Not Just Us: An AMA with Toni Schneider

Jim Ray: Toni Schneider, welcome so much to this very special edition off schedule, off protocol, an AMA with Bluesky’s CEO. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Toni Schneider: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Jim Ray: Excellent. I was noticing on the stream we’ve got some of the usual characters and some new faces signed up. So and we got a lot a ton of great questions. Before we get to the questions. I wanted to note that you are you started off you are our interim CEO there for a few months and then it’s about it’s been about six weeks now, right? That you went full time. I want to tell a little bit of a story. When you announced this to the company, we were in an all-hands meeting. And what you did is you brought up, you screen shared your Blues Guy profile, and you went in and you deleted the interim from your profile there.

And I have to say, I’m a little bit disappointed with our atproto community because I thought for sure that somebody would have noticed this and was going to scoop us on the news, but turns out when we officially announced a few hours later, hadn’t been scooped yet.

Toni Schneider: It was a fun moment. I was kind of nervous doing it.

Jim Ray: Nice. And was there any discussion internally about like, is this a good idea? Are we going to scoop ourselves or.

Toni Schneider: No, it was just I was like, I’m excited to do it. I was like, oh, that’d be fun.

Jim Ray: Excellent. Again, thanks so much for joining us. We’ve been promoting this. across various properties and we got some really great quick great questions i went in and i took all the questions i put them into a table i sorted by the number of likes and reposts and things like that and then we kind of categorize them. There’s some overlap between some of the questions. So really excited to get your answers on it other folks that are joining us are as well. This first one was a new one for me, and I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly. Edit button, I think is how people say this. Have you heard about an edit button? The question was what’s the ETA on an edit button?

Any thoughts on that one?

Toni Schneider: Yeah, I mean we I we always have to talk about that one first because it always comes it’s a meme right now that every time we launch anything, people are like, oh cool, but edit button when. And I’ll just say up front, I’m on Team Edit Button.

Jim Ray: Excellent.

Toni Schneider: I think it’s mostly because I’m typophobic. I don’t know if that’s a condition, but I actually don’t care. that much anymore when I see typos out in the world, but when I post something and has a typo in it, it just drives me crazy. And I think there’s probably a way to treat this condition. I it honestly that it probably makes me a little bit more hesitant to post. So I get why, yeah, says some people want the ability to fix a post if something goes wrong. That totally makes sense. It’s also actually pretty good illustration of just something that seems that simple is actually not that simple once you look into it, are at a product.

Alex Benzer posted about this a couple of months ago. And it’s like, hey, we’re thinking about finally doing the edit button. What do you think? And literally like 40% of people respond saying, yes. Please do it. 40% respond saying, please don’t do it. This is going to be a disaster. And 20% said they didn’t care. And it’s what’s interesting about it is so the reason it hasn’t happened is it’s actually more complicated than you think right. There’s the whole issue of somebody posts something, I repost it and they go change the meaning of it. And I don’t I can’t tell. And so it’s a.

Jim Ray: it’s a sort of.

Toni Schneider: Yeah, it’s like an abuse vector, right? So then you have to deal with, okay, how do we deal with that? Do we notify people? Do we have an edit history? Like it just becomes more complicated and then it starts to be more work and then it starts to compete with all the other things we want to do. And there is a long list of things this year we’ve worked on for the app, you know. Better search, better trending topics, better discover feed, but you know, better video. Like it’s just the list never ends and we just have to weigh it against all those things. So that’s why we will eventually do it. I just, it is more work than people.

thing. So stay put until we figure this out.

Jim Ray: I hear you. And we did hear we will eventually do it. I think recognizing all of that complexity is a big part of it. And you mentioned video which went out as we were going live there’s a new v2 of video with longer videos and we’ve got some pretty fun promotion.

Toni Schneider: Sorry, this wasn’t part of the question, but I do want to say that I do feel like we have invested a lot into the basics of the app, just getting it really up to par. We’ve had just, you know, huge influxes of users over time. And some people come and they see that some of the basics are still missing and they leave. So it’s just been really important for us to get the app up to snuff. And we have. I really feel like the last six months we’ve gotten a lot of the basics in really good shape. And we now can start to add more new things once that’s in place.

Jim Ray: And I think certainly this summer and even in the spring, we’ve we really hit a cadence where we’ve been shipping. And I say we, I mean I really mean the app team. I’m obviously on the protocol side of the house. And it’s been really great seeing the app team just continuing. Cause and people have noticed in the community too, lots of lots of good feedback from there too. So that’s really great to see.

Toni Schneider: Yeah, feels good.

Jim Ray: So we also got, of course, this is also a perennial question whenever we announce new things are questions around moderation. We got we got a handful approaching it from kind of different ways. I want to take maybe a more atmospheric approach to how we think about moderation. When the app launched, and certainly how we talk about this in the atmosphere, is this idea of composable moderation. And it’s one of the big differentiators from some of the more centralized platforms. And I guess how do you think about how we’ve done when it comes to the composable moderation bits? Where do you think we’ve succeeded? Where do you think we’ve still got some room to improve and grow and fix?

And where do you think maybe we haven’t quite lived up to the ideals that we had, especially when it comes to moderation.

Toni Schneider: I would say it is a differentiator for sure. I do feel like composable moderation has delivered on some of its promise. Moderation is not a monolithic thing. Right. And it shouldn’t be one company or one group of people deciding how everything gets moderated. So being able to break it out into multiple pieces, multiple products, multiple groups of people who just have you know, different ways of moderating and then having all of that information flow back into the protocol so everybody else gets to benefit. Look at all the moderation decisions and decide like here’s what I want to see or what I want to show in my app. I think it’s a it’s a smart system.

I think it’s shown that it can work better. than some of the other networks out there. There’s more work that needs to be done for sure. It’s something that I would describe as like we put it into place a while ago. It’s done well and it’s time to loop back on it and start to think about okay, it’s as a V1, it’s gotten us actually really far down the path, but we haven’t and maybe because and actually because it’s worked fairly well. We’ve just been working on other things. And I would love to loop back, both because it’s time, it can get even better. There’s communities of people who do this work out there and they’re a little bit unsung heroes.

I feel like we should elevate it more as a feature that people who use the app realize how well this works. I also think this topic will now really move into the foreground because of private spaces permissioned data, new applications that are coming out where people are going to build smaller, more private subcommunities. Which all have to deal with their own moderation issues as well. So it’s sort of a new wave of apps that are going to start to bring this topic to the foreground again. And I’m very interested in feedback on this and learning about, you know, what as we as we loop back around to it, what we should do with it.

Jim Ray: And composable moderation, it really does feel like it’s a new approach. And I think a lot of people come to they bring some of the assumptions that they have with them about some of the experiences that they’ve had on other social networks and they assume that we approach everything the same way. The moderation piece seems to be a pretty big part of that. Are there things that we can do within the app to help educate people or kind of bring people along and about how that that part works?

Toni Schneider: I’m sure we can do more. Again, this is part of iterating and learning more about how other communities are doing it. The more this is out in the open and actually surfaced so people can see it and it’s not seen as this like somebody in the dark backroom makes decisions and then we have to live with them, the better.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Toni Schneider: There’s always a balance right between we want to show how all this works and anybody can plug in and any, you know, go build your own, you know, plug in your own moderation, build your own app. versus a whole bunch of users who just want it to work. They don’t want to see all that detail. So there’s a balance there. I do think just surfacing more of the labels and more like seeing why a certain decision was made or giving more control to users. And let’s use like a very favorite non-controversial topic like AI slop, right? That’s something that some people want moderate it, others actually like it. We can do more to s surface that as a decision for users.

Say, look, this is AI content. Like, do you want to see it? Do you don’t want to see it? But instead of in the background trying to make decisions that clearly I’m not going to please everyone. And like as a user, I want to see more. Like show me the information so I can decide.

Jim Ray: That’s so true. And I that that part about finding the balance and kind of the inherent tension there is a really, really good one I want to talk a little bit about the other kind of big topic that folks are talking about a lot. I was just at the atproto NYC event up in New York. Can’t say enough great things about how well that went. The community up there has really done a bang up job. And this wasn’t an overnight thing. You know, this is the second one of these they’ve held. 2 to 3x growth since the last year. The big question that I was getting a lot that folks were talking about was about monetization and sustainability.

We got this great question from Cuba. When and how is Bluesky going to start making money? Which is, you know, a pretty big open general question. And then I think we had a slightly more nuanced take on it is when will Bluesky consider running something like Atmosphere. money for trusted partners? This one came from Jackie. Kind of a similar way of asking the same question, but how are we thinking about monetizing both Bluesky, the app that folks are familiar with, but also the atmosphere and how our many partners and developers are going to use kind of make money.

Toni Schneider: Yeah, this was the number one question, I think. We definitely spent some time on it. And first plus one on Ad Proto NYC. I wasn’t there, but it sounded super fun. And the Ad Proto meetups I’ve gone to have been super fun. So I think they’re if there’s one near you, definitely take the opportunity. It’s just that the community is at a really, really fun stage of just bringing in. It’s a very open, friendly community. And there’s so much interest now and more and more people wanting to learn about the atmosphere and atproto and it’s a great moment to have more of these meetups and be very welcoming and bring lots of people in. And I’d love to go to more of them.

Monetization. Huge topic. It’s on everybody’s mind. So when are we going to start making money? Hopefully this year we are going to start having some revenue as Bluesky as a company. I would say I see some just near-term things that we’re getting approached with opportunities and then long-term where I see I think and hope the atmosphere as a whole where everybody’s gonna start making money together. Near term, we’re definitely seeing some just commer like larger companies, commercial actors starting to get interested in the atmosphere and needing services to start to help integrate into it. That’s great news in terms of just people are showing up and they want you know they want to talk to us about being supported and enabled to join in and that’s why we’re we’ve launched Bluesky protocol services to start to think about what can that look like to be clear everything all the services we offer today for free will stay free.

We’re not going to start charging for any of that. But there’s companies approaching us saying, hey, we’d like SLAs, we like access to your engineering team, like we’re doing a big integration, those kinds of things. So that’s kind of near-term, just interest that we’re getting, which I see as a great signal. Long term, the way I look at it is what is commercial activity on the network that’s already happening today? Because I there’s this category of, I don’t know what it’ll be called, maybe social commerce, where you look at the atmosphere today and money is changing hands, right? People are very successfully fundraising. They’re selling subscriptions. They’re selling tickets to events. They’re you know, there’s a lot of like indie game games have a lot of energy around, you know, launching games.

And I actually have a an Attie report that runs every 48 hours that tells me about, you know, because then people post about say we’ve successfully raise this amount of money or sign up you know this amount of subscribers. So it’s already happening. It’s just in this very organic way right now. And I think what it tells us is the network has an audience of people who are actually very interested in supporting independent creators. They’re willing to pay for things. Our job is to make it easier and to have more, more things that people can transact on. I would like to see, and we will do this soon, is working with builders and creators to just make it easier for them to have offerings on the network.

I think a big next step after that is I want to see some form of attestation on the network. So when I, as a user, right, when I buy something or subscribe to something, the atmosphere that there’s a record of that so then other features can light up and you know others other apps can figure out oh you bought this thing and it’s confirmed.

Jim Ray: right.

Toni Schneider: And then we obviously want to make just commerce and payments easier. So people, it’s just a smoother experience.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Toni Schneider: to transact on the network. And I think we as Bluesky can play a role in this because to be able to do this, you want a trusted entity that trust with transactions. So that’s where I see us enabling this and we want to do this in a way where everybody who’s part of a transaction who helps somebody find something to buy who helps them but he buys something who obviously who delivers the goods should all get a share in it. So this can happen in an in an open network so that you can be a creator, I can be a network operator, somebody else can build an app. And it all works together seamlessly and everybody can participate.

And it’s gonna take a moment. Yeah. I see this as the way that this network both can lots of people can start earning money and we can have a network that’s where the content and the builders and the creators can directly sell things versus everything getting disintermediated by advertisers.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: And so I think this has a ton of potential. I think we’re the only network that can do this because everybody else runs on ads and it’s you know there’s no open participation. And I’m really excited about getting going on it because again, we see it organically already happening. We just want a lot more of it.

Jim Ray: I love that and I love how aligned it feels and all of the incentives are moving in the right direction. Like you said, it’s not being disrent disintermediated by some network that relies on surveillance or advertising or whatever it might be. It’s just we’re gonna do this. It’s pretty straightforward. You pay us money, you get a thing.

Toni Schneider: Yeah. And we really want to do this in a way that Enables everyone to make money, not just us. Like we make money when everybody else makes money, not just oh, we have a network now, let’s lock it down and start monetizing, which has been the pattern in the past. I also think it’s one of the key elements to enabling all this is atproto spaces because you know a lot of the especially you know the content on the network a lot of this needs to be gated and right this is what we’re now finally able to do. So you can say here’s something in an app, a game, a piece of content I’m offering to the world, you can now do that without it just being free and public for everyone.

Jim Ray: And let’s talk a little bit about at Protospaces. So the Alpha launched last week and lots of developer excitement. We had several hundred people sign up. We did get some questions about at protospaces and specifically about how we’re thinking about that in regards to the Bluesky community. Beloved community member Jerry asks, what’s the vision for permission spaces now atproto spaces and communities on Bluesky? And will they be related?

Toni Schneider: Yes, definitely related. The vision is that these spaces are again, so the idea is that you know we have the giant public square, that’s the network today. More and more people want to congregate into more private spaces. That’s great. Both, I think, are important. And we now are enabling the creation of more private spaces on the protocol. I think the big unlock here is that there’s always been a huge need for this, right? There’s lots of platforms where you can go build a private group but the problem with all of them has been either you’re sort of giving up all ownership and privacy because it’s part of some large platform, or you set up your own thing and then you have to convince all your friends to sign up for yet another thing and it’s this tiny little silo.

I think we can have the best of both worlds. Or you sign up once, you have an atmosphere account, and now you can freely join any of these groups check them all in one place, like all can all interoperate, but they’re still owned. Each community 100% owns their own community and can take it wherever they want to host it and run it. So I think that as a core principle is really powerful. The role that Bluesky, I think, can play in this is the discovery and notification layer for all of this. So when I s I want to be able as a user to still go to one place, in my case, the Bluesky app, and see like, oh, here’s the 20 communities I’m part of.

what’s new in them, it’s one place to keep track of it all. But then as I enter those communities, I go somewhere else. I go, that’s, you know, that doesn’t have to all live inside our app. So the app is really a sort of entry point, discovery point, a notification point for all this. And because all of this is part of the open protocol and the standards are forming around enabling all this. Anybody else in their apps can do the same thing. So any of these communities can show up in different places and we’re just we’re just one of those places. But it goes hand in hand. So we really that we’ve seen other social networks to get to certain scale and then you know face Facebook gets big and then you have Facebook groups.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: And you don’t want Bluesky groups where it’s just, okay, now, oh, you want to start a group? You have to do it on Bluesky and Bluesky is the only place. These are going to open owned by you know the people who built them and run them and then you can plug them into the Bluesky you have to have it be more convenient.

Jim Ray: And so that that interplay between the discovery mechanism on the broader social network, but then your ability to create call it cozier spaces for the communities that you help to cultivate.

Toni Schneider: Yeah. And it’s really important because I’ve had this experience. I’m sure everybody here has had this experience where you sign up for a cool new group and they’re all excited. And then it’s like a month or two later like, oh, I haven’t checked in.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: Because you just you can’t check in on fifty different spots every day and keep track of it. And then, you know, as a result, we all end up in prove chats which are fun but pretty limiting and so I think this is a long term a better solution and I think I think this is really gonna drive the growth of the atmosphere. As people now it’s just so many more opportunities to start to build more specific, more custom, more bespoke things.

Jim Ray: And the ability to kind of take the pieces of the atmosphere. So we got a couple of questions about this. And I think right now a lot of what we’d seen basically up until this point are atproto versions of other social constructs or social apps. And so I think this combination of appro spaces and the other pieces that we have in place that are atproto developers would be more familiar with will allow developers to really create these, as you were saying, kind of like custom and bespoke versions of what a community looks like. You don’t just have to shove into like the version of Facebook groups or a group chat or something like that.

Toni Schneider: But I hope we’ll just we’ll see more and more is how the interplay between all the proto apps and experiences adds more value. So if you have we have a thousand apps, thousand proto apps and you know, you can log into all of them with one login. Okay, that’s cool, but if they’re all their own little worlds, only that.

Jim Ray: yeah.

Toni Schneider: But if you start, you know, if you start to see like what we’re doing in our app point with doing like the standard.site integration, for example, is like, oh I’m following Jim on Bluesky. Jim is not only posting on Bluesky. You are like signing up for events and you’re writing articles and doing all kinds of other things. That just kind of automatically shows up for me as well because I’m interested in you and I follow you and I shouldn’t have to like track you on 17 different apps. That starts to be really interesting, right? Or just things start to bubble up and these pieces get connected in a way where, yeah, if you’re building a small community and it has an event component, that information should travel around and be available to others.

And so the more and more we see these this sort of remixing and interconnecting in action and our users just kind of go, oh, that’s cool. I think that’s really what brings the benefit of the whole network to life. That.

Jim Ray: ‘s super compelling, that vision of just the interplay between the different surfaces and being able to bring things public when you want them to and then keep them keep them private when you don’t. That actually leads into another one of our popular questions, which was about atmospheric integrations. And within the app itself, we’ve experimented with some integrations. We have the germ DM integration, we have the live stream integration. It worked great right just now where we went live and then all of a sudden on the atproto account it showed that we were streaming live, made a post for us. And then of course there is probably one of our more visible ones, which is the standard.site integration that we launched this spring.

with the standard.site team. So we’re able to kind of show an enhanced link card there and even bring a little bit of interactivity into that, into the app itself. So how are we thinking about integrating atmospheric apps more broadly into the Bluesky app so that we mentioned as a kind of a discovery service or a notification service, but then also we want to send folks back out into that universe of apps.

Toni Schneider: Yeah, we definitely want to do more of it. We have a list of ideas. It’s something where there’s so many ideas and opportunities. We need to we just need to start putting them in there and trying them. We’re actively working on several. So this isn’t just like, oh, it’d be nice to get to this. This is in active development. standard.site, sort of V one that we did was actually pretty basic and it really resonated. I really feel like this people get it just had this ripple effect, right? Where lots of people start supporting that that standard. So we’re gonna do we’re actively working on the next version of that. How do we make it more useful to users?

How do we make the content discovery easier? How do we make the subscription process super integrated. We’re working on notifications. How do we again like right now I follow all these things and it all just ends up in one notification tower. It’s kind of chaotic. So how do we start to break that out? So I can say like, no, when again, when you post an article, I really want to know that about that. I don’t want it kind of lost in my just, you know, stream. And then to, you know, back to monetization, what we talked about earlier, you know, when somebody wants has something for sale, like a you know, they want to raise money for something, subscribe to something, sell something.

How do we integrate all of that? So those are the kinds of things we think about. We’ll soon see in the app how we or we were in August within weeks. We will finally start talking more specifically about the atmosphere in the app. And this is a really it’s both a really cool moment because this is the big audience, yeah, one of the big audiences we can bring this concept to. And we want to do it really well because we sort of have one chance to make that first impression on, you know, let’s face it, there’s a lot of Bluesky users who have ever heard of the atmosphere. So how do we introduce that concept in a way that users go, oh, awesome, great.

Yes, this is super useful to me. Versus you should care about the atmosphere because it’s so cool and checkout, decentralization, you know, all those things that we love, but you know mainstream users just want to have a better social media experience. So.

Jim Ray: right.

Toni Schneider: So yeah, actively working on that, looking for more ways to, I would say have a place in the app where we can surface more and more of these atmospheric integrations. And outside the app, we also want to make it easier for people to make, not just build proto apps, but make their websites atmospheric, make their communities atmospheric. How do we just make that easier and easier and easier so anybody who’s interested in building something can do it. And we just lower that hurdle. You don’t have to be a developer. You don’t have to maybe start from scratch. Again, if you have an existing site or app, how do you integrate? So we’re going to continue to invest in that just to not now that people are starting to get more and more out-protocurious, like we want to take advantage of that momentum and say, yeah, come, any anyone can you can plug in.

Jim Ray: That’s great. I that idea of bringing more of the atmosphere into the app and doing it in a way that exposes the benefits of the atmosphere without having to hit people over the head about it’s a decentralized protocol. I think one of my contentions is that people are busy. It’s very rare that you will find someone who is not a developer or into decentralized protocols who is just like, yes, I want to own my data or however they want to think about it. But they often want the things that those things enable. And so the more that we can make that understandable to the average Bluesky user and the folks who aren’t even yet Bluesky users yet or across the various atmospheric app.

Toni Schneider: Yeah and to builders, publishers, like they have pain points because of non-open social media world that most people live in, there’s a lot of pain there, right? And I if we can just come in with a solution without having to learn about everything that’s under the hood. That’s yeah, we want more and more of that. That said, there’s already a ton of people. We have millions and millions of people on this network every day. And delivering value to them when we were sending checked a couple of weeks ago, something like two million clicks a day to publishers. And you know, we like sending traffic to people. What a concept.

Jim Ray: Exactly.

Toni Schneider: And we’re the number one referrer to a lot of publishers and they’re kind of like, wow, how is this possible? Like, you know, the some of these other networks supposedly are so much bigger, but I’m getting more engagement and more traffic here. It’s like, yeah, because we’re designed to enable that versus taking it away from me and routing it somewhere else. And we just need to stay the course and do more and more and more and as people experience those benefits, I think they’ll stick around.

Jim Ray: I hear that a lot from the especially the smaller publishers. In some ways more sustainable, but maybe slower growth. There seems to be a real integration point where Bluesky is sending them lots of traffic and they seem to be finding an audience at Bluesky which is which is really great to hear.

Toni Schneider: Yeah, and I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but to a publisher, I would say this is the last time you actually have to build your audience somewhere, and this time you really actually own it. This isn’t going to be another bait and switch where come here, lots of traffic, lots of excitement. And oh, thank you for your you know for bringing your audience. Now we’re gonna charge you to access your own audience. Like just that. You know, that’s just been happening over and over to creators and to publishers and to builders as well, developers. It’s a terrible pattern and the atmosphere is designed so that can’t happen. We can’t do that to you, right?

And this is what gets me out of bed every morning. It’s like we can break that cycle. You know, people should own their own draft. I mean, how obvious is that, but it’s just that’s not how the world developed for the last 10 or 20 years.

Jim Ray: So that brings us to kind of another broader point that several of our questions were asking. And it’s one that I often hear when I get out there and talk to developers. How does Bluesky, the company, not necessarily the app, but the company plan to make the app and the atmosphere a bit more legible to mainstream users. Does that mean we’re gonna start marketing more? Is there gonna be a Super Bowl commercial? Like how do we bring that kind of more mainstream audience in, the people who would benefit from having a lot of the pieces that exist that the atmosphere makes possible? But you know, they don’t necessarily want to start all over or think that they have to abandon their old ways of publishing or interacting with people.

Toni Schneider: It happens organically, piece by piece. There isn’t solar bullet here. And even if there was, it would be very expensive because all the all the channels out there to just break through and get attention or you know are super expensive.

Jim Ray: And.

Toni Schneider: we well but what we have is we have real people who are out there building and talking about it and talking to their friends about it. And it’s word of mouth, it’s organic. What we can do a better job at is just making it easier to explain all this. It is, I think we’re making progress, both as a company and as a community, but it’s still a lot, right? It’s it there’s kind of all these ways in and all these explanations and we I think we need a few more iterations of just getting the atmosphere story out there in a way that a makes it clear that Bluesky is not the atmosphere, right? It’s a part of it, but there are lots of other pieces to it and yeah what it means to be to join and what the benefits are and why you know and how we can help the people already on it how we can bring our friends and our followers into it.

And it’s I think we’re getting better, but we it’s ongoing work and I know there’s it’s been happening. That work has been happening. There’s a lot of people who are thinking about yeah, shaping that atmosphere narrative. As a company, we’ve been trying to help, but also not take over. So we want to support the atmosphere as a whole. We don’t want this to be a Bluesky owned or directed thing. So that’s so when we look at it a lot too, it’s you know we’re trying to strike that balance. Right. And that I think we’re getting better at as well. Because again, we yeah, we don’t want the world to see this as a Bluesky corporate thing because that’s that defeats the purpose.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Toni Schneider: And I like, you know, and it’s just I like how it’s shaping up. I think people have really rallied around the concept of the atmosphere, the atmosphere login. And I think we’ll see a lot more in the next couple of months to get that story to the next level. And then I think we’ll also see as that becomes, I think it actually it becomes you know it’s legible to us today, and it becomes legible to sort of more technically minded folks. And then we’re seeing that now, and we’re also seeing other companies as said earlier who want to be part of it, and I think we’ll see also moments where companies embrace the atmosphere and want to be part of it.

And I think those are all it just every step will help. There’s not going to be one big moment where yeah, the Super Bowl commercial.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: But lots and lots of small steps in us getting better at it. And then us as a company just supporting it wherever we can.

Jim Ray: You know, I had a question here from Blues Guy from last week, but then I think there’s a question from the stream from Patrick here that kind of dovetails into this. When will the login flow change to reflect atmosphere accounts? And I think another way that people have asked this is how are we thinking about bringing creators over? So it’s one thing to kind of bring a more mainstream audience in with kind of more traditional marketing and advertising. It’s another thing to kind of go after the creators. And I think one thing that we’ve seen and recognized and one thing that folks in the community ask us about all the time is things like tools for their favorite streamer or podcaster or writer.

I’m always very excited when I see writers really engage with the atmosphere and the proto side of things who are coming from outside of tech. You know, they might be a political writer, they might be there’s a really wonderful children’s author who’s been really engaging on the protocol side of things. So how are we thinking about better enabling on the creator side of things, which will hopefully kind of bring an audience with them?

Toni Schneider: Yeah, so this is we touched on this earlier with sort of yeah bring making the atmosphere legible in our app. So I’m assuming the question is about sort of in the Bluesky app when yeah,.

Jim Ray: yeah, yeah, in the Bluesky app and then also just across the atmosphere.

Toni Schneider: too. So I would say I mean this is maybe the other than our protospaces and that whole rollout which I think is a huge moment for all of us landing this the full atmosphere story, atmosphere login, is top priority. for me and for us for the remainder of this year. It’ll come in steps. And I think for the app, like I said earlier, I just I want to make sure when we do it in the app that it just it’s solid. It just people get it. It’s not this like, oh God, they’re making me have to learn about this other login thing. Like, yeah, don’t make me do that. I already have a login. Like, you know, we don’t because it’s, you know, happens with a lot of these kinds of changes.

Like we want it to be like, no, this makes sense now because as you switch, look at all these other good things that that are opening up. I think with creators, we definitely want to start to tell the story that, you know, you’re a creator on the atmosphere, not just Bluesky. And so when you when you set up shot in the atmosphere, here’s what it means. Yes, you get access to Bluesky and all that audience, but here’s all the other cool apps. But yeah, next two, three months are totally focused on this. And I know that again, there’s a lot of people in the community are focused on making sure that the story gets told in a consistent way.

We have a consistent look and feel to it. Everybody calls it the same thing. And it’s kind of a long time coming. And I it’s about to happen. I think the Bluesky app is one of the big moments when we switch over and we wanna we just wanna make sure our users love it and they know because we do we do get feedback from part of the Bluesky user, right? So whenever we do like an app road or atmosphere thing, they’re like, what is this atmosphere thing? Like just don’t mess up Bluesky. I love Bluesky. Like can I just keep using the app? Like why are you don’t, you know, you’re making my head hurt.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: So we still have some work there to do so that people don’t feel like we’re yeah forcing this in.

Jim Ray: We can’t end this without talking about AI, of course. AI has been the big topic of conversation for years now. It’s a regular source of discourse on the app, of course. But it’s also something that our developers think about a lot. I think we were a little bit maybe surprised in interesting ways to notice how what a great surface area the protocol is for AI tools and we of course launched Attie. Dame asks what’s the longer-term vision for Attie? And then we got a really interesting question. We got an interest a question from an AI bot that is on the network. A few months ago we re released a feature that allows you to Mark that your application is a bot.

This one is from void.comind.network. What would it take for agents to participate as first class account holders without making the authority opaque. I thought that was I just thought it was an interesting kind of meta question about the question itself. But kind of broadly, how are you thinking about AI with the protocol? How are you thinking about Attie and then making applications first class citizens without of course overrunning the network with all of the slop and other things that we’re seeing in other places.

Toni Schneider: I do think there’s applications of AI technology that are really beneficial. Just social media overall. And then there’s clearly it’s causing chaos and problems as well. So I think we, you know, it’s up to us to make sure we pick the good use cases that people actually like and avoid the bad ones. It’s still getting shaped. I mean, it’s a technology that’s, you know, sort of I don’t know, adolescence now, maybe it’s out of infancy, but it’s still it’s still changing. But we’re starting to kind of see like, okay, here’s how it plays out. I would just say I think it’s useful. I think it has its uses and we want to bring those uses to our users.

And I want to make sure like there’s some real downsides to it as well. I mean I do not like AI slop. I think it’s just annoying and a problem. I see LLMs as really powerful when it comes to Analyzing a lot of information, personalization, churning through just mountains of data that we can’t do as humans in a surprisingly smart and personalized way. I don’t see it at all as a useful tool to create content. I don’t think AI is, you know, creative in any way. And we should not use it to make content. I think we should use it to analyze content and to help people manage the complexity of the internet. So and so to me that’s where I come down.

I do think it’s add Proto is a really interesting technology for AI to engage with, and that’s why we have our Attie team that are it’s a team of people exploring all those possibilities. You know, the questions around agent to human or agent-to-agent communication, I think is super interesting. Voice question. You know, what would it take? for agents to be on the protocol. I definitely making sure that everybody fully understands that this is an agent and who is behind it. Like who is the person that’s responsible for this thing is super important. Like I wouldn’t want anything that you know, can sort of fake its way into seeming human, like everybody should know. And then if it’s good enough, then you know, if it provides value, may why not?

You know, people should also be able to turn it off and, you know, have nothing to do with it. I think so that’s kind of agents within the human context. Agent to agent, I think, is really interesting and unexplored. And I think that’s like a separate world of as we all spin up these, you know, pieces of software that do things for us and there’s lots of them in parallel cooperating, they need a way to cooperate and I would love for that to happen on an open protocol like atproto instead of yet another walled garden where, oh, you want to use this really cool AI agent? Oh, it’s only going to work, you know, on this proprietary thing.

So now you’re locked in again. So I think there’s an awesome opportunity there. Still very early. Very different from Bluesky, the network. Like this is like a separate, a separate world of sort of you know, agentic infrastructure. I think that’s interesting, certainly, for us to think about to the question of, you know, where’s Adi going? I really like having it as a separate entity where we can experiment. And.

Jim Ray: because.

Toni Schneider: you know Attie has thousands of users, Bluesky is millions. I mean it’s like a you know thousand x kind of difference. So it’s a lot easier with thousands of users to try things and see like what resonates. And then, you know, we’ll see we’ll see how we bring it to a broader audience as a standalone product. Maybe in the app as a extra feature if people want that, but it’s not, you know, it’s not going to take over the app, it’s not going to replace it.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: So that’s sort of where we’re at with that. And also I want that team to be able to explore and try new things, try, you know, wacky things that maybe work or don’t. Whereas in the app, we were much more measured. Again, it’s millions of people every day using this product. We’re not going to do anything to just all of a sudden completely change it around. But yeah, it’s and then the final thing I would say is I also personally resonate with you know the push against AI’s use of resources. I do think we’re overdoing it as an industry. I don’t think I think there’s lots of ways to use AI that don’t require these crazy data centers and all this crazy scaling that’s, you know I think out of hand and I think we’ll see all this settle down in a more reasonable way that technology can be can be deployed without causing all these societal problems.

So I do think that’s that needs to be reined in and our you know, we certainly want to be on the side of when we use AI, we want to use it in a sustainable way, like any other technology we use and not sort of feed into this frenzy we’re seeing right now of just, you know. I in my opinion just overbuilding, overscaling, overdoing it.

Jim Ray: I will close us off here with one question. So if you had an app in the atmosphere that you wanted to tell everybody watching and listening to go check out, what app would that be and what should they do when they get there?

Toni Schneider: Right now, a top of mind for me is atproto spaces. So that’s not like a mainstream thing yet for people to try, but I think, and we’ve already s seen like what a couple dozen spaces apps. You know, how what we’re gonna call this private data apps emerge. There’s Secret Sky. And then we have our own demo app, bulletin. my, I think.

Jim Ray: Right.

Toni Schneider: Super early, but just so much fun to like sign up and see it work and then also just immediately see the potential like oh my god we could do this with oh let’s try this let’s try this so I think that’s where, at least for me, right now the energy is just around playing with that and seeing, yeah, that what are people doing with it? Does it work? How quickly can we get you know what are the other pieces we need to add before we can bring it to more mainstream users? So that’s my that’s what I’m kind of checking out right now and I wish I had a little bit more time to play around with.

Jim Ray: Nice. And if you have not gone to bsky.network slash account where you can go sign up for the PDS, that will allow you to start experimenting with your own permissioned data slash at protospaces. We’ll all get aligned as to what we’re going to call this thing before we launch. Then go check that out now. Toni i can’t thank you enough for joining us today so i really appreciate it thank you so much and if anybody needs to get at you they’re toni.bsky.team is where you are. And you blog at toni.org. You’ve been there for many, many years. And you have an atmospheric blog there now, right?

Toni Schneider: A couple decades now, yeah. And I do, yes. Thank you for having me. I as you can tell, I love talking about all this. I think this is so much fun to work on. And while I don’t post a lot, I’m still a little bit, you know, shy and reserved about that. I do read everything. I’m on the network constantly. I’d do listen. I don’t always reply, but I try to. So I love feedback and I love to s community, I feel like we have super engaged people who are at the forefront of a lot of issues and very knowledgeable. And I love that we’re working on all of this together.

Jim Ray: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Toni. Appreciate it.

Toni Schneider: Thanks, Jim.