Sometimes You Just Want to Hold the Entire Network in Your Hand

Jim Ray: Alex, welcome back to Off Protocol Live.

Alex Garnett: It’s great to be here at Off Protocol Live, Jim. How’s your Wednesday going?

Jim Ray: Oh, you know, it’s going quite well. You know, do we do we want to turn this into a bit where we do a little sports talk up top or you know has that one run its course?

Alex Garnett: I think sports on the hour is something everybody could use, especially all the non-sports fans in our audience who don’t like it at all.

Jim Ray: Yeah, I’d say, you know, just like throw a little bit of real world. Are you I know that you are watching the World Cup which.

Alex Garnett: oh my goodness, I’ve barely missed a match since the group stage. Like I have too many monitors and something they’re very good for is to be able to have a game on while I’m working.

Jim Ray: I do forget you have your crazy, is it quad or more monitor setup?

Alex Garnett: It is quad at my desk, and I’ve also got like the very 50-foot long HDMI cable to the projector setup going down into my living room opposite my loft office. So technically it says five, but only four visible at a time.

Jim Ray: Amazing. And that’s another thing we discovered about each other this weekend. We’re both projector guys.

Alex Garnett: Both projector guys, yeah. And public service announcement, replace your bulb. You might not think you have to, but if it’s been a few years, like that thing has lost a third to half its brightness. I don’t know if you like me like to have people over to watch the games sometimes. And you’re always thinking to yourself, oh, I’m a projector guy it’s kind of light in the daytime. We’re gonna have to draw the blinds. Maybe I should just be a TV guy from now on. Turns out no, you don’t have to compromise. Just get a new bulb and you will be able to have that thing on in daylight. You forget.

Jim Ray: Replace your bulbs. That’s your PSA. All right. Well, that’s enough fun here at the top. So you know, I think the big news that gosh, you know, we get a holiday weekend and I forget everything that happened. That’s before it. But you know, right in just kind of sliding it in there, our own Daniel Holmgren did ship the permissioned data proposal that he was promising would get in there before I believe he said it was before we celebrated 250 years of these United States. And he did it. I think he put it up pretty late on Thursday evening. I think most folks tuning in have had a chance to look at it. A couple of late breaking changes there around the URI handle and things like that, but really happy to have that one launched.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, that is gonna be such a game changer for us. I’m glad, as always, that we’re doing it right, that we’re doing very spec driven development. I know the URI scheme, like unrelated to this, we have to now sort of play with our URI implementation because technically at URIs aren’t compliant due to the way the colons and the DIDs work, but taking that aside, which is frustrating, but I think we’ll get to the right solution there, there was some discussion about whether or not permissioned data should remain on you know at colon slash or it should be also you know at s colon slash or something like that and at one point, I think we were leaning towards maybe making it the same at URI pattern, and now we’re leaning away from that again, so it’ll probably be separate, but it’s a good discussion.

Really nice to follow along. We are doing this work in public, as always. Do feel free to chime in and I can’t wait to watch this take shape. Like month by month this summer, I keep thinking about like how much the use cases that we’re advocating for and trying to articulate are going to change the second this lands. And just being, you know, weeks or months rather than years away feels really good.

Jim Ray: Completely agree. And obviously we had Daniel on during the last one of these and he was there to kind of answer questions. If you still have questions or still have thoughts. I dropped a link there to the proposals, so jump in there. There’s a discussion thread happening. There’s discussion threads happening all over the place if you’re on the discourse. You know, lots of stuff happening on just even just on the main timeline. So really excited about that. And you know, there we’ve been talking a little bit about in the main Bluesky app, we’ve been talking about the big thing that that team is working on, which is communities. Community is obviously going to be using permissioned data.

And so these things are being developed hand in hand. There’s a lot of excitement around the communities project as well. And so really excited to see that one land. So I you know, it’s gonna be a really it’s gonna be a fun fall.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, it’s gonna be a fun fall. And the communities piece is great too because it also just reinforces for me how much we wind up talking about like developer primitives that are thought of on a completely different way in the other side of the shop. Right. It’s like we see keep saying permissioned data, permission, data, permission, data. And on the product side, they keep saying communities, communities, communities, because that’s the feature, that’s the UX that it directly enables. Like obviously there’s going to be more than just communities in Bluesky, the app. But it’s nice to know that like there’s a product angle here too, right? It’s feature forward and it’s protocol forward at the exact same time.

And that feels like the org working in lockstep, which is great.

Jim Ray: It’s really great to see. And I think you know when you and I joined, there was a little bit of we were kind of coming on at the end of a pretty long year there, at the end of 2025. And so it’s really great to see these things. happening in conjunction. We’ve got some love in the chat there for communities and I noticed that Trezy mentioned that Trezy, of course, has been working on the HappyView framework for building out kind of your own app views. Fantastic name, of course. And he’s been working really hard on looking at what’s going on with permissioned data. So you know, really cool to see that. Speaking of Daniel, Daniel, dropped that permissioned data.

I think he went and hung out on a lake for the holiday weekend and then he flew across the big lake there and he’s in Europe with Paul. They are attending DWeb Camp this week and then and then there’s the local first conference, which those things are you know spiritually aligned, I think, and so there’s gonna be a lot of you know, good discussion coming out of both of those. Have you been to either of those, Alex? DWeb Camp. I have not.

Alex Garnett: I have not I do not have the D Web cred that a lot of our principals have going back many, many years. And I will say that I absolutely love that Local First Conference is going to be by far the more polished of the two events they are going to. And I think that really says something because like Local first is, you know, great open source developer event. You know, I like going to SCALE here locally in Pasadena. I’m gonna be at Hope, Hackers on Planet Earth. I’ll speak about in just a just a second in New York next month. And those seem very much of a pair with LocalFirst, right? Those are like good open source energy, like people who really like to be doing the kind of protocol development and talking about the building blocks of the web.

D Web is like that, but there’s no indoor plumbing, as far as I can tell. You know, it’s like if you like hacking, like you better really like it and like it outdoors even. I.

Jim Ray: I it’s a little bit refreshing, kind of takes things back to the roots of the early internet days. So super excited to get the report from Paul and Daniel. If we’ve got folks that are going to be attending D Web or Local First, be sure to look for Paul and Daniel.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. I think you and I, it’s funny, both come more recently from like larger companies that were doing like the AWS reInvent, Google Cloud next. Vegas conference scene and like that’s all well and good. That’s not my favorite. Like I would much rather be out there in Berlin at this moment, and it’s nice that a project like atproto and a company like Bluesky can help speak across those different subsections of the tech industry really effectively. That’s a big part of what I like about being here. And it’s worth shouting out, I think. when we talk about different conferences and like different scenes people come from.

Jim Ray: Just to shout out you know, our own folks here, I think AtmosphereConf really hit that. kind of the coziness, the smallness. We did have indoor plumbing, which was really nice. And so it was it struck the right balance there, I think, which was which was really great. And then the follow-on after D Web and local first is of course the IETF. So this is not our first IETF, but Bryan is going to be putting his current sabbatical on hold for a few days to show up at the IETF. He’s been stewarding that project, and then Daniel, of course, will be there one thing that’s nice about the IETF, you know, we were talking earlier about kind of like the openness and the ability to participate, even if you can’t be in Vienna.

for the IETF meeting, you can still participate online and of course you can join and you can participate via email network that we’ve got going on there and the discussion forums and things like that. So still lots of ways. If you’re interested, you know, there’s like the work that we’re doing on the protocol itself with the permissioned data stuff that we talked about. IETF is kind of like it’s a whole different beast in a lot of ways. I know you and I we both read those email chains, and the standardization process is it’s really it’s kind of taking what we’re doing with like building out the protocol and taking that even to a whole other level.

Alex Garnett: Yep. And I think IETF is coming to San Francisco in November for meeting number 127. So if you miss this one, there’ll be a North American one coming later on this year.

Jim Ray: So join up with the IETF. If you’re really interested in that standardization process, I know we’ve got a lot of folks that are interested in Issues like governance and really some of kind of like the nitty-gritty of making atproto an actual standards, like a standards body. proclaim standard, not just a de facto standard like so many things in the tech industry end up being. It’s obviously really important to us and kind of our decentralization stories. So if you are interested in participating in that, then I’ll drop the link to that there too. You mentioned Hope, Alex. Tell us about Hope and our first ever booth.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, so Hope is the hackers on Planet Earth Conference that takes place in New York City. It used to be every other year, and they have just switched to making it every year. So I was actually there last year. It was out in like Deep Queens, which was great. I had to take a bus past the end of the subway, because that was on a university campus. That was like almost Long Island, like it was still technically in the New York City boundaries, but just barely. And this year they’re back in Manhattan at the New Yorker Hotel. And we have committed to doing a booth, our very first DevRel booth. I’m super excited about this.

They’d actually put out a call last week for Additional sponsorships because you know like the open source world’s going through it right now just with budget shifting and everything else. And moving to an annual conference was really ambitious for them. And they were like, hey, if you were thinking of sponsoring, reach out, we could really use it. And great timing for us because while we haven’t done a booth yet, you know, that’s one of those things we’ve talked about, like, hey, DevRel, eventually you’ll work your way up to a booth. And frankly, it’s nice to be able to do a booth at a aligned conference, technically, ideologically, tonally like hope, than it is to have to do a booth, you know, at AWS reInvent, for example.

And I am pleased as Punch that this is something that fit in our budget and our schedule. So I’ll be in New York the third weekend of August, tabling at hope. We will have some merch if you’re a fan of 2600 magazine or phone phreaking or hacker quarterly or the 6502 8-bit processor, probably you already know about Hope, but come on out. It should be a great time.

Jim Ray: Amazing. And folks that are in the Northeast and or the New York area should absolutely check that out. So yeah, really excited that we’re getting together our first booth. And you know, it can only get more exciting and I guess complex from there.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. I actually saw my first Bluesky talk in the Wild at last year’s Hope. So it has some special significance for me too, because I was not yet working here at that time.

Jim Ray: Oh nice. Who and was that somebody from the team or was that just.

Alex Garnett: it was not, it was like a local professor who just liked the way we were doing identities with DNS. So.

Jim Ray: very cool. All right. Excellent. Well that’s great. So it’s always nice when things break containment like that.

Alex Garnett: It is.

Jim Ray: Speaking of breaking containment, that was not a setup, but boy, you know, they’re just they’re just coming. Our friends at Tangled, they’ve got a couple of releases, a few things that I’m excited about are full text. search so you’ll be able to fully search all of the code. I think the previous search was limited to metadata and titles and things like that, but now they’re actually doing full text code search is the name of the feature there. And they’ve got a new CI engine that is powered by micro VM I really do feel like Tangled is one of those projects that folks are getting interested in beyond just the Bluesky connection or the atproto connection.

And you know, one thing I love about Tangled is it really feels like it’s not just trying to be a clone of GitHub or s or something like that. It’s is if you decided to sit down today. And this didn’t exist. And you were like, let’s build a place to manage your code repositories, but also do this kind of social coding thing. I feel like Tangled is pretty close to what you would come up with. So really excited to see how their mind share is growing too.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, I think competing on the CI and the integrations is super duper smart, I think, just because a, that’s one of those practical matters in terms of why people don’t get off of GitHub always. It’s like, well, we’ve got eight million integrations wired up, you know, like how are we going to replace those? Like we really do depend on those post-commit hooks and everything else. And like that is a pretty significant moat that GitHub has. And I think that has been a pretty big obstacle for you know your GitLabs, your Codebergs to be able to compete. And I also think it’s a pretty wide open space to innovate. So I’m pleased as Punch that Tangled is spending some resources on trying to move the CI space forward.

I know this is an area where GitHub has struggled with monetization in recent years while they try to increase their margins for things like CI because they know that’s a moat and that’s a surface they can defend. And so I’m thrilled that a atproto app is probing for weaknesses in the GitHub business model so effectively. It also makes me think of when Fly.io was first starting to push their Firecracker VMs as again, like a deployment tool as part of their stack, right? And that was a really interesting open source innovation. Like you do see Firecracker VMs popping up in different places because those are a usable tool and like a durable contribution that goes just beyond your own hosting environment.

So really, really great move there. I think that is exactly the way to make this uphill climb work out, and I am pumped for them.

Jim Ray: Couldn’t agree more. And you know, if you are interested in trying to start to migrate off of something like GitHub, Daniel Roe, part of the npmx team, among other things. Released a little tool to let you sync your GitHub repos with Tangled. And so you know you mentioned that one of the things that kind of keeps people on is the things like the CI integration, but that doesn’t mean you can’t. mirror your code. And so I forgot to grab a link for that. I bet somebody in the chat has the link for that and they can probably drop it in there. But.

Alex Garnett: they do.

Jim Ray: the Syncub tool is pretty great and I know that’s something we’re looking at too a great way to kind of get started with your Tangles journey is just start mirroring your GitHub repos over there at Tangled. A couple of other launches here. So new Anisota. One thing I really like about what Dame is doing with Anisota is to really kind of expand the idea of what a client could be. And Dame talks about this more as this is this isn’t just V2O Bluesky client, but really it’s an atmosphere client and I love that kind of thinking. And so you can pull in your standard.site documents, you can pull in your grain photos. I think even tangled repos show up and things like that.

And so really kind of expanding beyond just a short form microblogging client, but something and then of course in the very delightful design and artsy approach that Dame brings to all kinds of things.

Alex Garnett: Yeah. I remember like the week or two that I first joined, which was almost nine months ago now, like trying to grasp what was interesting and unique about the atmosphere so we could figure out how to strengthen that narrative going forward. Anisota was the first thing that I looked at. I think it was the first thing everybody was really pumped to show me by way of example two, just being able to show, you know, like what the client development space actually looks like and like what’s cool, what’s creative, what can we get excited about in this area that expands what was previously possible and is just fun and visually compelling and has novel UX and is going somewhere that we couldn’t go a few years prior.

So Anisota really is still like the high bar as far as I’m concerned in like totally experimental client design. And I love to see more innovation there. Way to go, Dame.

Jim Ray: It reminds me so much, Anisota in particular, but also a lot of the apps that are being built on the protocol. They’re all web native. So many of these apps, they don’t have native clients on devices, but they’re web native and they’re web native in ways that work and you can do PWAs or whatever it might be, but they really start with the web and it really kind of st feels like those early days of building on the internet where people are trying out crazy ideas, they’re not locked into the same you know, four UX patterns or whatever it might be. And they’re really trying to kind of like push in some pretty interesting ways.

So love to see it. Alex, you want to talk a little bit about the next version of Jetstream? I think people who are repo watchers, because we do so much development in public, sometimes in ways that we forget about, but I think folks are aware that there’s a new version of Jetstream in the works and not quite ready to release yet. But you wanted to talk a little bit about what’s coming with the next version of Jetstream and what people have to look forward to.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, this is a big, big deal for us, and it’s actually been related to most of what I’ve been heads down on for the last few weeks. So Jetstream V2 is going to be a new version of Jetstream. It’s going to be a really big launch for us in terms of how we discuss and how we advocate for and how we make available. large scale access to data in the atmosphere and on the protocol. Up until now we’ve talked about backfill, we talk about querying the network, we talk about cutting over from getting historical data to then getting the live tail we talk about using TAP for this purpose because TAP lets you do stateful cursor management so you can tell you know when you’re pulling down that backfill data and how you cut over.

And we talk about differences in trying to backfill, you know, non-Bluesky lexicons that might have less data volume versus Bluesky lexicons, which can be pretty challenging to backfill in quasi-real time because there’s just so much data coming off of that web socket. Jetstream V2 is going to make all of this significantly more flexible and just more fun to work with because it introduces the ability to replay that live stream from an earlier point in time. And so that way you can get all the data you want off of that web socket as if it’s serving you the live tail brand new, but now you can request historical data that same way so you can have stateless query.

You don’t actually have to introduce a cursor or a heavyweight client-side framework because you can do all that slicing and all that bounding on the server. Which again makes the querying process so much more flexible, so much more powerful. And it also means that when you’re talking about, you know, building your own app or doing your own data analysis. The requirements that you need to build client side are significantly less because the server side queries can handle all of that for you. So it makes Jetstream way more powerful. It also makes Jetstream potentially more computationally intensive, which is going to be interesting. Still open source, you know, you can still run your own Jetstream on top of any existing relay.

Jetstream obviously is still easier to consume than raw firehose data because it’s not CBOR, it’s just JSON over the WebSocket. But the Jetstream now has the ability to do a lot more server-side slicing and replaying and snapshotting coming very, very, very soon. So Jetstream V2 is going to accompany a total relaunch of docs.bsky.app. That is something we’ve been clicking for quite a long time. I announced the new endpoints.bsky.app a couple of weeks ago, and that was step one, sort of moving all the old OpenAPI endpoint reference stuff out of that DocuSaurus site. Since then, I’ve been working on totally reconfiguring what we present on docs.bsky.app to talk about the Bluesky run infrastructure. as separate from what you can do on protocol, what you can do on the network, right?

That should be us talking about our service offerings, our app, our jetstream, and so on. So that way the narrative is clearer between atproto.com and the Bluesky docs. That’s all coming hopefully in just a couple of weeks, as soon as we launch Jetstream V2. Look forward to that total overhaul of docs.bsky.app and we’ve got a bunch of cool new use cases and patterns for working with the brand new Jetstream V2 that should both be lighter weight and a lot more powerful.

Jim Ray: I’m really excited for this. I think that ability to kind of like slice by time by lexicon really could just kind of make Jetstream that much more powerful. And so really excited to see that one land and the kind of apps that it’s going to unlock. I know that you know, anytime you sit down, it’s not even necessarily the case that you would need to do a full network backfill. I think there are people who are interested in that. Sometimes you just want to hold the entire network in your hand and that’s fantastic. There are some like really interesting use cases that start to pop up for the kinds of apps that you can build when you can much more easily, not you don’t even have to backfill the entire network, but just part of it, the parts that you care about.

So I know there have been, for instance, a lot of standard.site reader apps that have been cropping up. And so keep a backfill of every standard.site record.

Alex Garnett: Precisely. It becomes way less necessary to even talk about backfilling. As a concept, right? Like it becomes more like just querying or replaying the data that’s already there, which is awesome, awesome, awesome. Really glad we’ve gotten here. And credit to Jim Calabro, who’s been doing all the work on the new jet stream. It’s been exciting chatting with him week after week this summer, just figuring out when we’re going to get to the point of shipping. And I cannot wait to show everyone those new docs.

Jim Ray: pretty soon. A couple of other things. Roomy is generally available. Speaking of kind of permissioned data, Roomy is one of these apps that’s being built on what we’re doing with permissioned data. And so they’ve been working towards that for a long time, got to meet some of that crew at the AtmosphereConf. And so they’ve announced their general availability. And so really excited about that. And they’ve also just been contributing a ton to the ongoing work that Daniel’s been doing around the permissioned data spec. So really appreciate their input there.

Alex Garnett: Yeah.

Jim Ray: And then we also we have a if you would like to come work with Alex and myself, we posted this first new job post in a while for the Atmosphere team specifically. We’ve got a new we’re calling it DevX and network engineering job, but this is absolutely on the on the team that you and I work on. work on which is on the atmosphere side of the house. So less concerned with Bluesky the app and more about building out the protocol and building out the infrastructure that makes it all work.

Alex Garnett: We’ve been hiring in a pretty good clip this year. I’m actually really psyched at how much the team has grown since I’ve joined. But this job in particular pertains directly to a lot of stuff that people at me about because it’s all the sort of like atmospheric bridge building. All the auth pathways, all the maintenance around, you know, like how we talk about the network, this job touches a lot of that stuff very directly. So if you’re interested, and I know a lot of this audience is, please do reach out if you’re thinking about putting an application in. We’d love to hear from you. This is like the good sort of atmosphere, care and feeding kind of job.

Jim Ray: And then finally, I think Tynan was mentioning we had not one but two local meetups, both happening IRL, but also being streamed right here on Streamplace, of course. And so that was happening, I think, within hours of each other on either of the US coasts, one in New York and one in Portland. And so as always, make sure to check out the local events that are happening near you. If you’re interested in starting your own event, if you if you have an event that’s happening and it’s not being listed on the atmosphere. community slash events page. And oh Tynan’s mentioned that Blacksky only posts launched today. Breaking news right here while we’re streaming. I’ve somehow missed that one.

So gonna have to dig into that one. But yeah, back to the events thing. Check out the events page. There’s quite possibly an event happening near you. If there’s not an event happening near you, maybe you could be the one to start it. So let us know.

Alex Garnett: Shout out New York and Portland, two of my favorite cities in this fine country that I do not currently live in. And I think we’re planning a new LA meetup at some point later on in July as well, for those of you who are local to me.

Jim Ray: Those LA meetups, they sound like they’ve been going really well. So.

Alex Garnett: they’ve been going great. Great community here. It’s the home of pckt, among other things. So, you know, we try to keep the community engaged. Just taking a look at Chicago on July 22nd. Don’t want to overlook Chicago. Boston tomorrow.

Jim Ray: Yeah, someone is mentioning you know a phenomenon that I think you and I have noticed. And I think it’s maybe a little bit more nuanced than is showing up here in the chat. But you know, we had a question of our are there any Bay Area meetups happening? I know Tessa from Germ has been driving some IRL meetups there. We’ve also, we’ve got a pretty strong contingent of Bluesky folks. So you flew up and helped host a meeting in with Toni, our CEO, in the True Offices. And somebody pointed out that somehow oh it was it was our very own Eli. Somehow atproto is weakest in the Bay. I don’t understand it. And I do think there is some truth to that.

I do feel like so much of the energy in the Bay Area specifically is just geared towards AI, AI, AI, I and I do think that kind of like sucks a little bit of the air out of that particular place. If you’ve ever lived in the Bay Area or spent significant time there, you understand it’s so weird. You know, so much of the tech industry had its basis in like the counterculture and these days the way that like the herd mentality kind of slips in is a little a little frustrating, but I do think there are some interesting pockets that are happening in the Bay Area. You were at that meetup. You know, what did you see when you when you were there last?

Alex Garnett: I think we have very good representation in the Bay Area, and I also think we have pretty good representation in, you know, LLM adjacent development. I know Paul has been like super outspoken. about how we use LLMs for development and how we see generally very positive results in terms of conformance from the kind of spec-driven development that we do. So I don’t think it’s the fact that like we’re not represented in AI conversations necessarily. What this does remind me of is and this is going out in a limb here. So maybe we have to cut the stream in a second. Jim, I’ll let you run me on tape delay. But yeah. I’ve seen some discourse lately to the effect of like we should really be in other channels talking about the atmosphere, you know, not just on Bluesky.

Which is a great point, right? You know, like it’s one thing to be posting on Insta about like fun posts that were on Bluesky, but also like getting that developer representation on like LinkedIn or X are usually the ones people think of where it’s like, hey, like here’s where I’m talking about like my new AI startup and like that conversation’s not happening to the same extent. on Bluesky, the app, like, is that preventing people from getting closer to funding? And I’m a skeptic about this. I really am. Like when I think about the kinds of ways that people post on LinkedIn or on X, like it just sort of seems like you’re doing PR for your job a lot of the time in comparison to like getting excited about how we’re using the technology.

Like I don’t feel at all that we’re running behind in terms of AI adoption or like failing to advocate for the atmosphere. in terms of what you can do with tech, I just feel like there’s so much money in SF that like a lot of it just becomes a PR exercise that sort of drowns out a lot of the more organic conversation, the more organic interest. Like we are doing so well in my book in terms of organic interest. Everybody I want to talk to about tech is having those conversations in the atmosphere right now. And I don’t think that’s for lack of focus on AI. Like I actually think that like we’re taking the best holistic view that anybody can possibly take at this moment.

I just think we’re seeing the limits of talking in a space that’s like 98 % paid PR, right?

Jim Ray: Yeah. It’s such a good point. And at the risk of getting too discoursey here, I’m gonna keep this thread going for a second. You know, so I mentioned this in reply to I think a thread that Zayu kicked off the other day is so I hold, you know, you and I have access to the atproto.com Twitter account. I think you and I have both seen this, the way that engagement happens over there. That account has 13,500 followers, and we still see zero engagement. And you know, the occasional reply that we do get is a bot usually. And obviously we’re in a very particular place, and I am I’m super curious to see if I think Tangled and npmx.

npmx are probably two of the projects that have the most potential in a place like Twitter. And so I’m so I’m super curious to see if some of those projects can take off over there. I just like I think that there are probably ways to spend not just our one and only precious lives, but to spend the time and the resources that we have. Because, you know, the reality is, not to get too political about this, but the reality is like the thumb is on the scale. And you know, these algorithmically generated media outposts like especially ones that have like an ideologue at the very top of them you know even to even take the ideology out of it they really want you to pay per post in order to boost things and or they want you to pay to for your account and things like that.

And I think it really does kind of what you were talking about. Like it’s it incentivizes a kind of conversation that in some ways feels antithetical to what we’re trying to build. over and atproto land. And so, you know, it’s just it’s really tricky. I, you know, I am constantly amazed, like the thing that I don’t get and the thing that I don’t understand, I mean like I get it because it’s all just money at the end of the day, but the thing I really don’t understand. is like, you know, it’s one thing for like engineers to be on LinkedIn or Twitter or something like that, but like why is Dario from Anthropic continuing to post on the network that is owned by not just his biggest competitor, but his biggest competitor who says really horrible shit about him all the time.

Like why would you do that? I just, you know, and again, I know what the answer is, but it’s just like have some self-respect, people so, you know, that’s the part that I just like there are alternatives, there are options. I’m not even saying like all these people should migrate to Bluesky, although that would be a fantastic.

Alex Garnett: Which agree.

Jim Ray: But you know, it’s just like, come on, let’s like have the most basic media theory applied to like how you go do promotion. End of rant.

Alex Garnett: Yeah, no, I mean I think we pretty much agree about this. Short version, we love our Bay Area projects. We love the atmosphere Bay Area scene. It’s just, you know, there’s a lot of money. There’s a lot of money.

Jim Ray: Workers of the world unite. Posters of the world. Come to Bluesky.