Blacksky As a Service

Jim Ray: Oh, I think we’re live. Okay.

Alex Garnett: All right.

Jim Ray: Fantastic. And I’m going to hit the button over on my profile that I’m going live. Oh look, it did it for me. Oh, that is the magic of integration. I always forget what gets magically integrated and what doesn’t. You know what I forgot to do is I forgot to turn Rishi off before we hit we hit go. So, you know, let’s just go with it here. We have an amazing special guest today. We have Rishi from Blacksky. And I’m gonna let you introduce yourself here in just a sec. But as we often do, Alex and I are gonna kind of tour around the atmosphere a little bit. and just see what’s been going on. And I’m seeing the chat’s coming in here.

So it looks like we’re streaming LFG from Patrick. And yeah, everybody’s here. So let’s get into it. So Alex, you’ve been working hard on improving our OAuth docs.

Alex Garnett: Oh, that was last week, Jim. I’ve already forgotten all about it. Like we not doing office hours since we did this? We didn’t do an office hour.

Jim Ray: No, we haven’t. Yeah, our last.

Alex Garnett: sieve. Yeah no, this was a nice thing to get to. This was there was some discourse, which I love, as you know. We’re all big discourse heads here at Bluesky. And we updated our docs, relaunched our docs back in February, and of the things that I rewrote in time for that launch, actually auth was not like a recent rewrite, because we’d been incrementally adding a bunch of like auth tips and tricks. in like December, January prior to the relaunch. And a lot of our docs prior to February were kinda written in this sort of like tips and tricks out of band way, which was nice because it’s a way to get, you know, information into the community still, it gets picked up by LLMs, whatever, but it’s not very legible.

When you try to tackle it as a first timer and try to understand a problem space. And so auth hadn’t gotten the full rewrite treatment up until February, it really deserved it. And I think people were really helpful in pointing out to me. They were like, hey, you know, Auth really deserves this full rewrite treatment. And so Finally had some time early last week after getting back from PTO to do a pretty big overhaul of the auth docs. I think they’re a lot more legible now. I really appreciated everyone pushing me to do that. I think we actually have like a nice top level introduction to atproto OAuth now. I still think, you know, OAuth is not anyone’s most fun thing to implement.

It’s one of those things where people do it because they have to, not because they want to, but I think we’ve taken a lot of the pain. points out of the eat your vegetables part of the analogy.

Jim Ray: Excellent.

Alex Garnett: Yeah.

Jim Ray: No, I couldn’t agree more. And I think if there’s one thing that I want folks to kind of take away from the from the new docs and just kind of like from the approach generally, it is like don’t use transition generic anymore. And we have we have some permission sets. You can create your own permission sets. So for the folks that are developing their own, please go build your own permission sets that you can use and that other folks can use. But do please stop using Transition generic. If you’re Clauding, if you’re Clauding, if you’re coding with Claude, you know, direct Claude away from transition generic as well. And we’ve got some more tools that are going to be coming down the pipe that will help with this as well.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, and I mean that’s been that’s been sticky, right? Like it’s actually interesting for me to note how challenging it is to move away from recommendations that we maybe don’t want to promote anymore, just because of the way you know, we used to have SEO, and we understood how that worked, and you wanted to get some like fresher information in front of people, some fresher patterns, you’re like, okay, SEO’s working. That’s doing my job. That’s amazing. Now we have LLM optimizations that like you have a lot less transparency into. And so if you notice, like, hey, we’re trying to push our new Lex SDK, we’re trying to push our new auth scopes and the patterns that the LLM has scraped are still using transition generic in the old SDK.

That’s not super surprising. It’s also not super problematic. It’s one of those things I think people start out with and they’re like, this is fine, right? And all I can do is try to be more proactive and be like, here’s the new example. Here’s the new example. Right. And like, cause you don’t you don’t there neither one is like being aggressively deprecated. We’re not taking out support for these things anytime soon. It’s not on a roadmap to say we can’t do transition generic anymore. the old SDK will continue to work. It’s one of those things where all you can do is seed the ecosystem with more up-to-date examples and then figure out how to close that loop with LLM examples.

Jim Ray: Exactly. Exactly. And all right. So I think that’s it for OAuth. As you mentioned, nobody’s favorite part of developing and the way you know and the way that we just like kind of everything that we have to do OAuth is just a little bit different than you would with like a centralized service. So thanks everybody for sticking with us on this. You know what I’m just gonna go ahead and bring Rishi into this because I don’t want him to sit there. This was this was my bad. I should have you know, made the introduction a little bit better. So Rishi, while we’re talking through this, will you just introduce yourself real quick? So we’ve got Rishi from Blacksky Algorithms, lead developer.

We’re gonna be talking about the project that he’s been working on here a little bit later. But can you just kind of introduce yourself to the stream here?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah absolutely. Hey y’all, my name is Rishi. As Jim mentioned, I’m the lead developer of Acorn. I’ve been on the Blacksky team now for coming up on a year, Rudy brought me on because I was working with Rudy and one of our other team members, Marissa, on a separate project called Paper Tree. Which I can talk about in a little bit, but excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jim Ray: Rishi, do you have any thoughts on OAuth while since we’re talking about it?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Appreciate the new docs. I’ve been going through them myself. Transition generic. Yeah, I need to I need to make some changes on my and some of the code bases that I’ve worked on too. So adding that to the to-do list.

Jim Ray: And to be clear, transition generic, that’s very much an us thing. We thought that just calling a transition would be obvious, not always necessarily an obvious thing. So, you know. Deprecations and new features. People get excited about new features. People are always less excited about deprecations. And this feels like something that’s kind of in between. We’re obviously not necessarily closing a door entirely, but you know, we do kind of want to move people along to it really comes down to just like making sure that your tokens are more secure. Like you know, don’t give people tokens that have keys to you know the entire repo is really what it means to move away from transition generic there.

So we’ve had a couple of like pretty solid guest posts on the blog. I’ve been really happy to see those. Alex, you stewarded one from everybody’s favorite feed creator, Space Cowboy. I did.

Alex Garnett: I was so excited about this. If I can just talk about it for a second. This made me really enthusiastic. So Space Cowboy maintains the 4U feed. The 4U feed is very popular. Many people say it’s better than our feeds. And we are spending so much effort on overhauling our Discover feed right now. I feel like that’s a tacit endorsement of the fact that for you is actually really, really, really good. And we are just so happy to have creators like Space Cowboy in the ecosystem. I get nervous, Jim, as you know, from your current handle and your sort of adventure at the conference. I get nervous about like the amount of home lab energy in this ecosystem because you know when you put something on your own hardware your own hardware is subject to acts of God.

It’s subject to you deciding that you’re having a bad hobby day and you’re gonna rip hard drives out of your computer for no reason. It’s not gonna boot for your meeting in the afternoon. I’ve never done that personally. I’ve done it constantly throughout my entire life. But again, like you don’t want to be in that position, right? There’s a reason the industry kind of standardized on VPS solutions and all that. And so when I hear about people running like kind of load-bearing infrastructure, and I would include microcosm in this, on their own local hardware, I’m like, oh God, oh God, is that problematic for us? And time and time again, what I’ve found is actually that people in our ecosystem are actually really thoughtful about how and why they use that local infrastructure.

Editing this post from Space Cowboy, I was really intrigued to find that his Tailscale setup combined with the VPS used in the cloud to cache and handle some connections. That’s really clever. Like that’s a great way to say I have a free unlimited compute resource in my house that’s paid up front that has a lot of spare CPU cycles that we can use to do the difficult part of the fee generation. And I’m still going to have something running in the cloud to guarantee that uptime that can help sync off some connections to the part that runs locally and does the heavy lifting. That is a very thoughtful, like half local, half remote architecture that is sustainable, that works to serve everybody who’s ever wanted to use for you on Bluesky.

Like I just think this is super neat and thoughtful. I saw Simon Willison, the Django and AI fella, picked it up on his own blog last night. So that’s really cool and I do just want to talk more and more about all these cool feed generator and like local first patterns going forward.

Jim Ray: Completely agree. And I do feel like Tailscale is probably load-bearing infrastructure, not quite to the same degree that microcosm might be, but Tailscale definitely, you know, pulls together a lot of this infrastructure and you know things like or Cloudflare tunnels is probably another one that that folks are using a lot. Rishi, I know that you know part of the origin story of Blacksky is like it really just started as like a custom feed. and has kind of grown into this amazing community infrastructure. Any lessons for folks that are interested in kind of running or maintaining their own feed that y’all have come across?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I mean I think if you look through rsky-feedgen, there are a bunch of like little clever hacks that Rudy has done. He mentioned one of these on the Skyline a couple a couple days ago where he personally didn’t want to see much Pokemon content. And so he added Pokemon to one of the mute like words in the in the like feed generator service, which I mean when you run a feed, I guess you want to be able to look at the feed and enjoy it yourself. So maybe that’s one of the one of the tips. But more specifically, there were also interaction patterns that were specific to Blacksky that were encoded in the trending feed.

And a lot of the other parts of the network Rudy noticed that like if a post received very little interaction but a lot of quotes, that usually meant that the person was getting dunked on. For the Blacksky specific feed, it meant that somebody had asked a question or started a trend and a lot of people were responding to it. So you do want to look at the like interaction feeds specific to your patterns to be able to generate a more interactive feed. I think the defaults may help you get started, but beyond that, like it is a lot of understanding how people want to interact in your specific niche.

Jim Ray: Very cool. No, that that makes a ton of sense. And yeah, like Alex was saying earlier, you know, it’s kind of a golden time for being able to, whether or not you’re running this on your gaming PC in your living room or you know, like just starting to figure out how these things work and then taking them and turning them into more infrastructure. A couple of other news items. I’ll just run through this quickly and then we’ll kind of get to the heart of it here. So beloved Android only Bluesky client Heron, like the bird, has an iOS beta. This is something I’m just like personally very interested in and excited about because I’m an iOS user and I think Heron is a beautiful client.

And so now I don’t have to switch to Android. So everybody go check out the Heron iOS beta. Our very own Bailey Townsend is going to be doing one of these live streams tomorrow. They’re going to be walking through building an app. So go hang with PDS Dad. We’ll just walk through building an app. I will unfortunately be traveling, so won’t be able to tune into that one myself, but it should be a good one. And then I know that there are folks tuning in now and other places. There was a lot of energy coming out of the conference around the at science and lots of you know, we I think we kind of weigh a little bit more heavily on the we’ve got more than our fair share of scientists and astrophysicists and astronomers and people that are just kind of generally interested in science.

So there have been some pretty interesting conversations. You know, particularly around like lexicon discussions, some discussions about how like what would a science-based standard sites look like and how might that be different from kind of like generic publishers and things like that. So you know, go check those things out. Alex, anything else that you’ve noticed?

Alex Garnett: Let’s see. I am Pumped about Heron. Also as an iOS user myself, I like how they featured all these cool heron photos in their like design studies. That’s a very cute, elegant thing to do. I like how much fun people have with this stuff. I’m sure that like those heron pictures were already on the network and they’re just kind of indexing them in order to seed some data for the app. Like that’s cool. Bootstrap with the existing posts. We’d love to say it. Use that social graph. Get those heron posts up front and center, right? It’s good stuff.

Jim Ray: Exactly. Exactly. And now I want to switch gears and bring Rishi on a little bit more. and kind of talk about you know being a Blacksky but also the work that you’ve been doing. So I kind of you we were talking earlier and you were mentioning that the acorn post was meant to just be kind of like not even a trailer but a teaser for the work that y’all have been doing. I think we saw some of this leading into the Atmosphere Conference. And even the name Acorn came up a couple of times. Love the callback and the reference. But so this teaser is that you know it’s not just that Acorn is meant to be a community management tool.

for Blacksky to use, but I’ve been thinking of this as like Blacksky as a service. And so Rishi, kind of take it away and tell us a little bit about what Acorn is, what you’ve been working on, and help us, you know, folks seem really, really excited about it. So like would love to know more.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, absolutely. So Acorn is primarily a tool for community organizers and creators who want to create a community around them. Blacksky started off with a couple feeds, as you mentioned earlier, and then it’s just sort of grew from there. We added a lot of different technical pieces. Whether that was moderation, like a mute list or a full ozone service, whether that was a relay, a PDS, a custom client, etc. And none of that was easy infrastructure and none of it was Continues to be easy to maintain. And so Acorn currently is basically managed infrastructure for atproto. So that you or people who are unfamiliar with AT Protocol can create a community without having to worry about managing just the entire atproto stack for yourself.

We want it to be very, very friendly to people who have no idea what AT Protocol is. We shouldn’t need to know what a PDS is or an ozone labeler service is or a lexicon is to be able to get started we want this to be something that expands the reach of the atmosphere and allows us to reach communities who might not know or care necessarily about decentralization, but still know that they want a better alternative to big tech platform. For us, it came out of just building services for what we needed. A big part of the way that Blacksky operates is through moderation or caring deeply about moderation. And we had a previous project, Safe Skies, that was basically tailored around can we moderate our feeds better?

Can we remove posts that we know don’t belong? Can we make sure that people are banned from the feeds if they don’t belong or have been harassing our users on the feeds, etc. And as I began to build out some of the features within SafeSkies, it becomes very clear that moderation touches absolutely everything in the stack. You need to be able to ban people from feeds. ban them from the PDS, take them down from the app view. It is kind of the core of a lot of the infrastructure that we have. And so basically all of these different pieces started to get touched. by the product that I was building. And separately, one of the team members, Clinton, was creating a lot of different services for us to use internally.

Whether that was tracking bots, making sure that repo signups were, you know, like on the up and up and all of them were authenticated by checking whether somebody was a member of like the Blacksky team to be able to log in. So he designed the authentication in a way that it made sure that you had the Blacksky team handle. And what we realized or what I realized is that it would just be great for all of those relationships to live in one place as opposed to being codified in multiple different services. And so when you take the moderation piece that touches basically everything and the fact that we have all of these social relationships that are right now spread apart but belong together, that’s sort of how the idea of Acorn came around where Every time you create a new piece of infrastructure, you’re not creating necessarily new relationships.

It’s the same people who are going to be using your feeds or your PDS, although the exact numbers might look different. So we do want one place where all of those community rate relationships live. And that’s what Acorn aims to provide.

Jim Ray: Amazing. All that sounds so good. You know, one thing that Rudy talks about a lot, and I love this framing, is he says community is our moat. And it strikes me that kind of what y’all are doing is saying like everyone’s community is our potential product now. And is that kind of how y’all are thinking about this? Is it you know, there’s maybe another way of thinking about it is like it’s in some ways it’s kind of the classic you know tech pivot or not even pivot, but just kind of a tech play to say like, you know, these are our strengths. These are the things that we are actually good at and let’s kind of lean into this.

I think about you know this kind of apocryphal story about how AWS came about, where like Amazon was building all of these things out, and then the you know memo comes down from Jeff Bezos, and it’s like everybody has to build their stuff on an API now. Like if you’re building a s a service for your own team to use, it needs to have an API that everybody in the company can use. And it seems like that’s kind of the direction y’all are going as well.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, sort of the idea behind building Acorn is we manage all of this infrastructure ourselves. Is there a way to make it so that all of the work that we put in managing our own infrastructure also benefits the community writ large. So we are migrating over our moderation is already fully within Acorn. We’re migrating over our feeds to Acorn, our PDS management to Acorn, et cetera. So anytime there’s any maintenance work or also any updates that we push to our clients that we push to our PDS. Any community on Acorn will naturally benefit from that. And so building community, but also having a force multiplier so that any of the work that we do for ourselves and the subscriber fees that people pay, all of that benefits even more people who might not be part of our community but have vested interest in building communities in this like decentralized ecosystem.

Jim Ray: Yeah. And so, you know, I know there’s an a few other community projects, and is this something that y’all are working on primarily as like a Blacksky thing and the idea that there’s this kind of green space that other communities can work with y’all on launching and going out there. How are you how are y’all thinking about either engaging with some of the existing ones or bringing new folks in?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I mean a lot of the people that we’re talking to right now in terms of users of Acorn are both people who have a small community on atproto and don’t have necessarily the tools to be able to scale. But we’re also talking to a lot of people who don’t know what atproto is at all. And that’s where a lot of the design philosophy of Acorn comes in where on the landing page, for example, I tried to make it a point to not mention the PDS or mention, you know, like a relay or like a labeler. I think when we’re on calls with people who are very interested in the mission of Blacksky but don’t know what atproto is, they are often like not they’re champions of what we’re doing, but they’re not necessarily champions of the technology itself.

And that’s what we realized too, where the thing that’s the most important is what’s visible to the end user. And so we want to make it so that anybody can spin up a community if they already have, you know, like a presence on other social media platforms without needing to understand what atproto or Acorn is under the hood with all the decentralization infrastructure in place. If they get interested, there’s always the option to learn more, but it’s not required to start.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: That’s a very strong through line, I think, right? It’s like we know people want this thing and we know people don’t want to have to understand all the guts of it in the way that we get excited about. And so being able to find inroads into the social media modes people already intuitively understand and they do want, and then be able to benefit from that and actually think about it in terms of open social is sort of that’s the whole job, right? As far as I’m concerned. So it’s super cool to hear.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I mean the end goal is that we want creating a community to be as simple as just starting a subreddit. And I think when it gets to that point is when we really know that open social is at a place where we don’t need to worry about understanding like we don’t need to worry about pushing the understanding of decentralization. We are just at total feature parity with the existing centralized platforms. And that’s a very good place for us to be.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. Makes sense. And we.

Jim Ray: that that is such a fundamental tension to the work that Alex and I do. And really, you know, everybody, you know, certainly a Bluesky, but I think anybody who’s built in anything on the protocol is you know, it’s I think I remind myself all the time is that like nobody wakes up and says I have to join a decentralized social network. But they oftentimes do wake up and say like, hey, this place where I have built my community, I have built relationships I the place that I go to look at pictures of sheepdogs or the place where I have my livelihood is all of a sudden a place that doesn’t align with my values. And I think that’s that that tension that we have just been living with for what feels like a decade now.

And so you know, while people don’t necessarily say, okay, I’m gonna go start I need I’m gonna go restart everything on a decentralized social network, I think that they do think that like, okay, let me find something that’s maybe a little bit more closely aligned with my values. And so it’s it sounds like with Acorn you’re kind of giving folks the ability to figure out how to draw those edges. So you know, from kind of a product perspective, when you’re thinking about onboarding a new community or when you’re talking to communities, like what are what are maybe some of the features that you might highlight, or what are some of the things that you would want folks to know about what Acorn provides that you either don’t get by default or things that you would have to spin up yourself.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, absolutely. One of the communities that we were talking to has a huge following on like Instagram. And they have created this app that very widely beloved and like a lot of people use at the same time, it’s very hard for people to just in interact in the comments of the Instagram page and they don’t want to do a lot of the work to spin up an entire social media platform. Like they understand that that’s a very difficult thing to do. And so I think what we try to sell a lot is just the promise of social the social web and social trust. Even in the landing page, I think the catchphrase of own your identity means a lot to developers or to people who know exactly what owning your identity is.

When I’ve tried to explain it to my friends, they’re like, well, we have our username and password. Like, what else do you really need? Like, I own my identity. And so for me, the real benefit of owning your identity is being able to clearly encode who is part of your community, who you can trust. who you decide has reputation and standing and also on the other side easily being able to spot bots and trolls and people who don’t belong. And so especially as existing social media sites get like destroyed by bots. I think creating these small spaces where you can trust the people who are in that space with you while still having a view into a larger network is very valuable.

So that that trust is, I think, part of the big selling point, the ability to create that trust. And then the moderation features just really make that apparent. where it’s very rare for you to be able to set your own moderation and be confident that it’s going to be enforced in the way that you want to and the Blacksky team, like JD and Dr. K specifically, have a ton of experience with setting up this kind of moderation infrastructure. making sure that communities are able to take care of themselves. And so it’s a combination of like the technical and the social that I think really makes this a you know like appealing product. And.

Jim Ray: Alex, I know that you have done a little bit of work with some folks over on like the ozone side of things. And so you might have some slightly better informed questions here, but you know, one thing that’s kind of interesting is a community almost needs to be of a certain size and scale before some of these like large-scale moderation tools really start to make sense. And you know, Rishi, how are y’all thinking about that in terms of like scaling down something, you know, like we’ve got moderation tools built to handle the load of 40 million Bluesky users, right? You know, a smaller community doesn’t necessarily need that same level of tooling, both either in terms of like the infrastructure required or the expense or you know even just like the interface of it.

And so kind of like how do y’all think about this notion of like scaling down to communities of various different sizes.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah. That’s actually pretty core to the way that we’ve thought about the product, which is you should only really start with what you need. We don’t want you to have to create like a huge list of moderation policies for your community if you’re not even sure whether anybody’s using your feeds right now. Like you should just be presented with the most important infrastructure and technical affordances. at any given point and not really necessarily anything more than that unless you go looking for it. And so we want to make sure that we have all of the functionality that Blacksky has within Acorn capable. But at the same time, you should need to grow into it. You don’t start with like the full service of like PDS community client.

moderation with like labeler infrastructure, you know, like badges, like everything else. Like we do want to be very intentional with the entry points that communities have into the service because the hope is that this is not a technical dashboard. We want this to feel the same way that being in community makes you feel, which is just that you should be reminded that this is a tool for and with people. And so yeah, we try to like in the dashboard, for example, foreground less the technical elements and more just the elements that are immediately applicable to you. Whether it’s like you have this many moderation reports, you have this many new users who joined, you have this many views on your feed, like all information that we think community organizers need to know where next to take their community.

Jim Ray: I think when the Acorn Moderation tool launched, I saw one of the screenshots I saw floating around was this kind of like speed bump or maybe it’s the onboarding or whatever it is that just says like, do you have water? Do you have a snack? You know, make sure you get up and take a run. And I just so love that approach to thinking about the person on the other end that is using this software. And it’s, you know, like you were saying, it’s not just like a cold dashboard that’s just show me all of the stats, but this is work that’s actually being done. And it’s grueling work and hard work. And you know, no matter the size of your community, there’s going to be a just a lot of real work that goes into the maintenance of it all.

And so just thinking about how those people, even just basic stuff like taking care of themselves. I really, really, really love that.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, moditors are kind of the unsung heroes of the internet where a lot of the a lot of the stuff that you see on the Blacksky feed is possible because there are moditors on our team who are aggressively filtering out. all of the content that shouldn’t be there. A lot of that interface design sort of came about because I was on call with JD, our trust and safety lead, and I would see like the moderation that they were doing. And it was very clear that like the tools that we have to support moderators are also the tools that affect how like the moderation work is or isn’t sustainable. And so it was a combination of me working with JD and also just like reading some research about how when you’re doing moderation work it’s very easy to get caught in a flow state where you’re basically going through report after report after report and you’re not really consciously processing what you’re seeing.

For a lot of other things, that’s great. Like if you get into a flow state while coding, fantastic.

Jim Ray: Totally.

Rishi Balakrishnan: But when you’re doing moderation work, the work and the reports that you’re seeing are psychologically damaging to the point where you want like a little bit of distance. You don’t want to be in that flow state. And so part of the way that we designed it is check in very intentionally with yourself beforehand. Have a designated endpoint so that you’re not just moderating for hours on end. And we also want you to be able to see the progress that you’re making within any specific session so that there is like very clearly like light at the end of the tunnel for any given session, you know.

Jim Ray: That’s great. Alex, did you have anything else because I was I was gonna go to we’re getting some good questions here in the chat, but.

Alex Garnett: yeah. All I was gonna say is, you know, it’s really helpful to hear about this because we think a lot about like how the different moderation tools that exist in the ecosystem really fit vastly different scales and different scopes, right? Whether they’re made for communities, whether they’re made for Bluesky scale, whether they’re made for something smaller than that. It’s something that I wind up thinking about from a couple points of view all the time. You know, one is from the documentation point of view. I bring this up like in docs, you really want to avoid kind of talking about things by omission, because people can kind of clue in there. It’s like that’s where the golden path doesn’t really exist for everyone just yet.

Like in some parts of the industry, it’s like the reason that’s not filled in is because that’s the revenue model and we know about that and you gotta kinda pay somebody for hosting. That’s not how it works here, of course, but you fall into a similar trap, right? Where it’s like, hey, we can’t put forward like a really clear solution for this because we know there isn’t one that fits all sizes. Like Ozone and Osprey, which what we use at Bluesky, do not scale to other teams. And whenever we’re talking about doing a new integration just into the app, for example. Like if we’re doing like a new live now integration, right, for example with Streamplace, or like we’ve done in the past with Germ.

One of the things I know Jay worries the most about is like, has this other app view thought about moderation? What are they doing for moderation? And knowing that these are often, you know, like one, two, three person teams were like that is a huge burden for them to take on, right? And like they are not going to want to be shipping Ozone and Osprey out of the gate. And so figuring out just how to put more solutions in front of people so they understand what’s available in the ecosystem of moderation, I think, is so important from a DevX, from a comms, from a sustainability point of view. So I’m really happy to see it.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, and I think there are a bunch of interesting possibilities that you get when you have community scale and community-centered moderation too, where for example, for our moderators, they do want to be able to see, does this person have standing within the community? Like are they on our feeds? Are they on our PDS? Are they like a recognized member of the community? And I think having all of our services bundled into one package makes it so that that social graph can be visible at the time of doing moderation work. So that moderators can tailor the actions that they’re taking to the people in the community, oftentimes who they recognize or they know of. And so agreed in that like having community scale or community-centered moderation is both a different challenge and has different opportunities compared to like doing moderation for 40-50 million people.

Alex Garnett: Yeah.

Jim Ray: I’ve got a couple of questions from the chat here. And I’m going to try to combine two in a in a bit of a deft movement here. And so there’s a there’s a question about what Acorn thinks of as community. And then I got a little nudge of pushback from Sharpie. So thanks so much, Sharpie, about community as a product is a strange framing. That was me who said that. Not you. But like I think those two things do point to an axis that Acorn kind of rotates around, which is like community is obviously who you are targeting this at. And you are also obviously building this as a product. And those things come into tension in some very real ways.

And so I’m curious how y’all are thinking about this, both in terms of like the kind of communities that you think would be interested in this. It sounds like you’ve talked to some folks already, but then also how you’re thinking about this in terms of a product and you know, how do you I presume this is like, you know, probably various paid features or tiers. And so, you know, what are some of the things that y’all are thinking about? in terms of how to make this available but also sustainable, which is like big ecosystem question right now.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah. I think the thing that sort of guides the way that I think about Acorn is like it isn’t the technology that creates the community, it’s people who create communities, and technology either makes that easier or it makes it harder. We’ve historically had technologies that make it much harder. The goal with Acorn is to make that process easier by giving people what they need to connect with people the way that they want to. And in that process, there definitely are product features that we think are going to be we are going to charge for. We are still working out a lot of the ways to make this sustainable, both for us as well as for the people who are interested.

And so we have an official blog coming out with the product. announcement next week and we have a streamplace live demo the week after that where we can get into a lot of the details of like what the pricing structure is going to look like but yes, there definitely is that sort of tension. And I think having Blacksky, the community itself, as the blueprint, lets us build in a way that resolves that tension a little bit easier. We build tools that we know that we need. And in that process, we can be fairly confident that other communities will also use those tools.

Jim Ray: Yeah that that makes a ton of sense. And kind of back to the community side, you know, so like inevitably there are going to be communities that come along that want to use some of these tools that might not align with Blacksky’s goals or Blacksky’s even values, a Pokemon community in order to be a little bit fun with it. How do y’all think about, you know, is that the kind of thing that you feel like you can just kind of right into the terms of service or are you is the idea to be a little bit more selective about the kinds of folks that you work with? This is a question that often comes up in open source as well, you know, like I think a few years ago people started to realize that a lot of open source projects that they were working on, that they were doing in their free time, they weren’t getting paid for, were all of a sudden being used.

in ways that they personally didn’t agree with. So, you know, that’s another one of those tensions. I imagine this kind of comes up in lots of different avenues that that y’all encounter all the time.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I mean we’re lucky in that right now the people who are approaching us to build with or on Acorn are all people who we believe are creating communities that are incredibly valuable. The way that we resolve that, or the way that I sort of think about it is I do think that Blacksky Moderation is sort of a default for any community that builds on Acorn. And so if Blacksky moderation is antithetical to the way that these communities are operating, then maybe they aren’t the best fit for us. But at the same time, we do want to be cognizant of the fact that we are also just a service provider. But definitely attention that we also work on or work with.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. I think also thinking about open source in this context, it reminds me of something that Juliet from ROOST always is careful to point out when this comes up, which is that like open tools for moderation are fairly novel. Like that’s not something that existed in this industry even ten years ago, back at like the peak of microblogging enthusiasm. Like that was one of those things everyone still solved internally, right? And maybe they would have like a trust and safety discussion where they would sort of share best practices, but even those weren’t really focused on tooling for the most part. Like the idea of having reusable open source moderation tools that can scale across platforms and across modalities and across communities that’s pretty brand new.

Like we’re actually doing like kind of cutting edge work here, which is a nice thing to remind ourselves.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that’s really fun is that all of this work is really novel. I was on a call with Dr. K, our trust and like our community safety and support steward. And the thing that she said to me is that Blacksky’s tool for moderation is the first of its kind. There’s never been a moderation tool that moderates against misogynoir, which is harassment targeting specifically black women. And I think that is something that made me or just reinforced how important it is the work that these sorts of community-specific or community-centered moderation tools are. Because you don’t get that kind of granularity with closed platforms who are moderating at the scale of millions or billions of users.

Jim Ray: Yeah. It’s such a good point. And it’s, you know, also the kind of thing that I mean it feels like there’s a very good reason why we haven’t seen those kinds of tools exist because the kinds of platforms that have been building them have, you know that’s just not been a consideration. It’s not been something that has been hugely important in the centralized platforms that we’ve all been kind of using for a long time. So yeah, I think the novelness is actually really, really fantastic. So love to see what y’all are doing, what folks like ROOST doing as well, because it’s that’s pretty good stuff. A couple more questions from the chat here. We’ve got one from Aaron Cassane who is asking will people in Acorn communities be able to choose whether their posts are community only or public firehose after Blacksky-only posts roll down?

Is this a good moment for that?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, that’s a great question. The way that we want to build Blacksky-only posts is so that it is feed agnostic. What that means is we are building it so that feeds that you create through Acorn will also be able to support privacy. You won’t have the content that your members post be available on the public firehose. Instead, it’s going to be hydrated by the Blacksky app view. All of that to say, yes, we will be able to support private feeds through Acorn and a lot of the work that we’re doing for Blacksky only posts. is automatically applicable for other communities as well. Sort of getting back to the we build it for ourselves and that automatically builds it for other communities.

Jim Ray: Cool. That makes a ton of sense. So lots of community-only posts. And I’m sure that y’all are watching the work that Daniel’s doing on permissioned data. I know that like the existing solution is off protocol and you know, hopefully what we’re doing with permissioned data is something that y’all be able to integrate as well. But it’s actually incredibly cool. There have been a few of these projects that have gone you know to bring these kinds of communities and not have them necessarily need to be on protocol.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I mean I’m really excited for the permissioned data too. I was reading through like the rough spec and a lot of the ways in which I think the protocol work is thinking through what like authorization for groups looks like aligns very well with the way that we’re thinking about authorization for groups within Acorn where there is a server that basically any and all authorizations for group related actions would go through. And I think that would slot very nicely into the permissioned data model as well.

Jim Ray: Cool. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. A few more questions here. So can feeds created in graze be integrated with acorn moderation controls? And that’s interesting. So that’s specifically about moderation too.

Rishi Balakrishnan: A lot of the endpoints that we have right now for feed moderation, the big ones are just being able to manually remove something from the feed as well as manually pin something to the top. our Blacksky specific features. We had them in rsky-feedgen like our open source Rust implementation. And so I we haven’t looked specifically at what moderation Graze provides or whether those endpoints are open, but I will say like a lot of the modern feed moderation is very specific to the way that like Blacksky has done feeds.

Jim Ray: Got it. Got it feeds are such a funny edge case too because they are they’re very protocol adjacent, but they’re also very kind of specific to you know, microblogging and like even Blue Skies you know, lexicons and things like that. So we’ve been talking a little bit about that internally about how we kind of level up the idea of a feed so that it’s a little bit less dependent on the existing implementation of microblogging specifically.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, and I know that there was some chatter on the skyline about being able to migrate feeds because feeds are tied to existing DIDs, and that would also be incredibly helpful for us to be able to migrate feeds between like accounts and service providers.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. The semantics around shared DIDs in particular, like organizational DIDs are non-individual. DIDs are one of those things that we come back to fairly often because it’s not really something that has to change at the protocol level. It’s mostly just operational. Like it’s like socializing the concept of shared dids and sort of building interfaces that support the concept of shared dids and then being able to hand things off more than anything else that has to happen. Like there’s nothing that says a DID can’t be shared right now you know, but we really have to do more at some point, and this is on my like perpetual summer fall-ish roadmap to just mock out what that looks like so people know they can design for that concept.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, being able to scope authorization on shared DIDs to specific lexicons or specific actions would be fantastic. Right now, the way that we do that. Is pretty off protocol where we just have the authorization for it and we manually check whether an action is allowed or not. But baking that into the protocol would be fantastic and make my life a little bit easier.

Jim Ray: too nice.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. And when you describe it, like the building blocks are all kind of there, right? It’s just we need like a product level feature to drive something like that. Because it’s tying together. all these things that basically exist, but it’s just who’s going to build the blocks up in the right way so that other people can then have that as a model.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, absolutely.

Jim Ray: And breaking news, I’ve been pronouncing it R Sky all this time. So knowing that it’s actually risky is boy, that’s a real gif-give moment for me. So Thank you for that. A couple other questions from the chat here. So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, but you know, what are some of the ways to communicate the decentralized value of atproto networks without needing to get too technical. And if you have a very concise answer for that, I’m going to steal it because I haven’t figured it out yet either.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah. I think a lot of the way that I communicate this is just by talking through the features that Blacksky has in seeing the surprise on people’s faces when they realize that this is possible. When we talk a lot about our custom moderation. People are like, oh, I didn’t realize that you could do that. And then the question of like, how do I introduce decentralization becomes a lot easier? I think you lead with the features that people aren’t used to. And then it’s easier to talk about the underlying technical reason why it’s important. Like I’m really excited about all the different integrations between the apps. Like even being able to integrate Streamplace into the community client makes that you have live streaming built into the place where you see posts.

That’s something that like isn’t necessarily an obvious feature of decentralization if you’re thinking about it solely in terms of this means that you don’t have to rely on big tech, but it is one of the nice emergent properties of building on a decentralized protocol. And I think focusing on what users can do. in a decentralized world and then talking about why they can do it is a better strategy for me that I found as opposed to leading with the why and then getting to the what.

Jim Ray: Yeah, it’s such an interesting question too, because you were talking about adding streaming. This came up I think I was actually talking with Rudy about this at Atmosphere Conf and he said he was talking to somebody who had just migrated over to Blacksky, and they were asking, okay, great, I’m over here. How do I stream like I can stream on Twitch or Instagram or whatever their previous stream and Rudy was walking through, set up Streamplace. And you know, the question kind of kept coming back to like, why isn’t this built into the app? And I think that that’s going to be one of those big fundamental tensions of the ecosystem broadly is that the connective tissue that the AT Protocol enables is in some ways just very different from what people are used to.

I mean just like think of all the stuff that that Meta has shoved into Instagram that kind of doesn’t belong in Instagram, but they knew that they had enough people there and now Instagram is also a microblogging platform and all these other things. And so I like there’s a little bit, there’s a little, there’s a lot of communication that I think that we’re gonna be doing to help people understand. You know, okay, you can and you can do you can live stream from the using the same ID that you have to log into Blacksky or Acorn community or whatever it is, but like that’s it’s a slightly separate flow and it’s going to be a different interface and it’s going to be in a different thing.

Are y’all thinking about like making more direct integrations into those acorn communities so it does kind of feel like one thing and then using the protocol and some of those API interfaces underneath, or how do you all think about some of that?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah. So I think first to clarify, like Acorn we primarily imagine is a tool for like the community organizers themselves. The end users are just going to be using like the equivalent of blacksky.community for their specific communities. It’ll have their community branding, their colors, their specific feeds, starter packs that they create themselves. But within that client, we do want it to be more full featured. And I think there’s a lot of work that folks are doing around like lexicon embeds and web tiles that we’re really excited about where I think that does a lot of the integration work for the entire ecosystem that Meta is able to do for itself because it is centralized. I know Rudy wants to get streaming into the platform.

I want standard sites like records to be viewable within the existing microblogging platform. I think having all of it in one place is really important. And I think the pieces are getting there. I think it’s just a matter of time.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. That’s something that we’re pretty excited about too. And whenever it comes up, it’s always like, okay, this has to go on products plate, and you know, we don’t want to overwhelm product. And also like on the one hand, it’s so clear that like this is a great differentiator for the atmosphere and for atmospheric apps to be able to integrate all these other different platforms. On the other hand, it’s like you think forward to like two years from now, are there gonna be like 20 different apps that technically are integrated into Bluesky, the app? It’s like that doesn’t feel like the right way to do it either. And so figuring out like how we genericize this, how we use web tiles, how we do stuff on protocol, how we make all these integrations sort of more graceful and dare I say liquid in a way that actually makes that sustainable so we can have that differentiator without just introducing more roadmap work and more potential dependencies for products.

I think that’s going to be a really cool open question like at next year’s atmosphere conference.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah, I agree. And I think that also helps resolve a lot of issues around moderation too, where right now in Ozone, like technically you can issue a label on any record, but really you can only view easily like the like a regular post record. And so having like lexicon embeds also makes it easier for the entire life cycle of a community where we can use existing tools that you have with unforeseen record types without it breaking the way that you experience or know your moderation workflow to be like.

Jim Ray: Yeah. There’s a few other questions here that that are kind of getting into the nitty-gritty, and I know you’ve got a couple of demos coming up. So I think we’ll point folks to first of all, if you’re not following Rishi on your handle is Rishi at Blacksky.

Rishi Balakrishnan: It’s rishkebab.blacksky.team.

Jim Ray: Amazing.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah. I remember I was a kid and somebody called me that as a play on Shish Kebab and I just ran with it. Like I was like fantastic. I’m not offended.

Jim Ray: Amazing. I love it. rishkebab.blacksky.team. So just remind everybody again kind of like what’s coming up. You said you’ve got a blog post and a demo, and so those are gonna be coming out in the next few weeks, is that right?

Rishi Balakrishnan: Exactly, yeah. So we are gonna have a blog post with the official product announcement coming out next week. And then the week after that, the team will get on a stream place and we’ll walk through Acorn, do a live demo, answer any questions about the product. and talk about what our plans are for onboarding communities.

Jim Ray: Amazing. That sounds fantastic. I think there were a few questions in the chat here that I think will be very appropriate for that one. So I’m excited to tune in. Anything else in the last couple of minutes that you want to make sure to point folks to or anything that we’ve missed in our conversation here before we send folks onto their weekends?

Rishi Balakrishnan: No, I think I think you’ve done a fantastic job of asking the questions that I think are most salient to thinking through Acorn. If you haven’t, check out our landing page, acorn.blacksky.community. See if any of the features there appeal to you. We’re really interested in talking to and with communities. about the features there that feel the most important to them, as well as the features that you wish were there and aren’t there right now because we do want this to be a tool for communities and creators to be able to easily manage your infrastructure without even having to realize that it is infrastructure that you’re managing. And so any outreach in that sense, like we’d love to have conversations with you as to what your needs are.

Jim Ray: Amazing. It’s a beautiful landing page. And I have to say, you know, we talk about what good looks like and what good design looks like. And over at Blacksky, y’all are doing such a good job of like being opinionated, but also being approachable and really striking that balance of you know taking these all of these primitives of this crazy open source decentralized network and turning it into something that feels as much like a community as anything else that’s out there. So just kudos to those design efforts as well.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Thank you. I spent a lot I spent an inordinate amount of time on the.

Jim Ray: Excellent. Someone.

Alex Garnett: had to.

Jim Ray: nice that’s great. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in. Have wonderful weekends, and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Yeah.

Jim Ray: Thanks again, Rishi.

Rishi Balakrishnan: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Jim Ray: Take care, everybody.