DID keys move to Multikey

What changed

On October 6, 2023 the AT Protocol team said the Bluesky AppView now consumes from the BGS at bsky.network instead of directly from the bsky.social PDS, which happened around October 5, 2023. It also announced that public keys in DID documents on the main PLC directory move to the Multikey format, planned for roughly the following week. The post gave no firm date for the DID change.

What it means

Firehose consumers had to take a new cursor from bsky.network, and code that parses DID document keys had to handle the Multikey format.

Who is affected

Developers of feed generators, mirrors and dashboards that consume the firehose, and anyone parsing DID documents. Client apps could mostly stay connected to bsky.social.

What to do by 5 Oct 2023

Restart consumers against the bsky.network subscribeRepos endpoint with a new cursor, ideally overlapping with the old source to avoid gaps. Test DID key parsing against the sandbox PLC directory.