How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots

If it's between this and a perpetual logo, I'll take this any day.

I actually really like this approach. The action button isn't relevant in this context, and it doesn't occlude the content.

There's certainly situations where you wouldn't want this (ie if you're developing the app and you want to redesign starting from a screenshot), but for the average user I think this isn't overly hostile. I understand that people are dogmatically opposed to intent being modified, but I think you need to balance nuance. I actually enjoy having an attributable source in shared elements, and I think this is a low-impact way of achieving that.

This is phone OS developer's fault for even allowing it. When I take a screenshot, I expect to have an image of exactly whatever was displayed on the screen at the time. Its not a picture of your app, its a picture of my screen. Some banking apps used to (or still) prevent this and now some apps get a hook to insert their branding. My device serves some master other than myself.

If you're mad at Bluesky for doing this, I think you're mad at the wrong party. Modifying intent is problematic and can be abused (although I think there's nothing particularly problematic about this particular instance). The real problem is that you have next to no possibility of modifying the behavior. On an OS that respects user freedom, there would by a myriad ways of intercepting what the software is doing to get your desired result. On iOS, you're at the mercy of Apple. I think we should be mad at Apple for normalizing a computing culture that views user freedom as a security risk, potentially something that should be outlawed (thinking of age verification).

Actually, I’m a little worried by what this post demonstrates but not the logo or the use of the api.

I’m worried that switching apps and screenshots _doesn’t_ put the logo in. If the point of the switch is privacy, isn’t that a bug? Shouldn’t it apply the privacy screen during any screenshot? What if there was sensitive information on there when you were switching and taking the screenshot?

Can they do something similar so that caps include the full date/time? I hate when caps are perpetually “1 hour ago”.

This is in fact a watermark to promote the application, which otherwise wouldn't be recognizable since Bluesky looks like every other microblogging app. I didn't know that Sam literally named the file GrowthHack.tsx, which is pretty funny.

Well, I have not once found a single case where an app reacting to screenshots and controlling the process in any way was anything to me but hostile and annoying. This one does not help.

It somehow is perfect example of how modern software engineering feels to go astray for me. A feature in my device working completely in benefit of the one providing said software. I wish, and wish only I can, that this trend goes away at some point.

Nobody in the comments talking about snapchat where like one of the core pillars of what "sets their service apart" is the difficulty of taking a screenshot without notifying the other party

This is why pocket computers are still so unserious. My programs should not be aware let alone respond to my administrative actions like screenshots.

On iOS, if you swipe control center down and then back up but don’t lift your finger, the screenshot will not have the logo. I do this with Twitter so my screenshots don’t have the X logo.

X and Threads do this too. I wish they all wouldn't, messing with screenshots should only ever be done when preventing them as a security measure.

First - it's great that people can't take screenshots of their sensitive data by accident

Second - I hate when my device keeps me from anything. I'm used to have control over my computer, and this is outrageous that I can't take screenshots of anything I want. There should be a god mode or something like that.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y-P92-yDZ9zqwuXjWjqA4JGyKGq... .ai features premium comment for funny videos sharing subscribe like remix camera filter

I'm confused why people are mad at Bluesky for this. Everyone stating their issues seems more related to Apple than Bluesky. So why point the finger at them?

To be fair this is useful for discovering bluesky from screenshots getting posted on other platforms.

Their product UI kind of looks like X, so it's helpful to know the source of a post

Unfortunately way more applications inject some sort of info into the image using noise of alpha channels when you take a screenshot... Ofc you shouldn't be doing anything wrong, but let's say you join a court and provide some evidence in confidence, you can be found if that evidence is shared with both lawyers

This is a pretty cool, harmless hack honestly. I don’t see how you could be mad at it.

I know of social media sites who have kept an untracked version of the link in the dom of the A tag, but replace it with their in-house link tracker copy of it as you're clicking, that way the destination looks correct when you hover over the link.

Once apps can present one thing to the user and another thing to the captured image, there are some pretty weird possibilities

This is an interesting case of "Good use" of a "bad feature". This feature is bad because it works against the user and device owner, but this use case like hiding your password when sharing your screen is a good use case.

Dear app developers: please do not detect screenshots, and do not change behavior. It is my phone and I should have the right to save anything on my screen for my own purposes and you should not know that I do that.

Reading between the lines:

Oh, so you can take screenshots of the content that tries to avoid it if you do it mid-switch?

If it's reliable and WONTFIX, that's almost enough to get me to switch away from Android.

Screenshot taking prevention is harmful and should not have ever been allowed to become a platform-level feature in the first place. Because if there's one rule of platform/client interaction, is that if you add a feature that can be abused against customers for stupid reasons, it will be. There's a number of apps I have on my Android phone that block screenshots for dubious reasons, that can be maaaybe charitably explained by calling them "growth hacking pretending to be a security feature", but in some cases even that's a stretch.

This feature should never have existed in the first place.

(At least Bluesky is open about it, both by being Open Source and calling out the "growth hack" by name in source code.)

If the feature can sometimes be useful (including this situation, which some other comments mentioned; but also for other things such as hiding actual secure data), then perhaps it should be made as a setting which can be changed in the setting menu (e.g. "Exclude secure data from screenshots"; it should also mention which apps use this feature), so prevent abuse. (This would also make it clear what the feature is, as well as being able to disable it.)

Is this the relevant issue for Graphene OS?

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/664

Upvote the issue if so.

I appreciate the Game Changer reference

This sort of stuff to me is an example of fear within an organization. Whenever I see engineering resources allocated towards self promotion and branding rather than quality and features for its users it shows how leaders want control over narratives.

I only ever used bluesky/twitter via web app on my phone, and stuff like this affirms that it's the right decision.

> The “Follow” button is visible when I take the screenshot mid-switch.

Does this indicate that the privacy feature has a gap, where you could reveal the length of your password if you take a screenshot mid app switch?

If not for the function being named "GrowthHack" I would have thought that hiding following status for screenshots to be a good privacy measure. They don't use it to hide anything else and since I'm not a user of the app I don't know if there is more extraneous information that could be used to infer or track down who screenshotted and they don't hide.

Why would someone use Bluesky? Isn't that a cesspool of the same midwit scolds, purity spirals, and performative outrage that made Twitter unbearable before the great migration?

This technique would be devious if applied to a QR code.

They're just following Apple's lead.

When iPhone shipped, any time you emailed a photo it would append "Sent from my iPhone" to try to virally market. Same or at least similar slimey tactics

Perplexity does this on web by adding a logo in response to key combos for normal screenshot shortcuts.

This is why I use the browser version for anything. I’m using an actual user agent.

Another reminder that you don't own your phone.

X does the same thing.

Does anyone know a way to do this for a computer? I built a p2ppoker website the protects the shuffle from the server but I would like to blank the cards on screenshots to prevent huds and AIs from making the game unplayable.

This trick was almost certainly invented by Nikita Bier when he joined X.

I’ve noticed that if you screenshot a thread in the threads app an “@threads” logo appears in the upper right corner

Tiktok has been watermarking videos since the beginning.

Usually post http://aidr.wtf appropriately.

> Thankfully, I remembered that Bluesky app is open source (or at least the code is available to look at).

What does the author mean by this? I checked the repo and the project seems to be MIT licensed, which makes it open source.

Is this iPhone only? I've never seen this on Android.

I think RevenueCat does the same thing. Smart way to exploit network effects!

has this guy lived on a rock? reddit/twitter/etc every social media platform does this already.

Example n+1 of why I only use web and not download an app

Companies always want to slop-spam their logos onto everything. It is a very annoying habit. On youtube videos this is even more annoying; several use floating logos.

As Spring inevitably leads to Winter, and Night follows Day, Thus the Inevitable Enshittification of all Centralized Platforms

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This is arguably missing the "how" from the title -- can someone fix?

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Shill News

Tangentially, I see a lot of people here upset that apps can react to your screenshot before it is captured. I think it is helpful to think about it as a tradeoff between freedoms:

(a) the freedom to screenshot any content on your own device (b) the freedom to share content with others that cannot be screenshotted

It can be annoying when DRM or privacy features block a screenshot, but I think it can also benefit the platform ecosystem that you participate in as a user too. Idk!