Ronen Tamari 0:00 story of trying to migrate a community to Bluesky. 0:04 And we wanted to hear from other people that are also working with their communities and trying to build community on Bluesky. 0:10 And we're on Twitter or other social networks. 0:13 Yeah. 0:14 And hear from you also. 0:15 What works? Maria Antoniak 0:16 What— Dr. Scott McGrath 0:17 yeah. Ronen Tamari 0:17 What insights do you have from your experience? Ariel M. Lighty 0:20 So I'll start and I'll kind of continue that question about Skyfollower Bridge. 0:25 So I think that's a really cool tool. 0:28 But I think one of the challenges with it is if people are joining after you've searched, then they don't appear. 0:36 You have to go research. 0:37 So I'm a PhD student, but I've on the side been slowly working towards a tool that is— it has to work similarly in the case of X because X, you can't export your followers and get username handles. 0:51 It gives you gibberish numbers. 0:55 Other platforms, they do actually export user handles. 0:59 So there's a little bit of complexity there in terms of data management from an EU perspective that you have to handle. 1:09 And so I've been thinking through a little bit of this. 1:11 I kind of did a vibe-coded version and now I'm like slowly thinking through like building this up as an actual system where, you know, Bluesky and Skylight and all these different AT protocol apps can actually implement this as like a notification that you can get, oh, someone just joined, now you can follow them, or automatically follow them, or whatever. 1:32 There's a lot of really cool implementations too of like verifying that you are who you as your Bluesky handle and your DID, you're associated with this LinkedIn account. 1:45 And if we can get that as like a verified, authenticated match, that makes it a lot easier to find those matches because sometimes the handles are a little bit different, especially since we can have domain handles on Bluesky. 2:00 That changes the equation a little bit. 2:02 So that is something I've been thinking about personally and trying to like move people over is like I want to be notified when someone is coming to Bluesky. 2:10 And not only that, I want them sorted in order of who's actually posting, not just who's here. Ronen Tamari 2:17 I think that would also help with what you said, Scott. 2:19 Like, if someone moves over to Bluesky and people get notified, they would get followed. 2:23 And then you get that dopamine hit of like, oh, people are engaging with me and they like to see me here. 2:28 So yeah, there's something there maybe. Ariel M. Lighty 2:30 Yeah. Speaker E 2:31 And I think I want to pick up on one thing that we'll probably need to engage with, like almost kind of a hosting, like the welcoming committee, if you will. 2:42 You know, kind of that piece. 2:45 Because that was a common refrain I heard. 2:48 Like, "Oh, it's just that I don't get engagement. 2:49 Nobody, you know, like nothing happens." And it's like, "Well, yeah, you're new." And you know, like you might have had, you know, other platforms and they engaged a certain way. 2:58 But for that kind of fertile ground to have people that kind of are engaging, like, "Oh yeah, let's jump in." Like, welcome. 3:06 I remember like during the entire phase of when we were trying, you know, in beta when we still had the invites and we're bringing people over, um, in for Science Twitter and that, you know, people actually set up like, you know, Hi SciSky where it's like, you're new here, tell us what you do. 3:24 Um, and that I think was one of the ways that kind of set the ground a little bit is like, like, yeah, this is what I do. 3:30 And you just, you kind of follow that and enough people were doing it. 3:33 You didn't necessarily have to have the entire community do it, but the bigger ecosystem was kind of popping in and saying, we're glad you're here. Speaker F 3:42 So I guess, how am I supposed to hold this? 3:46 Yeah, just at the bottom. 3:49 3 kind of general reflections or reactions to Scott's talk and thinking about— so I'm Maria Antoniak. 3:56 I'm a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. 4:00 I work in natural language processing, or otherwise known as AI now. 4:06 So that's my academic community. 4:08 I'm coming from like NLP, machine learning, Twitter, and now the AI, the AI social media community. 4:17 And so thinking about how that community has migrated or not migrated, that community has not migrated very well. 4:25 And I think there are a few reasons, there's a lot of reasons for that. 4:28 And there's also a lot of mystery. 4:29 Like if I knew all the answers, then I would, I would already have them all in Blue Sky. 4:34 But so one of the things is the industry connections in our research community. 4:39 So of course, a lot of what is happening in AI is to do with what is happening in industry, and that what is happening in research is also connected to what is happening in industry. 4:51 And so I think there's a general sense that if you want to be in the know, if you want to know what's happening in industry, if you want those kind of connections, If you're one of these, like, sorry, but like grifters and hangers-on who start up whatever, whatever, there's this feeling that you need to be on X and that's where people are. 5:11 So I think that is genuinely difficult to break away from. 5:17 Starter packs. 5:21 We tried this and it worked initially. 5:24 Like, I think there was also this sense of like, Ooh, there's this like prestigious list and I want to be part of the prestigious list. 5:33 Or, you know, I see that there are important people on that list and I also want to be on that list and I want to be in the place where this list is. 5:38 And so we had temporarily a lot of movement when we had this. 5:42 I was the one running our NLP starter pack and then there was like a lot of backlash, not just for NLP. 5:48 I think other starter packs in general, like they have some kind of design limitations and some problems, at least at that time, around like if you were added to a starter pack, you didn't know that you were added to a starter pack, and you would suddenly get 1,000 new— depends on who you were, you might get like 1,000 new mysterious followers overnight, a lot of them not anyone that you know or connected to, and suddenly your posts are getting a lot more attention, sometimes very negative attention, so I don't know. 6:23 I think we need something like a starter pack, but— and sorry, one more thing. 6:27 And then think about welcoming committee as well. 6:29 I think about like old days of Twitter and like they're like Follow Friday. Ronen Tamari 6:34 What's that? Speaker F 6:35 It's like hashtag Follow Friday and here are 5 accounts that you should follow. 6:40 There were all these kind of things on Twitter that I just— on one hand we could be like, okay, well we should do that too. 6:46 Like we But I don't know that it translates to our modern time and just like the way that we operate on social media. 6:54 Even when I say that out loud, it sounds like cringey. 6:57 And I don't know what the right way is. 6:59 I'm not the right cool person to do non-cringey things. 7:03 But someone should be thinking about that and replacing those old welcoming committee procedures with something new. Ronen Tamari 7:13 Just to call out Francisco, if you want to join this panel as someone who's on Twitter, feel free to hop in. 7:18 I don't want to put you on the spot, but just feel free if you want to crash the party. 7:23 Okay. 7:25 Yeah, just come up. Ariel M. Lighty 7:29 We're pulling in a guest for the audience on stream. 7:32 Uh-oh. 7:33 Phone a friend. 7:34 Phoning a friend. Ronen Tamari 7:39 Sure, but please introduce yourself. Speaker G 7:40 Introduce myself? Ronen Tamari 7:42 Yeah. Speaker G 7:43 Hello, I am Francisco. 7:47 I'm a heavy Twitter user. Ronen Tamari 7:50 Twitter users anonymous. Speaker G 7:55 Sorry? 7:56 It is an intervention. 7:57 No, I've been so excited about Bluesky for 5 years, and you know, a lot of my motivations are around getting to data sovereignty and moving the discourse that I think is important off of Twitter and into Bluesky. 8:14 Yeah, and I do, you know, I have a background in AI safety and tools for thought and community building. 8:23 And so this is all kind of my wheelhouse a little bit. Ronen Tamari 8:28 But thoughts about the sort of some of the resistance The resistance? 8:33 Yeah. Speaker G 8:34 Yeah. 8:37 So obviously there's just the network effects, the Matthew effect, right? 8:42 That winner takes all. 8:44 It's much more worth it for me to post on Twitter. 8:47 I get rewarded a lot more with attention. 8:52 The way I've been hoping to approach this is If I show that there are cool enough modes of interaction elsewhere with open data, it could be BlueSky, it could be through custom data sovereignty solutions like the community archive, which is something that I did for my Twitter community. 9:14 Yeah, if you show new use cases, then people might be persuaded by the extra value. Ariel M. Lighty 9:23 Yeah, yeah. 9:26 So I think that gets to kind of this idea of whether we're just trying to replicate Blue Sky or replicate Twitter on Blue Sky, or are we trying to do something different? 9:36 I think a lot of us here understand that the AT protocol offers a lot more than what Twitter itself could offer. 9:43 And so how do we start building out these systems to attract other people, and how do we get out that knowledge? 9:50 I think that is one big struggle maybe for some of us here, is we're only on the AT protocol now. 9:56 We're not posting anywhere else. 9:58 So how do we get these other people who are on the other platforms over here? 10:02 And I know in, in my community, research-wise, I'm chemical engineering and like computational biology, a lot of them are on LinkedIn. 10:10 They moved off of X, but they're on LinkedIn. 10:13 And when I go and look at those posts, they're long posts. 10:16 They're not 300 characters. 10:18 And so I think Leah has, um, extended lexicon that allows you to do longer posts. 10:24 And so that I think is definitely an attractor for a lot of scientists. 10:29 They do, they post long posts and they don't really love threads. Ronen Tamari 10:35 I also just want to throw in another question in the mix before we get on to kind of solutions. 10:38 I was also, because we talked in our kind of some of our pre-conversations about young researchers and like their new social media habits or lack thereof. 10:47 And yeah, also just kind of putting that in, and maybe, yeah, if you all have some insights there. Speaker E 10:52 Yeah, I think that was a piece that came to me as I saw, like, engaging the people that actually did have large presences on Twitter that had dropped off, you know. 11:04 I think they had kind of like just washed their hands, like, "I don't know if I wanna do that game again." And like that, there were multiple reasons for that kind of disengagement. 11:15 And I think, like, we should be looking at the younger, the actual doc students and undergrads, and like giving them a chance because they're going to be the ones that actually build the stuff. 11:27 They're going to be the ones that are going to have the ideas like, let's reinvent the wheel here. 11:33 And that's what I think where you can get people really interested in it. 11:36 So, you know, we might have actually passed a torch moment for like, the opportunity to really reconstitute it. 11:44 But I think we can take some of the pieces and make something better. 11:48 And I think just one other side I had was that the challenge really comes down to is like it's kind of similar to somebody who is really into coffee, right? 12:00 And like grinds their own beans and does the very particular way that they brew it. 12:08 You know, I think that's this community. 12:10 We're very into what the AP protocol can do. 12:14 But if you try to explain that too much, it really overwhelms people. 12:18 Like, why would I want to do that? 12:20 Like, I mean, like, so you're telling me it's always out there? 12:24 And like, people know when I block? 12:26 And it's like, yeah, but that's actually— there's some benefit. 12:28 And I ran into that several times when I'm trying to explain to people. 12:31 It's like finding that balance of like, You want to try it. 12:35 And like, you know, people might, you know, for example, a kind of ventilated seat in your car, like, why would I ever need that? 12:43 You take a 3-hour drive, you're like, oh yeah, yeah, now I get it. 12:48 But you gotta be there to try it out because otherwise it just doesn't click. Speaker F 12:55 So yeah, thinking about, um, like junior researchers, younger people, Again, there's this— there's kind of the marketing problem of like Bluesky is seen, I guess, as like millennial. 13:06 And I don't know, I can't solve that problem. 13:09 I don't know what to do about that. 13:11 But then we've tried to get feedback. 13:13 I try to talk to more junior students, younger people about like how they feel about social media and Bluesky in particular. 13:22 And I wouldn't say I have like a full picture, but part of what I hear— well, part of it I think is just in general the community is fractured, and there are other things going on, especially in the US, where like anyone on a visa posting on social media at all is very scary, potentially very high consequence act right now. 13:44 So there's that whole background, but usually what I hear is like, oh, it feels scary, or feels like you're up on a stage, or— and to some extent, I do think we have some new challenges, like what I was just mentioning, but also some of these are just— they actually may not be unique to right now, and I can remember when I was a junior student, I just lurked. 14:07 Of course, yeah, I also felt nervous, and I wasn't gonna just chime into random conversations between senior researchers. 14:13 I lurked, and that was fine, and I gained a lot from that, so There needs to be— so maybe on one hand, it's OK. 14:19 That's not a new thing for people more newer to a community to be more nervous about posting or joining, interacting in the community. 14:27 But then what we can do as more senior people or people who are more comfortable posting and being active is to give them something to gain from being there. 14:38 So interacting with each other, having conversations, posting about papers, posting papers of junior researchers, and trying to also build infrastructure to support that kind of sharing or encourage that kind of sharing. 14:52 I think that's one of the reasons that Paper Sky Jest is so great, right? 14:55 Like highlighting papers. 14:57 And that gives a clear gain to people. Ariel M. Lighty 15:03 So I'm actually not that much younger, really. 15:05 But I am a current PhD student. 15:08 And since I was, like, applying a few years ago, or I don't know what time is. 15:13 4 years ago? 15:14 Oh, God. 15:16 Yeah, so I was applying like 5 years ago, and what I can say is that I was pretty much on Instagram. 15:22 So it's a very visual-based community, but there is a very large, wonderful ecosystem of women scientists, scientists communicators, who were posting things to just help other— these were PhD students who had just started posting to help other people who are interested in PhDs to get into their PhD programs, just talking about their experiences, talking about the different types of programs, different situations that occur with all the different programs that exist, and that kind of thing. 15:55 And what I found is most of them are still on Instagram. 16:01 Um, I've, I've seen a few try to come over and they don't get engagement, so they're like, why be here? 16:08 Because there's also a fair amount of overlap with, okay, like, how can I use this to monetize? 16:14 Like, how can I use this for extra income? 16:17 I'm a PhD student, I don't have a lot of free time, so if I'm going to be making this content— that content takes a lot of time. 16:24 I've done it, it takes a lot of time to make the quality content that these students were making. 16:31 And so being able to kind of get some incentive to do that is pretty beneficial. 16:37 So if you come over from Instagram to Bluesky and then no one's liking anything, it's just kind of like, I'm not making money and no one's seeing it. 16:45 What's the point? 16:46 So one of the things I've been trying to work on is a custom feed that's PhD chatter. 16:52 And I know on Twitter, like, people just like use the hashtag. 16:56 And then over time it became like algorithmic where you didn't necessarily need to do that. 17:02 And so kind of what people did when they came over to Bluesky was just try to do hashtag-based feeds. 17:08 But what ends up happening is those end up being chronological feeds where people aren't getting the content that they want. 17:14 Like it kind of sometimes feels like you're getting ad blasted a little bit. 17:19 And so what I've been working on is more of a regex, like semantic style matching of like language, like common language that you might use when talking about research, when talking about your dissertation, your PhD paper, what you're doing in your academic career, and then filtering that from people's bios to just pull in, okay, this is a PhD student, let's filter out the professors. 17:48 But I think even if you're filtering out the professors, sometimes knowing that they can see it is a little bit of a deterrent, because especially as an undergrad, I know I was like, the brief moments I spent on Twitter, actually it was probably pre-undergrad, and like, I wouldn't want any professor or teacher seeing what I was saying. 18:10 I was just whining, because I needed to whine. 18:14 And so I think we also need those like closed permission spaces really to attract different groups, to give them that space to be free and feel comfortable. 18:26 But we also need to kind of like grow how we— how do we get people to find these feeds? 18:32 The search is not very good. 18:36 And so how do we get people even exposed to these things and finding the people that they can connect with that aren't necessarily people they're already connected with? 18:46 And I think that was a thing people found Twitter very useful for that hasn't necessarily existed as much yet on Blue Sky, at least in the academic sense. 19:01 I think that's very much been built, building up from existing networks rather than trying to expand and grow networks. Ronen Tamari 19:11 I know Eugene has a practice of like trying to find junior researchers' papers and posting about them. 19:16 And maybe we could do more of that somehow and make it more rich, like, I don't know, feeds that promote young researchers or give them more engagement somehow. Speaker F 19:26 I think, again, gain or showing, like, I've, through Blue Sky, got to know some junior PhD students and we're now collaborating through, like, you know, nice little social media interactions. 19:38 So I don't know, somehow, like, showing The rest of them, this is possible. 19:45 It's to your benefit to be posting about stuff. 19:48 You want people to see your papers. 19:51 There's a lot to gain by being on there, even if you aren't posting all the time. Speaker G 19:59 There's a nice hack, barely a hack, but replying to people on the topic of, oh, you know, making content is expensive. 20:11 Nobody sees my post. 20:13 When you're a small account, you want to reply to bigger accounts, and that's kind of how you give yourself to know for other people. 20:21 And you know, this— you could have good reply game, right? 20:25 Like you've got to reply properly, like it's improv or something, you know, like in a yes-and kind of way. 20:33 You want to be supporting the person you're replying to. 20:36 You wanna be adding something to the conversation. 20:40 And this is one of a basket of norms that kind of support a generative intellectual environment online, right? 20:52 And the norms aren't necessarily the same as they are in real life because you have a different set of affordances. Speaker E 21:00 I almost wonder if that's a way that you can kind of build this up is, We have these kind of pitches and sessions usually at conferences where it's like kind of the junior members and students, you know, how do you kickstart your career? 21:18 This would be valuable content. 21:20 Like, I mean, I think that's one of the age pieces is like Twitter started off like nobody knew what it was, and it kind of evolved into like, oh, this can actually be powerful. 21:32 And so, I think if we had all rolled the clock back, you know, 5 or 10 years, and like we were coming in from this like, okay, I need to do this, but I don't know how. 21:43 And like, I don't want to mess up. 21:47 And I think, and like, particularly in, you know, Twitter, the actual incentive structure is conflict. 21:55 So, it is about like, even if you were like an undergrad, you might have, somebody jump on you out of the blue with this huge account and you're just like, what did I do? 22:05 And that's why I think like, you know, the LEIA features are phenomenal in that way because it is in that sense like, let's give you a little bit more control. 22:15 Like, do you want to stand up like, no, that's wrong and here's why and like, I'm gonna get in this, or like, I'm not up for this and I just need you to go away before this goes on. 22:25 And so you have that lever. 22:27 Which I think could be a piece that does help cultivate the next generation. Speaker F 22:32 I'm just having one more thought about this right now, which is like, maybe it's just all wrong, especially for us, like if we're not the junior people to be worrying about why aren't junior people, how do we make it cool? 22:45 And instead, like I could think, you know, any academic in the room, if you've organized a talk series or a Cloak Camp, you're like, why is no one coming? 22:50 How do I get to see? 22:51 Like you need to get the faculty to come. 22:53 If their advisors are on Blue Sky, they're going to be on Blue Sky. 22:56 So maybe we should just focus on that. 22:59 How do we get the senior researchers who are comfortable posting clearly, because they're posting on X or LinkedIn, how do we get them on Blue Sky? Ronen Tamari 23:09 Uh, we can open it up to the crowd if people want to talk, ask questions. Ariel M. Lighty 23:13 I just think it's a really good point about that it's hard us as senior academics know what's necessary. 23:22 I was thinking about how we need to also avoid trying to put like a square peg into a round hole with this kind of stuff. 23:29 And maybe the solution for people who are more early career, for instance, you see there are a lot of different trends in social media use. 23:36 I think we as millennials just don't know what to use these days. 23:41 I think I see things like the group chats are far more popular and people generally focus more on chats and use more posts as places, also because they feel safer and less overwhelming. 23:52 It makes me wonder if things like Roomie could somehow be adapted to work for this kind of science use case, having these private chat spaces but that are also linked in with the things that your professor is on and you can talk about science on. Maria Antoniak 24:06 I think we're really missing out on this fact too that there's no group DMs. Ariel M. Lighty 24:09 Missing out on this kind of ability to have these more close, safe spaces. 24:14 Because I agree with what Ariel said, I think as well about how unsafe I felt sometimes as a vendor rep posting online. 24:21 This big professor can so easily see it and you're really afraid by it. Speaker G 24:28 So, hi. 24:37 Sorry. Ariel M. Lighty 24:38 So to summarize kind of the comment and question for the stream, Emily was just kind of reiterating the point of, okay, yeah, like as an undergrad, it was so overwhelming to be able to like to post and then know like some big professor could like see this and like do something about it. 24:57 Maybe we can use Rumi as a potential avenue for like providing group chats, which seem maybe more popular with the younger generation. 25:08 And provide a more private space for them to interact while still being on the same platform where their professors are. Speaker G 25:15 So I don't actually know what Rumi does. 25:18 I'm assuming it's like— Ronen Tamari 25:19 It's like Discord on Appraiser. Speaker G 25:21 It's like Discord? 25:23 Cool. 25:24 Yeah. 25:25 Well, I think a lot about the dark forest problem, which is basically this, that the open internet opens you up to surveillance and unwanted attention. 25:35 And there's the Dark Forest Collective who kind of write about this a bit, and then the usual answer they give is, oh, people retreat to the cozy web, which is group chats. 25:48 One thing that bothers me about that solution is that you don't get discovery, and the contributions you make in the safety of your group chat don't necessarily percolate to the knowledge commons, right? 26:03 Unless someone takes the link you just posted or takes a screenshot and repost it to some other group chat. 26:09 So I think it's really important to figure out if there's something in between the open internet and group chats. Ronen Tamari 26:22 And I think we have someone from Rumi in the room. Dr. Scott McGrath 26:30 Thank you. Maria Antoniak 26:30 Thank you. 26:31 I love this comment. 26:32 I totally agree. 26:34 That's such a critical part of why we're making Romy on that proto. 26:41 Like, this is what we want. 26:42 We know that communities want to work together to create stuff. 26:46 And if that's a community of researchers, like, you know, working on a problem, whether it's like within an academy or some other context, like people creating ideas together and like chat for us, like we create chat because we feel that chat is the lowest barrier of entry to contributing to a discussion and we want to create Roomie, you know, I'm not trying to sell Roomie, but like yeah, to say like We can do that and then progressively like build in the structure and we can keep refining on our ideas and move to like publishing to the broader ecosystem. 27:29 We want to get— have these ideas but not lose them. 27:33 Not like lose that knowledge and yeah, to be cultivating knowledge and sharing it with whoever we want to collaborate with in the broader world. 27:43 So I just wanted to say like yeah, thank you for your comment. 27:45 Yeah, we're right with you. Speaker G 27:47 Thanks for building it. Ronen Tamari 27:50 I've got another question. Ariel M. Lighty 27:51 Any other comments from the room? Speaker H 27:56 So I don't really have too much of a horse in this, but I just follow a lot of scientists on X and Blue Sky. 28:02 And this is— I just want to preface this by saying, you know, I don't think that people shouldn't do this, but— and this is going to be a bit brusque, but, you know, I was just thinking about the stuff about the starter pack and the stuff about like creating cultural norms. 28:16 And I'm kind of just like going to drive the dagger in. 28:18 It's like, you know, with the starter packs, when you follow them and you know that they're all like seasoned microbloggers, you're like, okay, if I hit this starter pack follow, am I going to get a lot of like good science and new emerging science stuff? 28:34 Or am I going to get like a bunch of crashouts from X addicts who are like Diaspora-traumatized, right? 28:43 So I'm thinking like, is there something we can do about like, how to like rehabilitate people who have been using microblogging for a long time to make it more comfortable for finding cool stuff? 28:56 And also just maintain like, you know, like I don't want to say you can't do it, you've earned it, you know, you've done a lot of great stuff, but also We see a lot of it already. 29:05 So if there's new interfaces, new norms that can be done about this. Speaker E 29:20 I had a joke earlier. 29:21 I was going to say, you know, ask Maria, like, was she doing machine learning starter pack number 1, 2, 4, 5? 29:30 The original. 29:32 That was one thing I noticed too is that we did spill over and there was kind of jockeying for like prestige. 29:39 Like, oh, you got to make it onto the, you know, that list. 29:44 And so that is, you know, part of the challenge. 29:47 I think it's something where, you know, to get back to the kind of Rumi piece, I like the idea of, creating space for people to get their bearings. 30:01 You almost have to let, you have to figure out your identity. 30:04 Are you going to be, what hats are you gonna wear? 30:08 And I think the people that I see that enjoy it the most switch those out. 30:13 They're like, yeah, I'm a scientist, but I was talking about it at lunch, one of the people in my feed that actually did stick around is huge into vintage computers. 30:23 And he will post his weekends are full of going in there and showing off those computers. 30:29 And so that's just, you know, that's related to his job, but that's just his passion. 30:33 And I think letting people figure out that identity, like I'm not going to be, you know, like I've got to be the PhD student in this. 30:41 I've got to represent my field and my school. 30:43 And like it's okay to show off your knitting, to show what you're enjoyed with. 30:49 And I think that space is needed. Speaker F 30:52 Yeah. Ariel M. Lighty 30:53 So I'm going to play off that in a second, but I just want to mention that we did have a break planned now. 30:58 So if you need a break, please go take a break. 31:00 We are going to continue with the talks at 3:00 promptly. 31:05 But yeah, so I think like the thing that is wonderful about Blue Sky is, you know, I did feel a lot of that pressure to just be one person and post about one thing on Instagram because, these things have one algorithm. 31:20 They see what you're posting about, and that's the algorithm. 31:22 Like, you can't change what you're doing. 31:24 Like, I saw many people go through this of like just having multiple accounts to post about all these different things, and I could never do that. 31:31 Like, I just like am incapable of having multiple accounts and posting multiple things. 31:35 So I find Blue Sky like very welcoming in that respect of I can post whatever. 31:41 And if you don't want to see some content, Don't follow me, just use feeds where you see my posts. 31:47 Like, I think there's a lot of people here at Atmosphere Conference where I don't actually follow them, but I regularly interact with them because I use the Atmosphere feed that I've made where I can see all of their relevant posts to me. 32:01 And sometimes I'll follow them, but I like to keep my follow list very low so I don't get overwhelmed. 32:07 And I don't really want to see political content because I get very overwhelmed. 32:12 But like, I post— I actually don't post that much science, but that's because my science is hard. 32:19 And also I haven't published anything yet, which we love open science and we would love to do that, but doing it is hard. 32:28 Yeah, so I mostly post AT science stuff, but sometimes I post art, sometimes I post— I don't know, I don't even know what I do. 32:36 But yeah, I think to that point of like starter packs, every time there was a starter pack, I know like there was one for a few that I was interested in and I always converted them to a list. 32:48 I didn't want to be forced to follow every single person because then you also are following. 32:54 I think the default is that you see everyone's reposts and their replies in your following feed. 32:59 I immediately turn those off, but I don't think that's necessarily something everyone was doing. 33:03 And so I think there was also some amount of people just not using Bluesky, 'cause they'd go to their following feed, and it's just retweets of all the horrors of the world, 'cause there's a lot of them, and that's valid, but once you've seen it once, you know it. 33:19 Okay, go do what you can about it. 33:21 You don't need to keep seeing it. 33:23 Like, do something. 33:25 Don't just drown. 33:28 But yeah, so starter pack's not my favorite. 33:31 I do like lists, and I do like feeds. 33:35 And if you want to talk to me about making a feed, I can help you with that. Ronen Tamari 33:40 I think we had more— another question? Ariel M. Lighty 33:42 So we have 2 more comments from the room, and then maybe somebody of you wants to close the panel and then go to the break, and the next session will start at 3:00 PM. 33:54 So we have 1, 2 more. Speaker H 33:58 Thank you. 34:00 Being science-y, I'd like to make a hypothesis, and that is that some of the, the challenges that you've described and the solutions that you've described are bounded within the ways that the BlueSky app itself works. 34:15 And we've talked a lot about protocol and backend and techie nerd stuff here, but I wonder if you have any thoughts about whether a different app view, different interface is something that, for instance, could put longer form posts side by side with short posts or whatever might help ease that onboarding and community building. Speaker F 34:44 Yes. 34:45 I gave a talk this morning about Lia, which is an app view that tries to build in a lot of our various learnings. 34:53 And wishes for customization for research-specific uses. 34:59 So check out that talk. Speaker E 35:00 I'll say too, like, one thing that's also emerged from seeing— so like, Richard Farrow does the MedSky community, and he's a machine. 35:14 He's got like 70 feeds, and he did the Olympics feed, And he does Latin Sky. 35:21 And so Richard, I don't know if you're watching on the stream, but, you know, hats off to you. 35:26 But the reason I bring it up is because he's taking nuance from Black Sky too and seeing like, oh, there could be some really cool stuff we can do there with labelers and like verified users. 35:40 And, you know, because he's also concerned about medical misinformation. 35:45 And so how do you fight that? 35:46 And so that's, I think, the iceberg that we're standing on is like there's a lot of depth here. 35:54 There's a lot of opportunity. 35:56 And it sometimes becomes overwhelming with that there's almost too many tools for us to engage with. 36:00 Like which ones are effective? 36:02 Which ones are going to work? 36:03 I think we have to kind of build it like Maria has done and see, you know, like what resonates with the community? 36:09 What do they need? 36:11 And that's what I think, you know, how we get there. Ariel M. Lighty 36:15 Yeah, so I think Leah is a really good direction. 36:18 And I really like the idea of, you know, being able to do embedded lexicons. 36:24 Because then we're taking advantage of this AT protocol ecosystem. 36:28 But we're leveraging it in a very AT science format. 36:33 And I'll just mention Richard also runs the STEM Labelers feed, which I think is— demlabels.xyz. 36:42 I could be wrong on that, but it— you can find me if I'm wrong and ask me later. 36:46 But he also runs that feed— or sorry, not that feed, that labeler, which also has lists for each one. 36:51 And so I would like to encourage you all, if you are scientists of any kind, you know, as we mentioned earlier, don't have to be a traditional scientist, grab a label. 37:02 I know it's a little bit difficult right now to find the labels. 37:05 I'd like to think about how we can move that to an easier-to-access system. 37:11 And I think that's one challenge that we have as a science community is we are generally scientists at our core. 37:20 We have jobs that are in science. 37:22 We're often overloaded with work already as researchers. 37:26 And so being able to connect with the wider developer community and have them get interested in this and have us have them help us build these things because we are much more limited in our time. 37:40 And then that gets into, of course, questions of funding. 37:42 Okay, how do we make sure these developers are getting funded? 37:45 But really building those bridges, I think, is also beneficial for science as a science, you know. 37:53 Well, we can start building, like, the open science stuff that was being talked about earlier. 37:58 We can start making these modular data connections and evidence linking to claims and all of these things. 38:06 If we are working people with people who know science, who know development, but then also taking people who are really just mostly science and people who are really mostly just developers and bringing us all together, I think is really how we move and make like these app views and get people attracted to it. 38:24 Because I think you're right, like Blue Sky by itself That's what people know. 38:29 So there's always this challenge of, okay, how do we get them to know? 38:32 Well, you have this BlueSky account, but you can just use Leah, which gives you your science that you want. Ronen Tamari 38:41 I think. 38:41 Yeah, well, one more question. Dr. Scott McGrath 38:48 Okay, so this is, I don't know, comment or discussion. 38:52 I don't know. 38:54 So I've heard today a lot of discussion around governance around the sciences. 38:59 Basically, you know, how do we make sure we have full control over our research and the documentation with it and making sure, you know, it doesn't get in the wrong hands, hide from AI training, for example. 39:09 And then kind of the segue always goes into Rumi and such. 39:12 So one of the things that I'm— for full disclosure, North Sky Social, I'm working on a private permission data service. 39:21 And so with that, it's basically like a permission layer, you know, where you can kind of like define communities or groups. 39:26 And so this is where, you know, we're doing it with the goal of like, you know, for marginalized communities that are always basically being targeted. 39:36 And one thing for me is like I'm always, I'm basically like looking at other use cases for it. 39:40 So I remember I talked to Torsten last month at the Berlin AT Proto meetup around what they're doing with both like papers and documents, which doesn't quite fit for how it works. 39:50 But as far as, like, general comment, it's like, if there are other use cases from the sciences that actually would fit this, I'm very eager to also discuss that. 39:58 Like, our part, you know, I'm doing some also my spare time, but it's always something that's like, once we kind of get it, it's actually being developed in the open, everything's out, the codes are out there. 40:08 But I would be keen to kind of see what else can actually ordered for it because it's basically being developed as primitives that anything can be used for it. Ronen Tamari 40:22 Okay. 40:23 Oh, did you want one more? Ariel M. Lighty 40:25 Cool. Speaker F 40:25 I just had one closing thought. 40:27 If we're thinking about why scientists are migrating or not migrating, I think we might also overestimate their understanding of anything about atproto and atmosphere. 40:37 When I told people I'm going to AtmosphereConf, even people who are very active on Bluesky have no idea. 40:42 What atmosphere is. 40:44 So we might be— there might be a lot more marketing that we can do. 40:49 There are already strong movements in science for like open science, and so if we can sell things the right way and make it clear— and that's something that like custom apps can also let us do. 40:58 We can do that marketing and emphasize certain features in ways that BlueSky does not. Ronen Tamari 41:06 I think we're closing up for now, so just Yeah, so we'll move on to the next session. 41:11 We also have a session upstairs with Matthew Lowrie. 41:16 Yeah, maybe we can give a round of applause first. 41:18 Thank you. 41:18 Please continue in the end conference if you have more thoughts on this. 41:28 And yeah, now we just have a parallel session upstairs with Matthew Lowrie about sustainability and building research institutions on App Proto and what that looks like. 41:37 So there'll be a few interesting speakers there, and here we'll have some researchers telling us about their PhD research on App Proto and Blue Sky.