Shinkansen Mindset

Jim Ray: Alex, welcome back.

Alex Garnett: Jim, great to be here. And can I say again, I love our intro music so much.

Jim Ray: I’m I haven’t talked about this a ton, but the intro music was composed by a longtime friend of mine, one of the most creative people I know, a fellow named Salim. And my favorite part about it is that he composed this and recorded it while on a Shinkansen, his wife is Japanese and he’s got his own family’s Japanese as well. And so he composed this on a Shinkansen in Japan. And it just that fact just makes me so delighted. And also I just I actually love what he came up with. I feel like it’s very atmospheric and you know it’s got good vibes. So I’m super excited that you love it too.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, it’s very post-City Pop. You know, you get that kind of Shinkansen mindset. You know, the last time I rode one, I struggled to stream an NBA game for no reason. I should have had Shinkansen mindset. I clearly didn’t, and now it’s the error my way.

Jim Ray: I do, I like that idea. Because it really is a mindset. All of a sudden you look up and it’s just like, yeah, you’re cruising through the countryside at 350 kilometers an hour. Boy, what an experience. Alex, do you have any sports headlines for us as we get started, as we always do, with the app for sports and clearly the topic that everyone is tuning in for, our take on sports.

Alex Garnett: Well, it’s July, so not much is going on in the wide world of sports. My local WNBA team just trade of the way Kelsey Plum. That’s kind of a bummer. Not sure what they were thinking. But they’ll get somebody good in exchange from Phoenix, I believe. So we’ll see if that improves their fortunes because they keep missing the playoffs. World Cup hangover hitting pretty hard. Gotta say, like I’m really missing being able to watch like four hours of soccer every day. That was really nice. I think I’m working more to make up for it, you know, for better and worse. But not a lot going on. And the Mets continue to engage in what I think is basically arson fraud in lieu of an actual rebuild.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: Which after all is a tri-state area tradition. If you want to evict somebody but you don’t know how to do it, you burn your house down. And that’s New York.

Jim Ray: You know, I was I would because I’m a bit more of a casual sports fan than you are, and I was struggling a little bit because as you mentioned, the doldrums of July and August here. And I was like, what are we going to talk about? I’m but then the LeBron trade happened. And I was like, well, this breaks containment. And I don’t know if folks know, but I do have a personal connection to Philadelphia. My wife is from there, and I find myself in Philadelphia more than I think I ever would have imagined I would. So I’ve got a little bit of a connection to Philly. He says there was a headline, I don’t know how true this is, that he’s gonna helicopter from New York.

Alex Garnett: He’s gonna commute. Yeah, he’s gonna be I-95 commuter. Oh boy, which is an interesting choice for slate in life. It’s like no more worlds to conquer.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: But you can’t really imagine Alexander the Great being like, all right, let’s see how the Amtrak’s going today. You know like oh they canceled three out of four trains. That’s a bummer.

Jim Ray: Yeah, right, exactly. I do like that idea of him being on is that the Acela line?

Alex Garnett: That’s the Acela. I mean that’s reasonably good one. Like Philly to New York is pretty reliable service.

Jim Ray: It’s like the one good, you know, like the DC to Boston line is basically the only good train line. Speaking of Shinkansen and futures that that we just won’t be imagined here in the land of the free.

Alex Garnett: Well, you never know. I mean we’ll get more rail funding at some point. We’ll build half a train and be pretty excited about it. I believe the California high-speed rail is on the verge of running from Fresno to Bakersfield.

Jim Ray: Fresno to Bakersfield, yeah, exactly.

Alex Garnett: Just look forward to it. That’ll be great.

Jim Ray: New bustling metropoli of s Southern to Northern California there. All right, excellent. Well let’s get into it. I’m looking at my list here and we don’t always talk about things that are related to the app or Bluesky the company, but I think there was one that kind of lit up a little bit. Have you made it all the way through Toni’s interview with The Verge yet? It was.

Alex Garnett: sure have. I really enjoyed that and they do a nice job on their transcripts too, which helps.

Jim Ray: Yeah, I thought I thought that one came out really, really well. Props to our comms team for setting that one up. And you know, the thing that that struck me is that Toni really talked up the atmosphere, the protocol, I would say that this guy gets it. And that was one of the things when he was, I think folks know that Toni spent a few months as our interim CEO before now he’s full time. And that was one of the things that struck me immediately in some of the conversations that I was able to have. And even just, you know, as he was able to kind of talk around and try to figure out what’s going on with the company, he seemed to really understand the protocol immediately, which I think augers really well for the work that we do.

Alex Garnett: Absolutely. I’m very happy having a permanent CEO. I really have enjoyed all my work with Toni. I enjoyed going down to SF for one of our local meetups at the True Ventures office that he helps run a few months back. And it’s nice to see so many notes that we hit echoed, you know, in this verge piece, because that was the front page of the verge all day long. That feels pretty good. And for the couple of like minor, I think, sort of points of friction people had with the interview, like for example, talking about like Bluesky’s algorithm and how we frame that, I was also really encouraged that some really constructive discussion came out.

out of that right away. Like I know community member Laurens Hof of Connected Places mentioned like it’s really not the case that Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: But this is like a durable thing that people seem to hook onto, right? And just because like we’re not TikTok, right? It’s not like we’re forcing you into an algorithmic feed. Just because the Discover feed is not the way that every single person engages with the platform, it doesn’t have to engage with the platform, doesn’t mean there’s no algorithms here. But it does mean that like in terms of how that comes out for a lay understanding, it is different. And I’m really happy to see people negotiate that and sort of find points of contention where they can help have that conversation on Bluesky.

Jim Ray: Exactly. I think so much of our lives here within the company, but also on the Atmosphere team and working with our amazing atproto community is all about living inside of those tensions. And the algorithm thing and the feeds are such a great example of that right there in the app because it’s been a selling point from day one. We don’t have these black box out black box algorithms that are driving the feeds like basically every other centralized social media app. But also that means that if you want a different feed experience, you have to go find it or create your own. And I think we’re working, I know the product team is working on some ways in and around that.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right. It absolutely creates a real tension within the product.

Alex Garnett: And we’re not naive about millions of users like Implicitly expressed preference for default, right? Like that’s one of those things that’s just sort of established in this application space and it has implications both for the regulatory environment and for the UX that we present. So, you know, it’s one thing for us to really firmly say at every possible opportunity, we care about user choice, right? Like we are not designing this so that way you can tell us every single thing that’s wrong with the feed. We want to make sure we teach you to fish. And what that comes out feeling like to a lot of people is Bluesky isn’t forcing an algorithm on you, right?

It’s not that Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm per se. There are algorithms that are beyond feeds themselves, of course, too, right? Like there’s technically the way we decide like how to show a muted post. Like that’s still an algorithm in some sense, right? So The lay understanding of algorithm with respect to the platform obviously changes a lot based on the conversation, and I am not unhappy with how it came.

Jim Ray: Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, agree. You know, on that note, I’ll just throw in a little bit more news from Bluesky the company, but there was a bit of a relaunch of Attie, our AI service and application that works with the protocol. I think the big news is that we added this new feature that we call Quests. Previously you were able to generate feeds and now you can interact with the entire ecosystem using some of these AI tools, you know, another kind of entry point into the great wide big world of the atmosphere, but using some of these atmospheric or I’m sorry, using some of these AI tools. to help you navigate that. I really like what we’re trying to do with Attie.

I think the framing is don’t use AI to fill your feeds with slop. Again, I think that’s a big differentiator from basically all the other centralized platforms, but use these AI tools to help you make sense of all the things that’s happening on it. I use I use Attie every day. I’ve got some custom feeds set up to help me see all the amazing stuff that’s launching and happening. So are you a big Attie user, Alex?

Alex Garnett: Yeah, quests I think are a really big deal. And quests have been like the vast majority of my internal usage of Attie for quite some time. It’s like the feed’s use case is well established, well understood. It’s like, we know we were just talking about like what’s a feed look like, it’s algorithmic sorting, et cetera, et cetera. But being able to pipe the results of a query and actually action it, that’s, you know, Unix Philosophy 101. It’s also like a big expansion of what was previously possible with AI tools on the network. One thing that we always talk about as being like a really cool differentiator for Bluesky is just being able to have access to all of that data, right?

Like data warehousing. That’s a differentiator for us. We’re pretty good at providing a data plane for all of the records on atproto, whatever they actually resemble, whatever you want to do with them. So being able to get from a filter to an action massively increases the usable surface of Attie. And I think it’s here where we’re actually gonna see that bet start to pay off and bear out.

Jim Ray: The Attie team is cooking. We’ve hired a few folks really excited. And, you know, Jay was transitioning from her role and now leading the exploration team. So lots of lots of great stuff coming there. I have to I gotta go give a quick shout out, Brittany Ellich, who new hire on that team and is doing some really great work. She put together a Jimothy explainer. And Jimothy, I have a soft spot in my heart for Jimothy for maybe obvious reasons, but I’m gonna drop the Jimothy explainer into chat here for everyone who is not familiar with what’s going on with Jimothy, or maybe doesn’t live in the Seattle area. Any good any good J Jimothy memes make it your way?

Alex Garnett: You know, it reminded me a little bit. Do you remember pedals the Bear from New Jersey, who was a bipedal bear because he’d gotten, this is actually kind of a sad story, his front paws had been hurt in a trap when he was younger. So he was a bear who lived in North Jersey who would just run around people’s backyards fully upright. And like Jimothy, like your first response is like, oh, that animal should not be moving like that. But he was really quite adorable.

Jim Ray: Oh.

Alex Garnett: And you know, you could kind of just be like strolling around like the wolf man because it turns out bears can run upright with enough practice, right? And so Jimothy to me feels like a callback to pedals. That’s also the kind of thing that, you know, speaking of Attie’s value here, AI is very good at sense making. It’s very good at like, hey, like explain to me what’s happening on the network, like the business intelligency use case of like what are people talking about and like what’s getting surfaced up. That that value is clearly very high for this. And it’s one of those things, I think it’s just a matter of time until like the rest of the internet realizes just how high value these sense-making aspects of Attie running on the atproto network are I guarantee I could get Claude to draw some favorable comparisons between pedals and Jimothy.

Jim Ray: Amazing guy. You know, that sense making part is so true and so kind of vital. I do feel like we maybe we haven’t quite tipped over into that, but I feel like there’s enough conversation. I think that Verge article spawned some back and forth between people around like we absolutely do want more culture, more basically things that are not political news. So more sports, more like all of the niche things that exist in other places. We clearly want more of that. But I do th I do feel like we’ve kind of hit that tipping point. where there’s if there’s a thing that’s happening in the world, it you know, I can remember it wasn’t that long ago that if I were searching for something I just kind of heard about on Bluesky, I wouldn’t necessarily get it.

But you know, these days I can get A headline I can get people talking about it. And that’s that feels exciting. And so having some of these sense-making tools built into that really helps.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. TMZ on Bluesky, you know, like.

Jim Ray: exactly.

Alex Garnett: We’ve made it.

Jim Ray: Yep. And speaking of sense making, so one of my favorite of the atmospheric sense making apps is Semble. And one of the things they launched is they launched an MP MCP server. And so you can now plug your Claude, what whatever your AI tools are into Semble, and then you can essentially query the symbol network with your AI tools. And so that’s kind of like you know, very similar to I guess kind of what we’re doing with Attie, but in a much more sort of constrained way, but also with your own toolchain if that’s something you’ve built out.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. I’d love to see more like I think actual case studies and just how useful these tools are because my Estimation is that that they are just like completely changing the game for any kind of sense making use case you might have, right? Just being able to be like what’s going on here? And I think because the AI space has run ahead in some ways of the actual like closing the loop ROI aspects of this, like I think maybe we’ve got to put more out there, honestly, too, just in terms of like, here’s how you can use this for X. You know, like this fits directly into your workflow. It’s a drop-in replacement for thing Y.

But really great to see, and I can’t wait to see more of it and just more production use cases.

Jim Ray: It’s the algebraic X, not X, the other place.

Alex Garnett: oh yeah, sorry. No, I don’t even yeah.

Jim Ray: All right, so moving through our list here. So we wrapped up some of the travel. We folks were on the road. You thankfully you and I were kind of staying put, which is maybe not the DevRel lifestyle that we’ve always aspired to, but I was happy to spend July at home. We’ve mentioned this before, our own Daniel Holmgren and Paul Frazee were out at the D Web conference, which was then followed up by the local first conference. And so Paul’s talk from local first, he actually kind of put together on his blog a version of that. He’s been doing some LinkedIn posting. So if you’re on LinkedIn, follow Paul Frazee. I think that’s new to him.

He would love the support. I haven’t been given him a hard time about that at all. But his talk from LocalFirst Lane had landed pretty well. And so give that a read if you were not at localfirst and then of course the IETF meeting happened and Bryan kind of re-emerged from his, I think soon-to-be-ending sabbatical. I miss that guy. I’m excited to get him back.

Alex Garnett: Imminently, actually. Bryan just shared with me he’s going to be heading out to New York for the Leaflet at atproto NYC event at two and a half weeks. And I thought that was going to be out of band during his sabbatical, but he is officially back by then. So.

Jim Ray: amazing. Very true. Getting back in it with a bang. Just come back to work, fly across the country. And hang out with some folks. So if you’re in the New York area and you have not yet signed up for the atproto, I believe it’s the atproto community Day is the official title, sponsored by our friends at Leaflet. Then you’re gonna want to get to that. But yeah, but Bryan and Daniel presented at the IETF meeting and the recording from that, I think last time we met that was that meeting was imminent or was you know hours away. It’s happened and there’s actually a recording. It sounds like it went really, really well. All of the feedback was really great.

And I had it kind of on in the background. It seemed like everybody was really supportive. Seemed like the biggest issue was the fact that currently aT URIs are not compliant with the URI spec. I believe we suggested that maybe the spec should change, but I don’t think that went over super well.

Alex Garnett: That was a nice two-week period where you thought, you know, maybe.

Jim Ray: they might do it.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, that’s no longer on the table. You know, it’s a bummer, obviously, because I know that we really love to be very spec driven here and to be able to say like, hey, they’re compliant URIs is one of those things that’s like very philosophically aligned and The fact that, you know, whoops, we maybe have slightly mispars that spec will be annoying, but it’s not going to be a showstopper. I think there’s been a few ideas back of the round for how we can reconcile these and have a backwards compatible legacy at URI syntax that’s not a real URI, and then the one that is forward compatible. So a bit of a paper cut but nothing too terrible.

And honestly, I just enjoy watching those IETF streams because everybody in the room has a real appreciation for the process and a sense of humor about it.

Jim Ray: Yeah, I totally.

Alex Garnett: And it’s a nice thing to send off our teammates and colleagues to do. Much like LeBron going to Philly, you know, makes you want to trust the process.

Jim Ray: Yep. Yeah. Well, and Eli, who I see is on the stream here, he presented in support of the work that we’re doing. We had a few community folks. in the room, including Eli. And I think Eli was also talking about some of the work that Streamplace is going to be doing to build on top of. The protocol. So really appreciate that support from everybody who I know we had a few folks tuning in and folks that participate on the email lists. Just a reminder. that this is an open process. One thing I really appreciate about the IETF is that it is really like really focused on the standards themselves. And I know like we were talking about the URI spec.

I think. You know, whoever it is that owns the current URI spec showed up and was like, look, you’re not actually gonna miss your slashes that much. And it became a pretty fun joke for us internally. You know, some other projects that we’ve been keeping an eye on. So, friend of the stream here, Erin Kissane. If you haven’t caught her conversation from a few weeks back, do go check that out. But Erin Kissane is launching, and this is just, I, you know, I love Kissane’s blog post about this. It’s so Kissane-y. She’s working with a few folks. We here at Bluesky, we’re happy to offer some monetary support. I know that folks at the Raft Foundation, I saw Blacksky chimed in.

But she’s calling her project a Cloud Atlas, which again, like cannot think of a better name. for kind of a survey of all of the apps in the atmosphere. I don’t think she’s going to be looking at every single one of them. She’s going to be talking with folks and really kind of coming up with a broad categorization of projects that are happening in the atmosphere. This is going to be hugely helpful for the work that you and I do. I know you and I have probably sat down and attempted versions of this. I think my first week on the job I was yeah, I was like, ah, you know, just let me let me put all of the apps into a category.

And very I did a very naive, you know, kind of like four by four grid thing or two by two grid and quickly realized it was out of my depth.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, this is something that we keep sort of running up to and then backing away slowly, the idea of trying to have like any kind of canonical list of atmosphere apps for promotional purposes. What I’ve found myself doing more and more often, especially as part of the very soon-to-ship docs update that I think has disappeared for a couple weeks here for good reason that I’m about to bring back into everyone’s lives. But when I made that, when I’ve made other recent like new explainers, it’s just as useful to cherry pick some popular lexicons from across the network, some popular apps. and then be able to present the idea of different views on the same data and having a back end that you can build out and a front end you can build out and so on.

That’s not exactly the same thing as building out like a comprehensive cloud atlas, which is community-maintained, which I’m really excited to see develop. And in part that’s just because like this is a very fast-moving target, right? Like in DevRel, I’ve seen like awesome lists come and go and things like that. And that’s a nice thing to try to populate for any given moment in time, but maintainability is never really organic for someone. something like that. And you don’t want to just be picking winners every so often. And so being able to do this in a way that respects the organicity of it, I think, is the key element here. year and I’m looking forward to seeing that happen.

Jim Ray: Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. And like I said, I don’t think we could have picked a better person to do it. So really happy to support Erin in her work and yeah, give that one a read. She’s got an open collective available. So if this is something that’s really important to you, I know other developers out there would benefit from something like this too. So if you’ve got a few dollars to throw towards this project, then don’t be shy. Alex, I know you’ve been working on documenting some of the reference PDS improvements. You want to walk us through what’s shipped and what’s coming?

Alex Garnett: Yeah, so I think I’m gonna cut a new reference PDS release tomorrow morning because we’ve managed to roll up a number of improvements all at the same time here, which is always exciting, because you wind up having the conversation it’s like, do we block the release on this and this and this? Can we block it on all of them? Because they’re all gonna ship. And we’ve gotten ourselves into one of those nice situations this week where there’s been a few mostly reference PDS improvements that I’ve been floating on the app in the last couple weeks and getting a very nice positive reception too, I have to say. So thank you to everybody who engaged with me when I mentioned A upgrading the default blob limit to 300 megs.

This is something that our app team has asked for because they want to be able to support longer videos out of the box just posting like 10-minute video to Bluesky. This is also something that we had a bunch of internal conversation about because we talked about whether we should split videos up, whether we should allow lower bit rates, and whether we should give PDSs the ability to easily report back if their blob limit hasn’t been raised, because of course this is not part of the protocol. This is just a default parameter that gets installed with the reference PDS that you can tweak as you want to. So if you want to have like The big bad video PDS, that’s totally in your rights to do so.

If you’d only want to accept image size blobs, you can also do that. So we basically wound up discarding the idea of lower bit rates for longer videos. I want to make sure we’re maintaining pretty high-quality video as a default experience, at least on Bluesky the app. We are bumping the reference PDS up to 300 meg blobs out of the gate, and we are providing the ability for it to report out on its own blob size limits. in a more predictable way. So that way you can get a, you know, this PDS only supports blobs up to X size. Being able to split blobs might follow from that. That is work that we are not doing out of the gate, but that might follow on soon so that’s feature number one is larger blob sizes and I love thinking about video blobs, so that was a fun one to work on.

Feature two coming tomorrow is Open telemetry, OTEL endpoints added to the reference PDS. So that way it can share some basic performance metrics. You can see how busy your PDS is, how often people are authing to it, how often people are creating new accounts. And along with that being enabled upstream on the PDS distribution, we are also shipping some sample Grafana dashboards. that provide those PDS-specific metrics side by side with typical host metrics like CPU and RAM and disk and so on. And as with most Grafana distributions, like you’re under no obligation to use our sample dashboard, but that helps to contextualize it. You can get it with like a two-line Docker deploy out of the gate, the same way you’re currently setting up our reference PDS.

We’ve got new docs coming tomorrow that will also show a way of shipping those Grafana dashboards along with it. So you can opt into the monitoring stack. Or you can use those OTEL endpoints to integrate with your own existing monitoring so that if you are running like a high-scale PDS environment, which we at Bluesky are currently, You’ll be able to then benefit from these OTEL endpoints and wire them up to your alerts or anything else you might want to have access to at a glance. That’s PDS feature number two. Feature number three, also shipping tomorrow, is improved auth flow with the ability to customize what people are seeing when they auth to your PDS.

Jim Ray: Love it.

Alex Garnett: So we’re adding configurable banner images, we’re adding a few more params that you can tweak just in terms of like background color and other CSS type features. And we’re improving the UX of that flow a little bit at the same time. That way you can do a bit more to style your own PDS. And of course, we’re always interested in streamlining like the atmosphere login use case. There’s going to be more work following not long after this to improve the whole narrative and the sample expectations for atmospheric login. All three of these feature categories have happened to land at enough of the same time that they’re all going into the same PDS release, which will be tomorrow unless I am incapacitated.

And I’m very excited to share that. Thanks again, everyone, for engaging when I started to share some of these designs around. We’ve also got another big feature release that we’re rolling up for next week that I’ll be ready to talk about then. And you can probably guess what it is because I hinted about it a couple of weeks ago.

Jim Ray: Excellent. Love all of that. The response in the chat is great. Kuba and Scott in particular, thanks so much for your support. So Kuba is requesting a describe repo section for things like the blob limits and stuff like that. So I think we’ve had periodic requests for that. Looking through our release here, so we’ve got a few that that kind of broadly fit into the category of new releases. We’ll just kind of rip through here. There’s now officially a Blacksky mobile app for both iOS and Android. So those apps are available as official apps, not just web apps or PWAs or anything like that. So that’s very exciting and congrats to the team at Blacksky for getting that shipped.

No mean feat to ship. I mean, even just going through the app store processes alone is enough to drive someone to the brink of insanity there.

Alex Garnett: It’s also a really nice like credibility signifier for people to just be able to get up and running with the app. It’s one of those things where it’s like obviously like philosophically, we don’t want to make everything about app stores and gatekeeping and third-party package management, which is basically what the app store is just a glorified package manager, right? But it’s a nice sign. Like I love this whenever our community applications go through these hoops because it is just such a show of confidence. and accessibility to do it. So I don’t want to minimize like how important this is, however you might feel about an open web. Like this is a really big deal and it’s great for them.

Jim Ray: Agree. Agree. And yeah. We do have a question here from Fry 69 who wants to know why they can post long videos but not a 30 to minute to 90 minute long audio podcast. This is a fantastic question that is very germane to our interests. And you know what, Fry, we’re gonna we’re gonna look into this to figure out what we can do about making audio maybe a little bit of a first class citizen everything is video now, so I suspect that it’s not so much a nefarious scheme as it is just we’ve got to prioritize somewhere. So.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, that’s just obviously some kind of mime type gating that we use for the app flow, right? Because the app is designed to serve video. Yeah. Blobs are arbitrary. That’s why they’re blobs. There’s nothing restricting, you know, like what can be in a blob at the protocol level. We just don’t have first class application support for audio without video. And that’s definitely something the app team can look at some point, I think.

Jim Ray: Yeah. So encode all your audio is video problem solved. Let’s see here. A few other releases. We mentioned last time that there was a tangled CLI. There’s a new one, TNG. So this one appears to be written in Swift, if I got that one correct. But so that’s pretty exciting. Always cool to see more CLIs coming for Tangled and more just interfaces to work with Tangled, I think. Obviously huge success story on the on the protocol there.

Alex Garnett: That prompted me to check to see if there is a DS9 CLI that exists. And there is, though I can’t tell what it does, it seems like it’s some scientific computing library for like signal processing.

Jim Ray: Oh, all right. Well, I guess that tracks. All right, let’s see here. And PDS Dad, everyone’s favorite, Bailey Townsend. This is a cool project. I’ve never been much of an Excalidraw user. Bailey took Excalidraw being kind of like the open source web-based peer-to-peer communal drawing application and made it atproto-native. which is super cool. And even came up with just like a chef’s kiss name for it, Lexidraw. You know, all of us nerds who are familiar with the way the protocol works, including lexicons. I think we were all appreciative of that. But you know, it’s something that that extends beyond that. You know, a part that I didn’t realize until I was actually doing a little bit of research for this show, it uses Iroh for the P2P bits, which Iroh, I know there was a lot of talk with the folks at DWeb and at LocalFirst.

Iroh, they recently hit their 1.0, is that right, at some point this summer?

Alex Garnett: I believe so.

Jim Ray: And so just a lot of, you know, not any explicit ties between the protocol and what they’re doing over there in Iroh land to try to you know, replace IP addresses, I guess, but just like a lot of synchronicity. So I expect that there will be a lot of kind of continued communal engagement. But yeah, Bailey used Iroh for that which is bad. That guy can’t say enough great things about Bailey.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, this is one of a couple projects in the last week I saw that was just nuts that I was like Wow, what do you mean you did this? Like that’s unbelievably cool. The other one that I have in our show notes here somewhere, community developer Scott Lanoue, who goes by Scooty on Bluesky, showed me last week their graphene OS fork that is entirely atproto account driven. So basically the entire OS which is an Android alternative that can run on a phone that I think is primarily web app driven basically has you know an app screen that is a bunch of atmospheric apps that just uses the atproto account like in the system account menu to be able to auth to each of those.

And the whole thing is working. Like it’s unbelievably cool. Just as I mean like and that’s one of those things I know was just gonna get people excited when they see it. Like there’s a certain kind of developer who you see that and like you put them in an FRI mach fMRI machine and their entire brain is exploding where it’s just like, whoa, what do you mean? And so even as a proof of concept or whatever, it just like does so much hearts and minds work in terms of how the protocol can function. So huge shout out both to Bailey and to Scott for just like really running wild in the past few weeks. Like love to see this stuff.

Want to make sure it gets the widest possible audience.

Jim Ray: So the idea there is instead of signing in with your iPhone with your Apple account or your Android phone with your Google account, you can sign in to Graphene, which as you mentioned is kind of this open source fork of Android. And you use your atproto account for everything, which man, I also think that’s just such a great kind of explainer. Like even just, you know, w as we went through I, you know how you have to sign in your iPhone with your Apple account? What if you didn’t have to do that.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. And again, that’s one that lands for a lot of people, just going back to what we talked about at the top of the show, like the algorithm discourse, right? It’s like algorithm doesn’t always mean algorithm the same way nanometer doesn’t always mean nanometer. Like a lot of the stuff in tech at this point is kind of shorthand for a more complicated thing. Right. And these are really salient conceptual categories, people who care about, you know, data sovereignty and all the stuff that we care about in this community. So I think these are really attention getting in the best possible way.

Jim Ray: Completely agree. And Scott’s actually in the chat here and mentioned that got some good feedback that we don’t even need a full graphene fork, we can use stock Android ROMs and credential managers to accomplish a lot of the same things. So that’s cool. So you could in theory, you know, just have a base Android app or a base Android install and build on top of that.

Alex Garnett: See if my XDA developers account still works from like 2012 when I last tried to root my phone.

Jim Ray: All right. Well, a few other items here. Dan Abramov, who as we mentioned last time, makes your job and my job that much easier with all of his fantastic atproto explainers, he has been on a tear. I feel like my I my podcast listening has been nothing but atproto lately, which I’m very excited about. But he had a couple of appearances. One on Syntax FM, which is Wes Bos’s kind of more web dev JavaScript oriented show, but they had Dan on, and I really loved the framing of this. The title was The Open Web’s Second Chance. And they had Dan on and Dan of course did his song and dance. And then he was also on a show that was new to me, UIT inside, which is from it’s a it’s typically a Japanese language podcast, but they did it in English.

And it’s from the parent company of Line, the messaging app, which is huge in Japan. Because I don’t come from like the React ecosystem, I’m always reminded of what kind of like a rock star is Dan is in particular segments of the web dev ecosystem. And so, you know, in both of these appearances, it was like we’ve got Dan Abramov, which was great to hear because we know him as like atproto Explainer Extraordinaire, but he’s obviously got a lot more cachet too beyond just atproto, which is great and super helpful because I think there’s a lot of A lot of folks who would be interested in the protocol, they just don’t know it yet. And so folks like Dan getting out there and advocating our behalf are obviously hugely helpful.

Alex Garnett: It’s massively appreciated. Yeah. I mean neither you nor I really come from like React or Web Dev land, right? Which is like I sit down, I’m like, I kind of know the shape of it. It’s like yeah, I’ll write you some types whatever. Yeah, you stay shadow dumb, he eats my soul, whatever. Like, and that’s all good to know. And it is really nice to be in these spaces. It’s something I think we’re generally aware of, like that there is a big TypeScript developer community that’s maybe still posting more on LinkedIn or on other platforms that like hasn’t wholeheartedly come onto Bluesky, but we can see so much to appeal to them in atproto specifically, in terms of just how you think about web components, like how you do your backends and being able to get that sort of thing for free one of those beats we like to hit in talking about like why use atproto for your app, even if you don’t care about microblogging, for example.

So every time Dan pops up, it’s just hugely, hugely helpful. It’s a great class in how to talk about this stuff and how to appeal to TypeScript developers.

Jim Ray: Yeah, completely agree. So and then wrapping things up here, as usual we have a standing segment for our friends at standard.site. So the folks over at Leaf Leaflet launched a an ability to embed kind of random HTML into your leaflet posts. And they even kind of came up with I saw some chatter about how are you doing this and keeping it secure? Jared and Miguel from Offprint were kind of going back and forth on this. And so of course it’s all kind of sandboxed within the browser. So and then.

Alex Garnett: MDX as a service. Yeah, I am a React developer. There you go.

Jim Ray: Nice. Well, and then immediately people started just dumping all kinds of random stuff into it. So super fun to see some of those examples. And then one that I actually thought was pretty interesting, Hilary Baumann wrote a really nice like what is standard.site explainer. And I liked her framing as kind of next generation RSS. And we get into trouble sometimes with maybe with people who have a vested interest in keeping RSS as it is. But I really enjoyed this explainer a lot too. So, you know, another good one for if you need to get out there and explain. So what standard.site is. And then I think that that kind of wraps up. Just as a reminder, you know, we always have love seeing all of the events.

I think last night there was the PDX event. happening. I saw some photos from I recognized the space and then I was just like, oh that’s right. They do that in the Code TV studio. And so and saw some familiar faces there, including a friend of friend of the stream Erin Kissane made it down and then the NYC community day is a few weeks away and then as always check the atmosphere. community for an event happening near you. Anything else that we missed? We did have a question here that came in. This was actually a really interesting question going back to the verge interview. So there was a lot of fuss about the verges video.

How are you going to ensure that new communities join here, for example, to get the football community here? You need football and they need soccer, what we call soccer here in the states, and leagues posting messages that isn’t happening at the moment I know this is top of mind for our partnerships and our apps team. We’re more kind of concerned with bringing some of those folks in. Alex, I know you had a couple thoughts on this.

Alex Garnett: I do. I’ve actually got quite complex thoughts on this because I think there’s quite a few aspects to saying, you know, like, okay, we want more sports talk to be happening on Bluesky. That way everyone isn’t just sort of, you know, blowing a gasket talking about politics at all times. times.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: And for my part, I absolutely agree with this. Like I think when I was joining, that was something that even I emphasized is like, hey I like this app not because I necessarily want to hear from people who I explicitly disagree with politically, but because I want to talk about something else some of the time. Right. And that’s really what I think diversifying the conversation is more about. It’s not like artificial viewpoint diversity. It’s like, hey, we’re all well-rounded people. We have hobbies. And for me, and again, speaking as somebody who sought out this job to work on this platform, I get a lot of the tech conversation that I want to be having. Again, like we just talked about, like I’m not like a diet-in-the-will React person, but I get to have a lot of other interesting conversations about open source, about what’s going on in the self-hosting world.

So like A lot of the tech discourse is there for me. Similarly, a lot of the sports discourse is there for me already because I am someone who is inclined to support, you know Worker owned journalism like defector. I’m a big fan of ESPN’s Mina Kimes, who has been a big user of the platform day one. And that is obviously a subset of sports discourse. And it’s not what a hundred percent of the global sports audience is necessarily looking for. And it’s probably true that part of this is getting more brands on the platform and getting, you know, organizations like soccer clubs to actually just post their regular news updates on Bluesky like they would have been doing on Insta or on Twitter a decade.

to go. Right. And so just getting the actual club and the club’s long-suffering PR person who loves to get yelled at for their terrible trades actually manning the post. is a big part of obviously feeling like you have like a platform that has a commercial interest by all these different clubs. Yeah but in terms of just being able to go and post and talk about sports and know that you’re going to find an audience for like complaining about the World Cup. We already have that. And I think it’s really interesting like what the going from A to B really looks like right there, right? It’s like we have the chatter, we have the engaged commenters.

We don’t have all the brands themselves in every case yet. And that I think that gives me what I want. Like I don’t need to go yell at the actual Mets and be like, why did you do this? I just want to talk to like 30 other depressives who follow the Mets and be like, why do they do this? But like there’s something there for sure.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: And I think figuring out how we get from like less of a self-selecting elite opinion sort of sports demographic to like an everyone’s here sports demographic. That’s something our partnerships team is really focused on. But it’s a really interesting question in terms of you think about, you know, like who was on social media and why and what are they getting out of it? And then what do the audience expectations in turn develop into from there.

Jim Ray: Such good points, every one of them. And I think that one thing a lot of folks don’t always realize, I think you and I have been on the other side of this a few times even here, is that oftentimes in order to get those official clubs on board or at the league level there are high dollar exchanges that are happening. What does Twitter pay to the NFL or to the MLB to have all of the teams on Twitter? Is it a six? Is it a nine figure sum? You know, those are the kinds of things that we can’t quite justify at this point. And so it does, it is a little bit more kind of bottom-up, it is a little bit more indie.

kind of voice of the crowd and at a little bit less of the kind of the official top level line of things. And that’s probably not gonna change anytime soon. We’re probably not gonna be paying the NFL millions of dollars to have every club on the on the app just yet. Yeah, I think seeing more and more of that conversation happening over here, I think is and then you know going back to there was a great post about building a sports app on atproto and what that might look like. And like again, if you want the official scores and if you want them instantly, then that’s a really that’s a huge investment. Right. So you like you have to officially license that data from the leagues, and that’s not cheap.

And they’re not at all interested in giving any of that stuff away. So a lot of it does come down to money at the end of the day, too.

Alex Garnett: There’s a lot there. You know, like people who do tech not in the tech industry are often not having the same conversations as we are, and that’s to everybody’s detriment because so much of like good quality devrel and developer evangelism happens because there’s two or three people like at some random orc at Manchester City, at Taco Bell, you know, like anywhere else who are like, hey we like this product. We like this open source project. We have the latitude to be able to adopt it internally. And that’s how you actually grow your developer base. right is because like your product was good enough for the people doing tech outside of tech to be like this is for real like let’s get some PM onto it and see what they make of it so the more that this platform appeals to the tech people at Manchester City, the better.

And I do think that we’ve got a lot of margin and room to grow there.

Jim Ray: Yep. Yeah, completely agree. My favorite developers to talk to at my previous job were the internal engineering team at Home Depot. And huge organization. I mean thousands of developers and they’re responsible for, you know, the fact that you can go to Home Depot, you can pull up the app and it can tell you not only which aisle and which bay within that aisle, the fasteners that you’re looking for, but they can tell you how many there are. And I although I ran into this problem the other day, they told me that there were 24 boxes of the three inch screws I was looking for and there were zero. So didn’t always work out.

Alex Garnett: Betrayed by the fastener mechanism.

Jim Ray: But it’s the only time that’s ever happened. And you know, I can now come up with my shopping list. I can g I can know exactly what aisle to go to. And that’s like we think of technology as like AI or, you know, VR things or whatever, but so much of our lives is just like those marginal little improvements. Well, that seems like a great note to end it. Thanks everybody for showing up on the stream. Really appreciate it as always. And we’ll be back. We’ve got some exciting streams coming up. We’ve got some special guests coming up. We’re gonna have A couple, you know, we’ll keep with our usual bi-weekly cadence and then we’ll drop the conversations.

I’ve got some really exciting conversations coming up too. Really excited to for those to drop. Oh, quick programming note on that. Tim Biggin, I don’t know if he’s on the stream or not, had requested some way to kind of disambiguate between the live stream recordings and the chronic pre-recorded bits. And so now you can do that. You can go to the Off Protocol homepage and filter to your to your heart’s content. So thanks Tim for pushing on that one. Really appreciate it. And thanks for noticing. So.

Alex Garnett: if you ask for stuff, we might do it. Yeah.

Jim Ray: Exactly. All right. Thanks, everyone.