The Path of Honor

Alex Garnett: PHP Zero Day, what more do I have to say? We oh they missed my Billy Joel song. That’s terrible.

Jim Ray: We were gonna we were gonna license it. I think the fees were a little high. We’re still pre-revenue, so we will not be licensing any beloved songs about the apocalypse. Alex, I thought you were going to be joining us from your secret underground bunker awaiting the apocalypse. And yet here we are in our normal, normal streaming setup.

Alex Garnett: Trying to throw out most of my computers in the last 24 hours, but the trash pickup here is not that reliable and I have a lot of computer yeah. So it’s an uphill battle for me personally.

Jim Ray: Alex, it’s great to be back in the midst of the world crumbling around us. Thanks to everybody for joining us. If you haven’t had a chance to update your computers. At the very least, run a brew, brew upgrade, sudo apt, apt get update, upgrade, all the updates, and please just make sure that you’re Secure out here on the internet. I th I’ve been I’ve been on vacation for a minute and I come back and all this stuff and I didn’t we spent our entire team stand-up this morning just chatting about Everything’s going wrong with the world. Or at least with the computers.

Alex Garnett: Jim, I’m thinking of a number. Can you guess the number I’m thinking of?

Jim Ray: Is it.

Alex Garnett: It’s between one and ten.

Jim Ray: Is it possibly four? You get me with that one every time.

Alex Garnett: This is I love that we all we try to engage in a in an act of consensus building. We live in a society, as I’m constantly saying, both on and off stream. I believe it was Winston Churchill who said if we can’t show up and podcast in spite of all the computers breaking, what can we do?

Jim Ray: What can we do? Exactly. The only thing we have to fear is not being able to live stream on our semi-regular schedule. As I mentioned, I’ve been on vacation. So I’m I took this as an opportunity to kind of catch up on some things and I also picked up a bit of a I either have I was in South Korea, which is very near Siberia, much closer than many people think. And there’s a plague thing happening in Siberia. So I either have Siberian plague or just a run-of-the-mill respiratory thing happening. And so apologize for the raspiness of my voice. But there we go. But I did take this as an opportunity to catch up on some stuff.

And see where we’re going. Alex, last week you launched a new blog series about atproto spaces. Tell us what’s going on with that.

Alex Garnett: Oh, I’m really excited about this. This is something we were talking about internally a couple of weeks back when I was just wrapping up a bunch of travel to conferences to do the September speaking tour essentially. We have a lot of exciting spaces work coming out with open social groups, with spaces in and out of Bluesky the app. And one thing we’re doing is trying to foreground a lot of the developer community work that’s taking place, implementing spaces, implementing the new non-public broadcast data that we’re supporting in atproto now. And it turns out there’s already quite a lot of that that we can feature that we can actually show off end-to-end like publishing a spaces record from one app and viewing it in another.

So getting pumped about this, the second blog post in that series should be going out this afternoon, and we’re gonna keep on doing it until we land the final spaces spec. Which is on track. I think that’s only a few weeks or months away at this point, and we’re gonna keep tootin’ the hype horn till then.

Jim Ray: So that’s atproto spaces. And then we’ve got some exciting news coming out of FOSDEM. And so FOSDEM we’ve been pr participants in the past. You were at FOSDEM last year.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, we had a really nice turnout at FOSDEM last year. We shared a dev room with some of the folks from DASL and from Matrix and from ROOST last year, and we were all kind of put in this miscellaneous like open social category, which was great and it was really nice to get some collaboration going. I’m even more excited to share that this year we officially are going to have our own atproto dev Room at FOSDEM. And this is a really big deal. FOSDEM is a really good conference for groups and for communities to come together. It’s a free conference. The main stage, the main track is actually like not really the draw. The first time I went to FOSDEM, I was really surprised to find this is like a twenty-track conference, essentially.

And it’s a twenty-track conference where some groups like have their major governance meeting and their major FaceTime for that year. You all come together because it’s very accessible. If you’re already in Europe, it’s on a university campus in suburban Brussels, so everyone just kind of piles in for the weekend. And I think this is going to be just terrific. You know, I’m looking very forward to our big atproto conference at the end of April in Amsterdam. But FOSDEM is gonna be like a really, really significant, I think, checkpoint on the way to that big milestone. And I’m expecting a big turnout and a lot of opportunity to submit a talk. Typically like one dev room for a day can fit 12, 15 talks by itself.

So this is a really cool one and I’m hoping to see a lot of folks there.

Jim Ray: Oh man, that’s so great. And last year, I think the room was like decentralized protocols, which I think was that was that right? It was like mostly Activity Pub and but it but it would there wasn’t like a dedicated atproto one, right?

Alex Garnett: So there was a dedicated activity pub room. Oh and that was actually the way it worked out where there was like the one act Activity pub room because again, that is the main activity pub meeting for the whole community for that year. And then there was like an everything else room essentially. And we were in that everything else room along with ROOST and Matrix and IPFS. And that was great, but this is a really nice sign of growth for the atproto community. And I was really impressed by the camaraderie and the community aspects of that big activity pub room.

Jim Ray: Cool.

Alex Garnett: Because I went and sat in there for half of one day and I’m excited for us to be able to offer something similar.

Jim Ray: Great. That’s great. And I love to hear it. I myself was not planning on going to FOSDEM, but now that we’ve got our own room maybe it might be reason to head over to Brussels, which is a beautiful city.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, I’m actually feeling the same way. I was gonna sit it out this year because I know that I think both Paul and Bryan were hoping to head over, but this might be a good time for us all to make a big show of it. So TBD, but really exciting news.

Jim Ray: Cool, cool. Excellent. And you mentioned the atmosphere conf, which is happening just a few months later. at the end of April, as we discussed previously on the on the live stream. And the news from I’m gonna say AtmoCo this time is the CFP is up, and I’ll drop the link into the chat here. And so anybody, I you know, I imagine that folks have been watching that one anxiously, but if you have your an idea for a talk that you might want to present at this year’s Atmosphere conf, then go ahead and submit your talks. There’s no talk too small or too big, I think.

Alex Garnett: Ain’t no talking high enough. I don’t I don’t sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Jim Ray: No, it’s I’m I similarly to kind of the momentum with FOSDEM. I’m super excited for AtmosphereConf. Again, you know, we’ve been there’s a little bit of chatter happening with some of the organizers this past week. And so, you know, there’s gonna be continuing to use I think they’re just about to nail down the venue so we’ll announce that as soon as it’s ready and yeah just really excited and excited to see everybody and yeah, keep that keep that going. You know, you mentioned that the community from FOSDEM was great and I’m seeing here in the in the chat our very own PDS dad mentions that it’s coming up on a year for y’all being at Bluesky.

I think he’s referring to us, Alex.

Alex Garnett: I think my one year may have been yesterday.

Jim Ray: Yeah. And mine is on Halloween, the auspicious holiday. For very American reasons. I started on the last day of the month so that I could have healthcare continuity.

Alex Garnett: Yeah.

Jim Ray: It was I literally logged on, filled out some forms, went trick-or-treating, and then flew to Seattle the following Sunday. Yeah, it was a kind of a wild start there. Yeah. I just have to say though that this has been it’s been a wild year. And Simon Willison, pelican-on-a-bicycle renderer extraordinaire, has written about November of last year being this inflection point in the entire tech industry. It’s when Claude Code finally got good, right? And so starting a new job at the exact moment that that happened in the tech industry and like I think for you and I both this was you know a little bit of a pivot from what we had been doing previously. It has it has been a really wild year.

And but I just I have to say I and I feel like I’ve said it before and I will say it many more times, I hope, but this community continues to be amazing. Thank you all for being so welcoming and for being so gracious to Alex and myself. Time has this kind of like dilation effect where it’s like, I can’t believe it’s only been a year and it’s already been a year. But yeah, so happy year, Alex.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, you too, Jim. I’m very thankful for the time so far. And you’re absolutely right. Like I can think back to last October or November and be like, that was only a year ago? That’s unbelievable. And then I can think back to January and be like, what do you mean that was a whole year ago? Right. It really is very inconsistent in terms of just like the intellectual aspect of it, the community aspect of it, just all the opportunities you get to show up and try to make an impression and try to really represent the project as best you can and figure out what there is to add and I’m very grateful to everybody for everything they’ve done to make that as productive, as fun as it’s been over the last year.

And here’s to many more.

Jim Ray: Could couldn’t agree more, pal. So all right, let’s get to it. All right. So that’s enough wispy nostalgia. So happy proto. From the one and only Trezy is launched in beta. And this is a hosted HappyView. You know, the goal of HappyView, as best I can understand, is that Trezy helps to kind of like abstract out the app view stuff. So you want to build your own atproto app, but you don’t want to necessarily get into all of the details of building out your app view. So HappyView kind of helps. with sort of a framework-level abstraction. I’ve always thought of it as kind of like in the same way that like Django was a framework for building web applications.

HappyView always struck me as a framework for building proto apps, right? And so Happy Proto is a hosted HappyView platform so that you don’t even have to deal with all of the underlying hardware and figuring out where you’re gonna host all of this stuff.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. Backend as a service is still a really important model. You think about Heroku, you think about all these generations of front-end devs who were like, I have an idea. I do not want to think about a deploy as long as I live. And I’m really happy to see that audience served in the atproto community. You know, I’ve always been the opposite. It’s funny. I’m like, well, I don’t really have ideas or aesthetic judgment, but I’ll deploy your app for you, no problem. And like speaking as someone who’s much more on the other side of this, I really think that the most important thing that people who don’t mind deploys can do is aid and encourage and facilitate people who like to do that kind of novel front-end development.

So this is a critical part of the community. I always love just rattling off top of my head everyone who’s doing something that I think is exciting. in the space of app deployments. Like thinking about Firecracker VMs, all the things that have come up in the time since the Heroku heyday, I think this is a really key part of our ecosystem to build out. So super fun.

Jim Ray: And Trezy here is a slight correction. So the wait list is launched and then the beta invites will happen next week. Sunglasses emoji. And then Trezy also notes that Boris always calls it like super base for atproto, and I think that’s a pretty great analogy. All right. So Bluesky, our corporate overlords and employers, they make an app that we might be familiar with. They were at we were at TechCrunch Disrupt, our very own Toni and Rose. They were on stage together. and talking about the future of the app, about the atmosphere, about atproto, and a few things that they mentioned that I think will be interesting to this crew. So the Attie site builder beta launched.

If you didn’t get your email about that Let me know and we’ll make sure that you get into the Attie site Builder beta. The Attie site Builder is super fun. I know that you’ve built a couple of apps with the Attie site builder, right?

Alex Garnett: Yes, I did. I shipped enemies of the friends of the farmers market parking lot to demonstrate that we can adequately replace Facebook groups for extra local use cases.

Jim Ray: Kind of a whole team get-together about a month ago and we were kind of crash testing the site builder while we were there and we were all getting together in beautiful Mexico City and there was a competition amongst the team to see who could eat the most tacos. And I’m happy to say I was able to like totally vibe code a taco tracking app from my phone using the Attie site builder while we were sitting at dinner for the first of these the taco eating contest. And, you know, over the next day or two kind of refined it. The very first build was very much like, here’s your bootstrap interface and so but you know a couple of tweaks and ushed it up a little bit.

My I think my favorite feature was that when you logged your tacos you got a little Spanish lesson. And so there was some little Helpful flavor there, but.

Alex Garnett: You got like legally distinct Duolingo Al with the mustache being like, hello, I am Carlos.

Jim Ray: I showed it to my wife who is a former Spanish professor and she logs one and then she immediately notes she’s like that didn’t Gregorna. She’s like, oh come on.

Alex Garnett: But it’s great that other people used that too. I think being able to demo not just like a one-shot landing page, but like an actual usable social app really is a big synergy for us here. It’s when I think about okay, sure, I can vibe code a landing page. That’s okay. I can see people being initially excited about that, but it not really having legs. But the fact that you were able to make something that people then showed up and used all week, like that really does feel substantial and it also vindicates, I think, a lot of the way we talk about the protocol and these particular relationship that the protocol has to Attie. Like that does feel pretty cool end-to-end.

Jim Ray: Yep. And you can start to see how all of these things come together with spaces and with all of the fundamentals of the protocol and with things like Attie and the site building tools where maybe you create a group in the Bluesky app and or create a space rather. And you bring your folks in, and maybe you’re a wine tasting team or you’re a book club or you’re the friends of the enemies of the farmers market parking lot. And but and you know, you get together and you start to realize like, oh, we’ve actually got some more expansive needs than just kind of like group chat and then you either build an app or you have your agent kind of build it on there, and then you can build out these full experiences.

And I think one of the things that we want developers to do is build these kind of component pieces so that those can fit into there as well. And then the last step, and they and I know that Toni and Rose talked about this too at TechCrunch is that we want to add the monetization piece so that all of this becomes sustainable. And I mean we want to make that available not just to ourselves, of course, but to developers as well. It’s all kind of coming together.

Alex Garnett: It’s all coming together. Payment rails are really important and it’s something that you’re gonna see us talking a lot more about over the coming weeks. I’m really excited for Freemix.fm to launch. It sounds like that’s coming any day now. They’ve also got a really novel approach to payment rails. in their atproto app. And that’s something that we’ll be taking every chance we get to promote both on this podcast, through our accounts, and elsewhere through the autumn and winter.

Jim Ray: It’s such a cool app, and you’ve done such a good job of shepherding that one through. What I like about it is that it’s not like the typical atproto you know it’s not just like hey let’s rebuild an existing social app but they’ve really kind of thought through some new fundamental ways of interacting with each other and to kind of create like a little creator economy inside of this music creation app. And it’s a it’s like it’s just so cool.

Alex Garnett: It is really cool. I love just all the work that’s gone into the interface design. I think one of those things too, whenever you start talking about audio or video editing thing. It’s like, okay, it’s all well and good to have social features, but the interface really has to work and has to be as built out as the local NLE in some cases. Seeing the choices they’ve made to make it actually like a full end-to-end solution that’s fun to use and to derive samples from existing work, I’m just super impressed. So take a look at Freemix. Love Freemix. One of my favorite ecosystem apps lately.

Jim Ray: Yeah. And Trezy here notes that there’s a launch party tomorrow at the at Chicago meetup. Yeah. So that’ll be fun. All right. Space Cowboy. Now this one is cool. I saw this one just this morning. Space Cowboy built an atmospheric for you feed. So I think most folks are aware of the For You feed that Space Cowboy maintains famously on a gaming PC in their living room. And this it I think this got particularly interesting to people as the RAM crisis hit and they needed to upgrade the RAM. But so Space Cowboy has built a foryou.club/atmosphere, which basically takes the idea of the for you feed and kind of expands it across all of the different atmospheric apps that you might encounter.

So it looks at the fact that you liked a Bluesky post that was similar to a post that someone else liked and you both might be and that person was that person favorited a pckt.blog post. And so now that’s trickling up into your recommendation. I totally love it because it’s that’s just like the promise of the protocol right there, right? You know, it’s like the interactivity between all the different apps. So cool. And I just had a chance to kind of just barely play with it, but yeah, really, really slick.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, it’s nice to see Space Cowboy leading the way there. I’m not just speaking as somebody whose RAM is now worth $2,000. That’s a vested interest in it appropriating further. But I love to see more atmospheric apps take off. And this is something that we are going to have a lot to share on this subject in the coming weeks and months. I’ve seen some really constructive discourse around the Attie site builder launch and in the community in the week or two after that, talking about how people still wish that Bluesky was doing more to integrate and to feature the atmosphere. And what I wanna say is we hear you and we are really, really, really psyched that we have some super cool feature releases coming very soon that are going to help support a lot of atmospheric integrations in Bluesky.

I know I already teased on our last conversation that we’re finally getting our ducks in a row vis-a-vis OAuth in the app, but there’s also a lot more coming along those lines. very soon that I am just so excited about. And part of it is a matter of just making sure that our app team gets resourced to be able to ship these sort of atmospheric integrations. But it’s all coming up Millhouse right now.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: And so if you’re excited about Space Cowboy’s For You feed, stay tuned. You’re going to see a lot more ecosystem stuff in Bluesky, the app, very, very, very shortly. And it’s going to be very cool.

Jim Ray: And that’s one of the big focuses. We’ve talked about this a lot internally, and I think we’ve kind of projected this out. It’s also one of the things that Toni talked about at this TechCrunch event is the differentiator for us is all about the atmosphere. And so it’s something that we are uniquely good at. And it’s also something that None of the other social apps can do. They’ve decided that walling themselves in and walling all of their users in, which is very lucrative right now, has been the way to go. But it’s not possible for them to offer the kind of integration that that approach does because it’s completely antithetical to how they run their business.

And so we it’s a huge opportunity for us. It does mean that takes us we gotta go some kind of squirrely routes to get there, but I’m pretty convinced that we’ve chosen the right path. The path of honor.

Alex Garnett: We get there. The path of honor. Imagine. Okay. It’s 700 years ago the shogunate is complaining to one of his subservient. You can’t eat honor. What is this? I want a pheasant, not a sword.

Jim Ray: That’s a fair point. We’ll just have to turn that into some we’ll have to turn that honor into something monetizable too.

Alex Garnett: Absolutely. It strikes me that my shogunate voice in my head sounds a lot like George Costanza, which I’m not gonna explore right now. But I think that was potentially telling. Let’s see, another news. Speaking of actually adding AI stuff, really excited to see what is cooking up with did.bot right now. That’s a project I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks. This is basically did identities for agents. So being able to support attribution in the atmosphere when work is done by an agent. I think that’s one of those things right now that is still very all over the place, whether or not people like want to directly tie work done by one of their agents back to them based on attribution norms and get in a given community.

There is not a lot around standardization there just yet. And did.bot is a really cool project that takes the position that dids can be very useful for agentic identities. So their demo is just updated. If you go to did.bot and scroll to the bottom, you can click through to their live demo. And this is going in a really interesting place too.

Jim Ray: Yeah here’s a an interesting point on the on the chat. And this always this always comes up whenever we talk about particularly around monetization things, hoping Bluesky doesn’t Sherlock atmosphere money. And Joe Basser responds lol. And so I it’s I think this idea like the name itself, Sherlocking, I think is kind of telling that that’s even how we think about it because you know, Sherlocking had it goes back to this thing that happened in the Apple ecosystem 25 years ago where Apple bundled a feature into their operating system that obviated the needs. I forget which one was which. Was there was a was the app called Sherlock or was the thing that Apple bundled into their operating system called Sherlock?

Alex Garnett: I think it was like Spotlight search devoured Sherlock, right? Because Sherlock was very good like on device.

Jim Ray: This was pre-OS 10 even, I feel. And one thing that I think so this was when the Mac ecosystem was not very healthy, certainly not by today’s standards. And so I do think that a lot of the anxiety around the Sherlocking of things comes from the lack of direct, clear monetization. And so we need to do a better job. And we’re working, this is a big, a big priority for the team is working on showing how that monetization can happen. But you know, we’re pretty well committed to making sure that the stuff that we build out, people can build on it. I think the our general sense is that we want to be a strong default but also a strong partner to anybody who wants to build their own products.

And so that’s pretty much how we’ve been rolling so far. The protocol enforces a fair bit of that, which is nice. You know, it’s not like we could shut down third-party clients, for example. And so I think we’re gonna continue to make that part of our ethos. And so yeah, there’s still work to be done there for sure.

Alex Garnett: There is. And I think to your point also, this is why you have to focus at some point on growing the pie. And not just trying to partition it further, right? And that’s one of those things where it’s easy to hear someone say that and being like, okay, Mr. Abundance, sure, sure, sure. You’re gonna leave some scraps for everybody else. But the reality is you can’t litigate, you know, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an opportunity. You really do need to help make those opportunities big enough. I’m really proud of our orientation towards autonomy in this ecosystem, like a lot of our taglines on the doc sites that we’ve launched this year, where it’s like Less asking, more building.

It’s like, here’s lexicon, you can go and run with it. Like you can be your own authority. There’s a reason that there’s a lot of that sort of Web3 juice in the guts of atproto. It’s because we do believe a lot in being able to be your own authority. We just really need to do as much as we can. to move and grow the ecosystem forward at the same time as we’re doing that. And so I totally agree with you. I think Sherlocking slash developing and crippling opium addiction that’s what Sherlocking is to me. But Sherlocking doesn’t like th there’s a reason that that’s be something that I think we get stuck litigating when there isn’t just like the sense that the ecosystem is growing.

Right. As long as we have stasis, it’s like, sure, you’re gonna be concerned about like there’s not as much going around right now. But we have to get beyond stasis anyway.

Jim Ray: Yep.

Alex Garnett: And then, you know, one way or another that concern just starts to minimize, you know, in the eyes of the people trying to do more with it.

Jim Ray: Yeah. And amazing Arthur Conan Doyle shout out there. No, such a such a such a really great point. And I think maybe we’ll kind of close up here with you dropped a link in here about we’re actually seeing an uptick in Bluesky traffic, which goes a goes against a little bit of the discourse that has been it’s this feels like perennial discourse on a on a what six to twelve week cycle I folks are still using the app, which is nice.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, I don’t want people to go around thinking that like traffic is perpetually declining. If we have hard numbers to the contrary, I’m gonna share them because I think it’s good for people to know that, you know, like this is not just like an asymptote that we are pushing towards. It’s not like we’re plateauing our user growth. We have a lot of work that we’re doing on partnerships and different parts of this org to make sure that we’re just helping to, again. grow the pie in the first place. And the numbers this fall are looking pretty good in that regard. And so if you need a dose of optimism, we’re happy to provide it and back it up with numbers.

Jim Ray: And I’ll just say I had to block my first spammer in the chat since we’ve been doing this. And I if there is a sure sign of success, I can’t imagine what it is. Somebody with female name number one was asking if we’d like to hang out and chat. And so that’s you know we got we got our first spammer, so I think that that means we’ve made it. I’m still not feeling 100% caught up, but I am gonna go back and make sure. So if there’s anything I missed, make sure to get at me and I’m gonna go try to recover from whatever this is, but Alex, as always, it’s been a pleasure. And everyone on the stream, thank you again, of course.

We’ve got some we’ve got some fun episodes of the podcast coming up as well. So I’ve got a couple of those to record. And so yeah, look for those too.

Alex Garnett: Sounds good. Great having you back, Jim. Be well and talk soon.

Jim Ray: All right, bye.