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May 8th, 2023 × #bluesky#socialmedia#twitter

Bluesky + AT Protocol

Scott and Wes discuss the new Blue Sky social network and AT protocol, comparing it to Twitter, Mastodon and other decentralized social networks.

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Topic 0 00:00

Transcript

Announcer

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Silinski and Wes Bos.

Scott Tolinski

Welcome to Syntax.

Scott Tolinski

On this Monday, hasty treat, we're going to be talking about blue Skye and the AT protocol.

Scott Tolinski

If these things sound like things you have never heard of, then you are probably not a Twitter user And probably have not been on Twitter in the last, I don't know, week or so as the Blue Sky Discord has been absolutely blowing up. And honestly, I haven't been on Twitter Either. I've been on Blue Sky. So, we're gonna be talking all about what the heck this stuff is and why it matters for you as a developer and What it kinda means in a a bigger picture of everything on the web. So my name is Scott Tolesky. I'm a developer from Denver, and with me as always is

Wes Bos

Wes Bos. How's it going, my man? Hey. Pretty good. Pretty good. Excited to we're recording this on a Friday, because We have a bunch of invites to Blue Sky to give out.

Wes Bos

We will put a couple in the show notes and a couple we'll tweet out at Oh, no. We're not going to tweet them out. We're gonna can we sky them out? Can you get to to blue sky if you don't have an account? Let me try. I don't think so. I don't think yeah. I'm not sure you can. Well, no. You can't. Okay. So we're not gonna sky him out because or scheme.

Wes Bos

That's what we'll talk about the the verbiage around this in just a second. We will tweet them out at syntaxfm, and then we'll also put a couple in the show notes. And shout out to Matt Stipe, who hooked us up with 16 invites. These are things that are impossible to come by, and He just casually had 16 laying around. So

Scott Tolinski

and, I, you know, I don't want this to turn into a coupon code thing where everybody's going nuts. So if you you You did the try the ones in the show notes, and they don't work. That's all we got for now, and we'll we'll keep sharing them on our Twitter as well as, in in all of the socials whenever we do get more, hopefully, we do. Maybe the new sky, hears this episode And wants to hook us up. Syntax FM on Blue Sky if you wanna give us more invites.

Scott Tolinski

Cool. So let's get into it. Blue Sky is basically The new Twitter.

Scott Tolinski

It's it's not necessarily confirmed to be the new Twitter or anything yet because there's been a lot of new Twitters lately. We had Mastodon.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. What what is Hello? What is the Remember, hello? I I really don't. I've, like, blocked all of them out of my mind because, so many of them popped up, and it was like, oh, this is gonna be the one, but, you know, nobody's doing it Or nobody has access to it. I know Substack has their own Twitter clone because Substack and Twitter are fighting even though they both have Same investors.

Scott Tolinski

We have, a lot of different what was some of those other ones where it's like notes is one. Something called notes, but I have is apparently another one. There's Yeah. There there's lots of them out there.

Scott Tolinski

We both downloaded the app, Damas, a while ago that's built on Nostr.

Scott Tolinski

Yes. And that was, like, just a just in case That one ends up blowing up. We got in early so I could get the at Scott handle on it. But, yeah, the the blue sky is basically the the next in a long string of attempts at taking over Twitter.

Topic 1 03:18

Twitter clones often don't gain traction

Scott Tolinski

And we've often talked about, like, What is the next Twitter? If Twitter happens to go the way of Myspace, what is their Facebook to their Myspace? And we talked about it probably not being just a Twitter clone.

Scott Tolinski

However, if you log in to Blue Sky, aesthetically, Visually, functionally, it is very much a clone of Twitter, and that seems to be a positive for most people, including myself, actually. It's hilarious because, like, you cut back to

Wes Bos

about 4 or 5 months ago, and I I very clearly remember saying, The thing that gets us off Twitter is not going to be a less good version of Twitter.

Topic 2 04:00

Blue Sky may not necessarily be the next Twitter

Wes Bos

It's going to be something else.

Wes Bos

And boy, was I wrong about that? So we're not saying that blue sky. I also said, like, What could could Elon possibly do to Twitter? You know, like, the guy's not an idiot. I think I said the guy's not an idiot. And, like, like, I understand He's a he's a evil villain. He's contentious.

Topic 3 04:20

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is controversial

Wes Bos

Yeah. But I was like, come on. Like, there's no way.

Wes Bos

I'm certainly not giving up on Twitter. I probably would like if, we all stayed on Twitter. I have such a large following there. Yeah. Very nice to to keep. But, obviously, there there's a lot going on.

Wes Bos

The quality of Twitter maybe hasn't gone downhill, but the amount of irritants And Twitter has has definitely increased

Scott Tolinski

over the years. So and honestly, Wes, I know sorry to to cut you off, but, like, I did not pay for the check mark.

Scott Tolinski

And, honestly, you know, I'm not, like, about to get in fights over the check mark. I didn't pay for it. Don't wanna give that guy money, but, yeah, I have seen, like, no engagement since they introduced like, I feel like I'm effectively shadowbanned. I feel like that when I'm posting now on Twitter, I feel like I'm talking into the void even if I'm sharing useful things that would typically get People clicking on them or interested in them or just the fact that they're they're interesting things people typically would share. I'm getting nothing, and, I don't know. I I have no idea if that's because, I'm not interesting or if it's because blues or, the the whole blue check mark thing has essentially,

Topic 4 05:25

Wes paid for Twitter blue checkmark for features like longer video uploads

Wes Bos

Diminished the output of It it has. Yeah. It has. So I paid for it, much to many people's Chagrin.

Wes Bos

And I I basically so I had the I've had the blue check for, like, 8 years or something like that. I got it not because I'm anyone special, but because They were handing them out to anybody. I would just, like, I I, like, I remember submitting the form and saying, I have a blog. Like, I think that was my that was my That was early. Yeah. And they're like, sure. You have a blog? So they threw it to me.

Wes Bos

And and then once once they took those away, I was like, alright. Well, there's actually some features on Twitter, Blue, that I wanted, Which was I want the longer video. I want 1080p video. So now I can upload in higher quality.

Wes Bos

I can upload more than 2 minutes, which is really nice. I've done a couple of those. And then there's obviously the algorithmic benefits to it as well. And As somebody who makes his living, posting content to Twitter is a big part of that. So it sort of gets tangled up in the Being verified, which is obviously silly because now it's just whoever pays for it, it doesn't actually mean anything. And that's a little frustrating because they don't necessarily I don't say care about that.

Topic 5 06:57

Twitter is now pay to play which is frustrating

Wes Bos

Like, the web developers that follow me know who I am. I don't I don't need that. But I actually like the the features, and there's this feature called It's like a it basically takes all the links of the past 24 hours out of your Twitter feed and compiles them into thing. So I see everybody's blog post. It's kind kind of like a RSS feeder of anything that people have posted and find interesting, and then it ranks it based on How much engagement it's got. And I kind of like that as well. So it's kind of interesting, but I definitely noticed an uptick in engagement once I did pay for it. So Unfortunately, Twitter is pay to play, which sucks because you shouldn't have to do that. And I think that's a lot of why we're really excited about Blue Sky. Yeah. I think the the big problem there is that they

Scott Tolinski

often say that if you're not like the if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Right? Yeah. But, like, Twitter's asking you to be both the product and to pay for it. Like, you will pay to be the product. And, like, to me that, like, what? It just really rubs me the wrong way. So let's let's get into, Blue Sky itself. Blue Sky, built on the at least the app portion of it built on React Native.

Topic 6 08:04

Blue Sky app is built with React Native

Scott Tolinski

And from what I've heard, the staging Site, which is staging.bsky.app, is built on React Native for web, which, before we talk to Nathan on the show here a few episodes ago, I would have said that I don't I don't know how I feel about that.

Topic 7 08:24

React Native for web is a cool project

Scott Tolinski

But, React Native for web, I I've since learned is actually, like, a really cool project.

Scott Tolinski

I I just called him Nathan, and his name is Nate, or at least he goes by Nate. So Yeah. Sorry, Nate, about giving you the long form.

Wes Bos

So React Native Web Is also what Twitter.com is built on. And the idea is that you have like go back to the show with Nate. He's He has Tema GUI. It's kind of the same idea of React Native Web is that you just have like a text component. You don't have a paragraph tag, you have a text component.

Wes Bos

You don't have a div tag, but you have whatever the equivalent is.

Wes Bos

And then you can compile the like the view layer to native on Android and iOS and to divs, HTML and CSS, On on the web, and it's, it works pretty good. I don't know that I would do it myself, but it's also why if you view Source on Twitter. There's all these crazy class names that don't make any sense, and it's because it's almost entirely compiled from the output of But it works pretty well. People have been kind of grouchy at the performance and whatnot, but it's snappy. It's fast. There's obviously bugs, but it's very early days. The people that run Blue Sky themselves are surprised With the uptake that it has, it was just like a Sunday afternoon, and I opened my Twitter. And there was, like my whole feed was Blue Sky invite. I need a Blue Sky invite. I need a Blue Sky invite. And I was just like, oh, oh, boy.

Wes Bos

I need a Blue Sky invite. You get that sort of FOMO, so I threw it on there.

Topic 8 10:02

Blue Sky took off rapidly on Twitter

Scott Tolinski

Look. Somebody help me out. Every every minute that ticks by, you're like, someone's gonna take, Scott at blue. Of course, I had no chance of getting Scott at Blue Sky, but, Somebody's gonna take it, and so you gotta get on there. I I was I was resisting the urge to beg for invites, and then I my My resisting only lasted so long before I was on Twitter begging for invites.

Wes Bos

So I I wanna talk really quickly just about, like, Like why social media is important, and why I think it's kind of interesting that developers, like all developers Our not all of them. Obviously, they're still invites, but it seems like literally everybody that can get an invite is actually there and actively posting. Like, I posted Something there 29 minutes ago, and it has 36 likes on it. Like, there's actually people just Kind of milling on it like they are on Twitter. And I think that's really important because in the very early days, I was around when Twitter started up, And it was just tech folk. It was a lot of developers talking about coding and that type of stuff. And it has The same sort of feeling that it did in the early days of Twitter, and developers are hacking on it and building little tools and things like that. And that's exactly why Twitter exploded is that they had an open API. Literally anybody could use the thing, and people were building all kinds of interesting stuff on top of The platforms as well as the the different protocols in the case of this. So I I don't know why this is the one that is Taking off. And I don't know. I would love to go back on, like, the Twitter. Like, who was it that, like, initially said I need a blue sky invite? Yeah.

Topic 9 11:43

Early Twitter was mostly devs, Blue Sky has similar feel

Scott Tolinski

But it it took off like wildfire, and pretty much everybody is there now. Yeah. It it's interesting for me to think of, like, the first people I saw on this, because I I would by all accounts, you and I got on even pretty early in in the the grand scheme of things, But it it has been one of those projects that I've had bookmarked for a long time, specifically, the things about the AT protocol, which we'll get into in this episode. But I I've been looking at it for a long time, and it's been on my radar as something that exists, but there was there's no User focused or facing app. There was no nobody on it, obviously. It was it was always being discussed as, Jack's New social network that is the exact same as Twitter, with some caveats of which we'll talk about that are mostly involved in the the technical side of things. Right? Yeah. But in in reality, I think he's just an investor on it or an early investor. And so I think that that definitely probably was part of what Propelled people into wanting to do this. Oh, this guy made Twitter. I bet he could, I bet he could make this other Twitter part too, even though it's not really, you know, his app necessarily.

Wes Bos

Yeah. People also use that as, like, a negative. Like, this guy's gonna screw it up. And I was like, well, the guy kinda made The biggest social network in the world, and he's got he has his bag. Like, he's probably infinitely wealthy now. Like, maybe he would want to make a 2nd run. Like, I was like, maybe this is the Dino of Twitter.

Topic 10 13:13

Jack Dorsey is an investor in Blue Sky

Wes Bos

Obviously, he I don't think he's involved as much As people think he is, though. Yeah. Totally. You ever have Game Genie? Oh, no. You don't really play video games growing up. Oh, yeah. I had it. My my, Neighbor had a Game Genie for Goldeneye.

Scott Tolinski

Okay. Well, also if you're out there and you're you remember Game Genie, go go do some YouTube watching on how Game Genie works because, technically, it's like replacing RAM values. And so the codes that you typed in in a Game Genie were simply just actual values in the RAM that you were swapping. So that way, when the game loaded up and it went to access how many lives you had or something like that, it would access that in RAM and get the new value that you put in there instead of the default. That's how it works. Amazing. It's unreal. It's a,

Wes Bos

edge function.

Wes Bos

Yeah. It's so cool. Sits in the middle. It sits in between. Anyways, Let's talk about so Blue Sky is the platform itself, and it's built on top of this thing called the At protocol. I know you're calling it the AT protocol.

Topic 11 14:10

Blue Sky built on AT Protocol, an open standard

Wes Bos

I'm assuming it's at protocol because of the whole at sign.

Scott Tolinski

Well, I mean, you know, things can be multiple things, Wes. They can. Or things can be realized.

Scott Tolinski

It's capitalized, a t. It's Yeah. Yeah. It's true. What does it stand for? It stands for, I actually do know what it stands for. Thank you very much. It stands for, I don't know. At at.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah.

Wes Bos

Anyways, the the app protocol itself, The whole idea behind Blue Sky is that Blue Sky is just an app slash client that is using this new protocol.

Wes Bos

It's very much The authenticated transfer protocol. Oh, really? Okay. I I I stand corrected on that one. I certainly

Scott Tolinski

The ATP. The ATP authenticated

Wes Bos

transfer protocol. So the protocol itself is an Open standard, which will allow literally anybody to implement this protocol and to make their own or To to have different instances of it. So the the kind of idea behind that is that It is entirely distributed. It's not blockchain.

Topic 12 15:25

AT Protocol is decentralized and distributed

Wes Bos

It's not Mastodon.

Wes Bos

But it is the whole idea is that it is Distributed and that you can take up your records and move at any time. And probably the thing that I love most about it, and this is something That we said on the last potluck, somebody said, what do you think about this, like, blockchain thing that will prove who you are? And I said, Doesn't isn't that what your domain name does? Isn't your domain name proof of who you are? And then 3 days later, this thing comes around. And the way that you You can obviously you when you sign up, you can get a bsky.social, handle, but you can switch to using your own domain name as your handle. So I am at westboss.com, and I love that because it has you have to prove that you own the domain name via a text record in your DNS settings Before you can actually get that domain name. And now if anyone sees a piece of content posted by the whole encryption thing is Is behind this app protocol. If anyone sees a piece of content that is posted by atwestboss.com, they can go to westboss.com and see, Okay. This is actually the guy. Right? Like, I know that this is this is Wes's URL.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. And it it, inspired me to get a new URL and to get Buy a new domain. So I bought tolin.ski.

Scott Tolinski

So good. Which I didn't know a dot ski existed. What I really wanted was s c o Or s c dot o t t, but OTT is owned by Dish Network, and they do not let anybody have them. So What about

Wes Bos

sc0.tt.

Scott Tolinski

Dottt? I don't think that does exist. It does. Not multiple.

Scott Tolinski

As available.

Wes Bos

Oh, yeah.

Wes Bos

Fixed daylight savings for good.

Wes Bos

Somebody who has an anti daylight savings website is using it.

Wes Bos

Man, that would be sweet because Matt Mullen.

Scott Tolinski

You're on my shit list, Scott Yates.

Wes Bos

Matt Mullenweg has ma.tt, is funny because the whole idea behind the domain name is that you prove who you are, but everybody's going for these, like, Short vanity domain names because I also own West. Io and Boss.af, and I thought I should do those. But, like, West Boss is kind of my thing, so I had to go Go with that.

Wes Bos

Yeah.

Scott Tolinski

So what what else It's distributed and by. So, like, when you said distributed, you said you could move it. And a lot of people will say, like, decentralized too. Do does decentralized and distributed, do you Do those mean the same thing to you in in this sort of way? Yes, it does, because it's not.

Wes Bos

Like Blue Sky Has my data. All of my skeets are okay.

Wes Bos

A post in Blue Sky.

Wes Bos

The creator of it jokingly put a thing out that said, posts on Blue Sky or Skeets.

Wes Bos

And then yesterday she says, please don't make Skeets Catch on, but it's it it it's it's just what I wanna say. Like, it's obviously hilarious, but, like, let's take the word. Yeah.

Scott Tolinski

Take back the word from Lil Jon.

Scott Tolinski

Good luck.

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. And and also too, like, in in that same regard of being decentralized. So right now, Well, you know, one thing about it being decentralized too is that you can have different instances like federated on Blue Sky. So, essentially, people could create essentially their own apps that are their own instances of this service.

Topic 13 18:57

AT Protocol allows custom schemas

Scott Tolinski

The same way when you sign up for Mastodon, it asks you to pick your server. Or when you sign up for Discord, it asks you to pick your, pick your server on Discord. Right? In Discord, it makes a lot of sense because you you sign in to the syntax Discord, and then you're talking with a bunch of syntax fans.

Scott Tolinski

On Twitter and Mastodon, in my opinion, it's one of the reasons why Mastodon has had a hard time Gaining traction. Right? People sign up for an instance, and they kinda feel did I pick the right instance? I got I I I created a Mastodon, account. But when the account creation process popped up for me, I got, like, instance, paralysis. I was like, I have no idea what server to pick. And because of that, I'm, like, delaying signing up for this thing because I don't wanna pick the wrong one. Oh, I wanna be in front end social, but front end social is not taking sign ups anymore.

Topic 14 19:50

Federated servers possible with AT Protocol

Scott Tolinski

What do I pick? I just pick the first one, I guess. I pick the first one. But with Blue Sky, it was like, here's the here's the Here's the path for Blue Sky. You sign in, whatever. They haven't launched any of the federation stuff yet, but that is part of the the whole protocol. And part of The future of this stuff is being able to have different instances and different servers on this protocol.

Topic 15 20:14

People want a single sign up place but ability to move data

Wes Bos

And I I think the important part of that is People do want a place to just sign up.

Wes Bos

However, if you do want to go somewhere else, you can choose where you want to go for the algorithm is a big one in that The data is there, and algorithms can be great. TikTok has a great algorithm. It shows me stuff that I love seeing.

Wes Bos

Algorithms can be Really frustrating to a lot of people as well, or they can be skewed in a certain way. Or if you don't like the way that a specific service is banning people or or doing whatever, then you go to a service that has different

Scott Tolinski

Things in place. Right? So you can Yeah. I heard I heard of a blue sky algorithm that is only wholesome posts.

Scott Tolinski

Give me only wholesome posts.

Wes Bos

Yeah. I I guess that would work. Right? Like, the the way they describe it is that a data repository is like a git repo, And you commit your records to that Git repo.

Wes Bos

And then the thing that consumes all of those records that are Across all the different repos, we'll be able to decide what you get shown and How it's displayed and then the applications itself, I guess. No, the applications itself is kind of how it's displayed, whether it's like, oh, yeah, I'm using the blue sky 1, I I don't know that. I should say I don't totally, a 100% understand how all of this stuff works. Also, I don't think they totally know how All of this stuff works. It is all very much a work in progress.

Wes Bos

But what is very interesting to me is that they started With the protocol initially.

Wes Bos

And they started with this idea of, I'll just Jump over to, like, the the lexicons really quickly. We'll come back to finishing up the app protocol.

Wes Bos

Basically, Records can have different schemas. So obviously, a Twitter like piece a record and following people and unfollowing people and muting people, That is one implementation of this protocol. But as I see it, you could literally implement anything.

Topic 16 22:27

Algorithms can be frustrating but also useful like TikTok

Wes Bos

In the schema, it can be You can define custom schemas, and I think that is really interesting because the first time I looked at that, I'm like, oh, cool. Another open standard.

Wes Bos

What happens when people want features that are not part of the standard? Right.

Wes Bos

Then then what do you do? That's what happened with RSS. People move to Different algorithms.

Wes Bos

That's why people go to something like Spotify, because.

Wes Bos

And Twitter got rid of their RSS feeds, you know, like standards are great until somebody wants to do something custom On top of that, and they they say I can't move fast enough to keep up with these standards or I just want to do something on my own. So the idea is that this is a standard Where you can publish these immutable schemas that define the different types. So I would imagine you could also host A horse network, you know,

Scott Tolinski

and it's horse time. Yeah, exactly.

Wes Bos

Yeah. You could host an internal one In your company, something like that. So the protocol seems very broad and open With a heavy emphasis on proving who people are while being distributed.

Topic 17 23:43

Standards struggle when people want custom features

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. So, you know, it it isn't just a Twitter clone at that, that where the the protocol ends up being a big deal. And we're seeing kind of the future of social media in general move in this direction on all fronts.

Scott Tolinski

The only thing is that nothing's really caught on in this space, in any sort of federated type of social media.

Topic 18 24:05

Federated social media is next evolution

Scott Tolinski

And, whether or not this ends up being, quote, unquote, the winner or not or something else Takes it takes into the space is definitely a a different conversation.

Scott Tolinski

But I I do think that we are seeing a decentralized, social media as this kind of next evolution inside of social media.

Scott Tolinski

That said, notice how this is not blockchain. And, like, that was everybody's like, for for things to be decentralized, it must or or decentralized and blockchain was, like, often hand in hand as the way people talked about a lot of this stuff. Right? So it's good and interesting to see that this is like, hey. This is decentralized, but it's there's none of this, like, web 3 spam about it. They're calling it Web5 or something ridiculous.

Wes Bos

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Bos

They have a whole FAQ. Is ATP the app protocol blockchain. No, it is a federated protocol. It is not blockchain, nor does it use blockchain.

Wes Bos

And they link to Wikipedia article saying a federated protocol is a Pputing or networking providers that agree upon standards of operating in a collective fashion, which is, I guess, like, that you know what is a very good example of that? Phones.

Wes Bos

Our, I guess, like, IP addresses and HTTP and, other ones were oh, that's that's the other good example is that XMPP, That was the, like, open chat format.

Wes Bos

Mhmm. And then that kinda died off because people wanted Even SMS is an open a federated protocol.

Scott Tolinski

Is it? And SMS?

Wes Bos

Yeah. Because you can text anybody to any phone number And anywhere in the world on any phone, an SMS will work. Right? But Apple comes around, says it's not good enough. I want to do group chat. I want to do reactions. I want it like the standard doesn't allow me to do Voice calls or sending payments inside of this type of thing. And then you say, okay, well, like, yeah, XMPP is great because it works everywhere. But At the end of the day, most people don't care. They want features that just work and they want cool stuff to sit on top of that. So Very curious to see how this will play out. Yeah. It's interesting because, like,

Scott Tolinski

do people, like, people want that or do they act like, our r s c. Do you know or RCS? Do you know what RCS is? Rich communication services is a standard that Android phones use for rich Communications inside of messages. And now Apple is the one who, of course, is doing their own walled garden thing of using their own thing instead of the standard.

Scott Tolinski

So do people really want the standard or they just want the functionality? And I, you know, I think with Twitter verse, Blue sky here. We'll see if people really want a standard.

Wes Bos

Yeah. Yeah. I'm very curious to see if, like, right before this Who is it? Teigen? Some celebrity Teigen. I don't really know who celebrities are. Chrissy Teigen. Chrissy Teigen.

Scott Tolinski

Do you not know Chrissy Teigen Is my wife from a fan of Sarah Teigen? It's not from Teigen and Sarah. Not Sarah and Teigen. That's not a thing. I don't know. Teigen is Sarah.

Scott Tolinski

Chrissy Teigen is married to John Legend. She's a, she's a model. She's an author. She has a lot of, cookbooks, Wes, that actually, I gotta say, the My my favorite cookbooks in our household are Chrissy Teigen's cookbooks, cravings, I believe they're called. Yeah.

Scott Tolinski

If if you don't got those and and you like cookbooks out there, Sick Pick is, her her cookbooks are fantastic. Happy to party mixes from them, and they're lovely. I'll check that out. So anyway, she just joined, like, 30 minutes ago,

Topic 19 27:50

No media, DMs yet on Blue Sky

Wes Bos

and everyone's freaking out. And it's kind of interesting because With Twitter, it was devs in the early days, and it has this, like, magical feel where not everybody is mad at each other and talking about politics like it has that early days kind of excitement feel. And I was like, okay, Politics like it has that early days kind of excitement feel. And I was like, okay, but like when did the baseball players come? You know, like at what point did the, The the the Twitter thread boys start showing up and giving us tips and that stuff, that kind of thing, because also It's it's very early, and this thing could be gamed extremely easily.

Wes Bos

I think there's only a handful of devs working on this thing right now, so it's It's almost like, oh, don't grow too quickly. Otherwise, it's become a come like a dumpster fire of of different things. But they also have a lot of good stuff In place already, which is the ability to report somebody for impersonation.

Topic 20 28:41

Reporting system already in place on Blue Sky

Wes Bos

They have, they have a system in place already Where actual humans will review reports, and Tom from Myspace has already been marked as a fake account. So

Scott Tolinski

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot a lot there. There's no blocking, unfortunately, yet, but you can mute people. So I've already started meeting some people, but I I haven't, you know, I I would love to have that blocking functionality in there. I Also write a, you know, a thread today that says, like, when you delete Escape now, it's, like, goes into the trash and isn't exactly Deleted from their system. So, like, that's still something. Oh, yeah.

Scott Tolinski

The there's definitely, like, early days. There's no link shortener on it. So if you post a big old link, it's gonna take up a bunch of your Characters when you're trying to keep your characters under a limit. So you gotta go elsewhere for a link shortener.

Scott Tolinski

There's no multimedia on here yet, so you can't do GIFs.

Scott Tolinski

You can't do video, which is a big thing. You know? For for sports Twitter to move over to this thing, you're gonna have to have at least GIFs and embedded video because Sports Twitter is, like, almost all video. Right? You're showing highlights. You're showing clips. You're showing, you know, events that took place. The blocking thing is really interesting. So

Topic 21 29:55

No blocking yet on Blue Sky

Wes Bos

Jay, who is the, I guess, the founder of this, says the team was just 4 people when we decided to implement mutes and not blocks. We did mute to not blocks because the Federation architecture was not finished, and blocking requires cooperation from all entities in the network. If I block someone on my server, okay, where does that information get stored? Just on my server or on other servers that, Didn't know how to respect it. Okay. And then what if the server doesn't listen to my blocks? Right? Like, what if there is Like this. What if your block list has to be public then? What if you don't want it to be public? So there's a lot to think about. And that's, I think why they are really focusing on making the protocol first before they get into that type of thing. And there's there's no DMs or anything like that. But No DM was like that as well in the early days. We did, I guess no. We didn't have DMs on Twitter on the 1st day. We didn't even have at,

Scott Tolinski

You know? Like, it was just Oh, yeah. There's no hashtags. Hashtags. No hashtags. Community invented thing. Yeah. There's a lot here. You know? We didn't even get into some of the stuff like it uses XRPC, which is like their own general purpose, our PC that they created to use with the protocol.

Scott Tolinski

It's generic, they say, so you can use it for other things. But, it's interesting where it, like, maps the calls Server to server calls. It maps them, like, directly to a a get request, which is like it's funny because the way it works It's like API .com.atproto.repo.listrecords.

Topic 22 31:30

Blue Sky uses custom XRPC protocol

Scott Tolinski

Right? That's the XRPC call. Yeah. But that all that's doing is, like, translating that to a git request to XRPC forward slash com.atprotocol.repo.list.

Scott Tolinski

So it's like almost like It matches directly with the API request. With that thing, it it it's just like a quick little swap of of how that request is actually taking place. So there's, like, really interesting stuff. And you even got to mess around with their API quite a bit,

Wes Bos

already, which is, like, amazing. Yeah. I I dipped into it right away because I was like, this is Super interesting. So I wrote I wrote a couple of things. First, I wrote just a little CLI to pull in a list of Skeets and display them Just as like a that's what you do. Right? And it again, it reminds me of early days of Twitter where you can just make a call. There's no OAuth. There's no Tokens. Literally, they didn't even you just had to put your username and password in initially. Now they have a concept of app passwords where you can, like, make a one off password You can revoke at any time and it doesn't have full access to your account. So I built that. I built a something that posts.

Topic 23 32:37

Wes built Blue Sky bots and scrapers

Wes Bos

I did. So I switched from my westbostonbeastguy.social to my own domain name, but I didn't want somebody to snatch up My old one. So luckily, somebody gave me a 2nd invite and I just squatted on that one, and I've turned that one into a reply bot. So anytime somebody Replies to it or anytime somebody follows me, I send them a a skeet back and says, hey, wrong account.

Wes Bos

You're meant to mention this specific one. And that was that was kind of an interesting one as well, where I was I used a database to store who Which Skeets I had replied to, then I realized you can use the notifications feed and mark notifications as Red, which is something that Webex doesn't even do. So you could do it without a database, really, if you wanted to. Well, now even with the Twitter,

Scott Tolinski

The, Twitter API will bankrupt you before you can do a single thing. So Exactly. Yeah. And I built a spider as well that

Wes Bos

I basically got a list of my followers, and then I looped through all of my followers and got their followers. And basically, I just wrote a spider that the entire network.

Wes Bos

And within 45 minutes, I had every single account in a JSON file. There was At the time, there was like 37,000 accounts on it.

Wes Bos

And then I sorted them based on who had the most followers, who's following the most people. And it's funny.

Topic 24 34:08

Some users already exploiting following

Wes Bos

The almost all the top accounts are clearly people who just wrote a bot to follow everybody on the network, and they're getting close Yeah. Which is What happened on Twitter in the early days? People would just follow everybody and then unfollow them, and then it would look like they had

Scott Tolinski

a lot of followers, which is You could have it there clicking the follow button really quickly.

Wes Bos

Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Bos

That was actually back in Myspace days.

Wes Bos

There were some people that had, like, like a 1000000 friends on MySpace and people would buy this thing called BatterAdder, And it would literally do that. It would just click and add friend. Next 1. Add friend. Next it was just I don't know how it was built. I'd be curious to talk to the person that built it. But, Well, hey, Wes. You should listen to the episode

Scott Tolinski

61 of Darknet Diaries called Sammy.

Scott Tolinski

I'll link to that in the show notes. Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Sammy was a great episode where they talked about one of the first worms that this person accidentally wrote on Myspace for adding friends. They basically Wanted to add more friends, so the worm added some friends, and then they went to sleep. And then they woke up and there was like it was they they wrote a a basic worm that was

Wes Bos

adding friends, and it got out of hand. Yeah. Because you could put you just insert JavaScript into the page, and then it it just warmed out. Man, Matterhouse is a YouTube channel.

Topic 25 35:24

Early Twitter worms

Wes Bos

Oh, no way. Where it shows how to use it. Oh, man. I I never use this on MySpace because, like, you had to buy it. I didn't either.

Wes Bos

But there was, like, guys in bands that would just run this thing 247 because it was such good promo for your band. So I imagine Now that people there's there seems to be no rate limiting in place. I asked them, do you have rate limits? They're like, we haven't decided on that yet. But, like, I accidentally I put, like, a 200 millisecond wait in between every request. I forgot. I took it out one time, and it made, like, 10,000 requests Oh, in, like, like, 50 seconds or something like that. And I was like, oh, I guess there's no rate limiting,

Scott Tolinski

in place right now. I did see that there was, they were their servers were slowing down because people were, trying to brute force

Wes Bos

account passwords, which I know we Do not know what's up there. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Definitely check it out.

Topic 26 36:18

Blue Sky could disappear or could be future of social

Wes Bos

I think, it might flop, But yeah. It could very well it could very well be disappeared this time next year. We have no clue. I feel like it is It's good enough. I feel like it has really good uptake in the dev community. And I think that like it's it's kind of on us to push people in that direction, To at least give it a good shot, you know? So if you're listening to this podcast,

Scott Tolinski

try get an invite, try try jump on it and, like, Give this thing an honest shot as a at least the dev community place for chatting. Yeah. Totally. And I'm I'm personally going to at least commit 2. I re deleted the Twitter app off of my phone. 1, because it's compulsive enough for me anyway. So I'm the type of person who's gonna pop up in Twitter all the time when I shouldn't be.

Scott Tolinski

So get getting rid of the Twitter app, good for me. And then I have the Blue Sky app on there, and I'm trying not to check it compulsively, but still at least Committing to when I'm away from my computer, not using Twitter, not as a means to exclude anybody who is not on Blue Sky yet, But as a means of of controlling my own personal browsing habits. So, yeah, if I can wean off some of my, dependency in emotionally on Twitter, then that's all. Pro for me, regardless. Later. Peace.

Scott Tolinski

Head on over to syntax dotfm for a full archive of all of our shows.

Scott Tolinski

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