Rudy Fraser 0:01 I wasn't going to compete. 0:03 I left my jacket in there. 0:05 Flung over a chair. Speaker B 0:07 You weren't going to compete? Rudy Fraser 0:08 It's hilarious. Speaker B 0:12 I won't plug it in yet, right? Rudy Fraser 0:14 Go for it. 0:16 Yeah, do it. 0:25 And then I usually do extended so that you can See speaker notes. 0:28 Oh, Google Slides. 0:32 Yeah. 0:45 Ooh, nice. 0:59 I'm gonna let everyone introduce themselves, so I might just yell at people in a second. 1:10 Yeah, do that. 1:11 Hello, all you lovely people. 1:14 Hugging is for lunchtime. 1:17 Please move to your next destination. 2:47 All right everyone, can I ask you to please sit down? 2:50 Rudy Fraser is entering the stage. 2:53 We've sold you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge. Speaker B 3:13 Mic check, mic check. Rudy Fraser 3:17 Yeah? Speaker B 3:17 Okay, cool. 3:19 All right. 3:24 Hello everyone, I'm Rudy Fraser. 3:27 Brings me a lot of joy to be presenting on this topic here at the second Atmosphere conference. 3:35 It's also been— Rudy Fraser 3:36 yeah. Speaker B 3:37 It's been really cool to be able to ask people if this is their first Atmosphere conference. 3:46 And if this is your first Atmosphere conference, welcome. 3:51 And yeah. 3:52 I hope that there's something here that you can take away. 3:55 And ship something and build something for the community and ecosystem. 4:00 All right, so as I said, I'm Rudy Fraser. 4:04 I'm the founder and CEO of Black Sky Algorithms. 4:07 I am previously a fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center. 4:13 I'm the board chair of PAC Collective, which is a nonprofit that physically hosts about 25 mutual aid groups in New York City, and I'm an organizer with We the People NYC. 4:27 Black Sky launched about 3 years ago now, and we started off as just a custom feed on the Bluesky app, and now has been used by over 2 million people. 4:42 The feeds are used by 250,000 people every month, and we are a member-supported organization. 4:49 And yeah, and that member support is really important because the last time that I was here at Atmosphere Conference, it was just me on this slide, but now it's our entire team and our entire team is here today. 5:04 So if you see folks with a black sky shirt on, tell them what's up. 5:15 Yeah, and yeah, I think the thesis for Black Sky is that we really do believe that App Protocol has these unique properties that allow folks to— it helped us bootstrap a pretty large community, and we think that we're really interested in helping other folks basically do the same thing, leveraging the the stuff in the protocol. 5:41 So the title of this talk is Groundings with My Siblings, and I want to start by explaining where that comes from. 5:47 Walter Rodney was a Guyanese activist, scholar, Pan-Africanist, and I think most important for us today, he was a practitioner. 5:58 He's best known for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, but his earlier work, The Groundings with My Brothers, is one that changed how I think about what I'm doing with Black Sky. 6:09 Rodney was 26 years old, fresh off his PhD, teaching at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1968, and he did something that the university and the Jamaican government could not understand. 6:21 He left the campus. 6:23 He went into the communities and sat down with Rastafarians, people that— and I think a lot of people have an understanding of like Rastafarians in like Bob Marley's sense, but Rastafarians in Jamaica are considered like, they're like houseless people, they're like gutter punks, like they're outcasts. 6:46 And yeah, and so he sat down with these folks and they reasoned together, and that's what grounding is. 6:54 It's a Rastafari concept, sitting down together to reason. 6:59 And the part that I keep coming back to is that Rodney insisted that he was the student in those exchanges. 7:09 He said, "I got knowledge from them, real knowledge." He went in thinking he had something to teach, and he came out understanding that the people closest to the problem already had the analysis. 7:20 They didn't— they just didn't have the platform that he had. 7:24 His widow, Patricia, described grounding not as an event but as a practice. 7:29 A way of living, one where academics and activism were integrated and inseparable. 7:37 I'm borrowing this framework because over the last year I feel like I left the codebase and went to— kind of did the inverse— went to college campuses, went to conferences, went to community spaces, sat down with people, spoke, listened, probably talked to the most people I've spoken to in my life in the last year. 8:02 And like Rodney, I learned more from those conversations than I could have given back in those moments. 8:08 And so that's what this talk is about. 8:09 It's like what I heard, what surprised me, what we got wrong, and kind of, yeah, what we took away from these moments. 8:21 So here's what that grounding looked like in practice. 8:23 15 different cities, several college campuses and schools, a lot of time sitting with people who have never heard of App Protocol, never heard of Bluesky, but who care deeply about the same problems that I believe everyone in this room is building towards. 8:39 And now I'm grounding with you. 8:44 Really, I should be probably sitting amongst y'all, right? 8:47 Like, it's instead of just like speaking from the podium, but I want to give you what Rodney gave the people he sat with, which is just honesty and his experience. 8:59 There's a tendency in tech circles and communities to only share the wins, only share the big fundraisers, and I think if you follow me on Blue Sky Black Sky, I tell you when I think we're doing something wrong. 9:15 And, and yeah, and so I don't think you learn from just wins or highlight reels. 9:22 I think you, you learn from losses and from pain. 9:27 The open source community is at least adjacent to the ideal that information wants to be free, and so this is my giving this information to you for free so that you can build something. 9:41 That folks find valuable and you don't have to go through the same pain points that we had. 9:48 OK, first up, PDSs. 9:53 I think portability is a core premise of the protocol. 9:58 But there's a pattern in how it actually becomes real for people. 10:02 So in this chart, you can see— so over time, right, This is a chart pulled from Macuba, I think is their name. 10:12 They have this dashboard of independent weekly users posting from non-Blue Sky PDSs. 10:19 And that first gray circle there was, I kind of unintentionally posted about giving away invite codes. 10:31 I was talking about giving away invite codes to our mods. 10:33 And then Black Sky was like, there are invite codes? 10:37 And what are the invite codes for? 10:42 And so, yeah, so I did the Oprah meme and then we got like 200 replies asking for invite codes. 10:49 And at the time, I remember being pretty frustrated with where the Atmosphere community was at on data portability. 10:58 I feel like there are times when stuff is treated as a solved problem. 11:03 And so I made a post about it. 11:05 And a day later, I made a video showing how to migrate using the Goat command line tool. 11:13 That video now has 1,000 views on YouTube of just like a 45-minute video where I'm just like, this is hard, you probably don't want to do this. 11:25 And then the very next day, Bailey Townsend shipped version 1 of PDSmover. 11:38 And yeah, and so, and like, you can kind of clearly see that that makes a difference, right? 11:47 The purple circle is some ban controversies that we won't get too, too deep into. 11:56 But it was again a real pain point. 12:00 I think sometimes people see things on the internet and they think it's like, it maybe doesn't affect real life, but again, I'm in all these different places. 12:09 I was at a conference in the Bay Area, this observatory, and multiple times in the night people kept coming up to me, it was like, so what's going on with Link? 12:20 I'm just like, Do you know him personally? 12:24 But they just heard about the story, and for us it was very painful. 12:28 It brought our entire mission— like sometimes people are like, why do you even need a PDS? 12:31 Da da da da. 12:33 It brought our whole mission into question of like, why do you even exist then if this could happen? 12:38 And so, and it had a real dollar value to it. 12:41 Like we ended up shelling out $14,000 to like set up an AppView server, just the like bare metal. 12:47 And then went, and that's not counting the labor to like get all that stuff built and shipped. 12:57 And then the blue circle, which is the big spike, is EuroSky launching. 13:02 Shout out to them. 13:09 So you can see all this happened at the end of last year, and there were just like very specific things. 13:13 People did to change the narrative. 13:16 And as I mentioned to Blue Sky folks, with all due respect to Blue Sky, this was a fully community-driven effort. 13:23 There was no outside initiative. 13:26 It was just folks saw a problem, they worked on it. 13:30 I know Bailey was going back and forth with folks, figuring out how to make it better. 13:35 We were going back and forth. 13:37 Every invite code was done via my DMs at one point. 13:41 So I was literally talking to hundreds of people to coordinate this. 13:47 And so the pattern there is the story is really just like there was a tool, but it wasn't accessible to folks, right? 13:54 The command line tools didn't move the needle. 13:57 And then it went to this client-side Chromium-based tool that was mobile-friendly, and that was what folks needed. 14:06 And yeah, and so it was just like, to me, that felt very clear. 14:11 The users that we knew, they weren't ever going to download the source code and build something to use it. 14:19 It needed to be really clear and concise. 14:23 And we found out from just doing that, there are people using all types of browsers I've never heard of, personally. 14:30 And in different scenarios. 14:31 So imagine you got one of our first users who migrated. 14:34 It was like a half a gigabyte blob storage. 14:37 Imagine if you're trying to do that client side over like a cell phone network with some random browser. 14:44 You know what I mean? 14:46 And so, and yeah, and then what I think I tip my hat to the EuroSky folks. 14:52 What they did was they did it server side. 14:55 And so it was like it just happened in the background for the user. 15:00 And it became really turnkey. 15:01 And so we took that inspiration from that and built what became move.blacksky.community, which followed that same pattern. 15:09 Also, because we have this community space, we're able to analyze this 20 million record feed database and was able to find the real— people had real fear. 15:21 They thought that their accounts were going to get deleted if they did the migration process. 15:27 And so another thing that we did was add social proof. 15:30 So when you go to move.blacksky.community now, you see how many people are on the PDS. 15:36 You see, and it's sorted by people with big followers because people are like, oh, if I have a bigger account, how will this work for me, da da da. 15:43 So having that kind of social proof. 15:47 But we found that that was the effective way to help people get through the migration. 15:53 Yeah, now our PDS has over 30,000 accounts on it. 16:00 Yeah. 16:01 All right, the next one, a favorite, the app.biski-compatible app view. 16:14 I want to— this is like an important one for me because I think sometimes people point out, I guess, where we're at and not necessarily where we want to be going. 16:23 BlackSky is not trying to be a microblogging app. 16:25 We're not trying to compete with BlueSky on that. 16:31 The app modality or medium is not important for us. 16:36 To fulfill the mission of reaching millions of people but being independent, we needed to do this. 16:43 We needed to be able to say that we could do a backfill of the entire network. 16:47 It needed to be possible. 16:48 People have said it was done. 16:49 We needed to like actually do it. 16:52 And more than anything for me, I needed to prove to myself this could be done in a way that people would actively use it, that I would be able to log in, open it up every day, and like it would be an effective experience for me. 17:03 And it was hard. 17:04 And the things that I knew were going to be frustrating for people were the things that ended up being frustrating. 17:12 Some people like to act on the internet that like follower counts don't matter. 17:15 The biggest complaint is the follower counts not matching Bluesky. 17:22 To the point where we built a feature that says backfill in progress that analyzes what our count says compared to what Bluesky says compared to what Microcosm says. 17:32 And if it's a big enough difference, then we show that badge to people to try to get ahead of that and communicate that we're working on it. 17:42 Profile pictures not loading. 17:44 People are like, I can't recognize— I don't know this person by their handle. 17:47 I know them by their profile picture. 17:49 So if you don't have the profile loading, now it's like a weird experience when you're scrolling your timeline. 17:57 Stuff like that matters a lot. 17:59 Another thing that we found out that I don't think Bluesky knew themselves is that if you're banned from Bluesky, you aren't banned from the image CDN. 18:08 So your profile picture can load, but you are banned from the video CDN, so you can't upload videos. 18:17 And so now we're like, oh, we got an app view, boom, we unbanned you, like we reversed the decision, and then they tried to upload a video, but we were still using their video CDN, and now once again we look like we haven't fulfilled our mission. 18:34 And it's important to know these things. 18:35 I have on the kind of just like, I think what people think it's like setting up an app view, I just want to highlight some of that stuff is like, they think the top is just like record hydration. 18:48 Then it's like, there's 42 million people, but we don't care about all of them. 18:52 So like, what's the order that you backfilled the people's accounts? 18:57 Then there was like, stuff was taking too long. 18:59 And then people wanted to use Skeets app. 19:01 With our app view. 19:02 And then Skeets app had, like, a timeout on it, so that, that was, like, shorter than our timeout. 19:07 So then it was a bunch of 502 errors if you tried to use Skeets. 19:12 Notifications is its own thing. 19:13 There was a bug at one point where it was giving you duplicate notifications. 19:16 That's annoying. 19:18 Post aggregation, profile aggregation, those are the follow counts. 19:22 Handle resolution. 19:24 Being able to, like, include the Germ DM. 19:27 Get timeline, the further down is the harder that things got. 19:33 Get timeline, your following feed is really hard. 19:38 Mod appeals, so if Bluesky bans them and they're like, people are reaching out to us like, "Which one of you banned us?" It's a very tricky and complicated thing to answer and then get back to people about, You know, and again, every single time something like this happens, it's like, if you can't— if, like, why do you exist if we're still, you know, experiencing these things? 20:05 Um, OAuth. 20:06 You found out that OAuth doesn't allow you— if you do a social app fork, you're used to being able to, like, delete your account, deactivate your account. 20:14 We included OAuth to make it, like, really easy for anyone, like, even if they're not on our PDS, to be able to log into Black Sky, but then you couldn't— the OAuth permissions don't allow you to delete your account. 20:26 And so then we're like— then we had to like hack on PDS Gatekeeper to like do some things where like now we ask you— if you're on our PDS, we ask you for the password, and that allows you to delete the account. 20:39 And if you're not, we send you to the account management page, but we know that the account management page also like doesn't have like all the things that you need. 20:47 Right, so pain. 20:50 All this is pain. 20:54 And again, you learn from the pain, but we experienced the pain, so now if you want to do this, you know what's kind of coming, right? 21:02 That's the whole message of this. 21:05 Post nerd at Proto. 21:16 So something that I keep coming back to is like, and I actually got this from Marissa from our team, is like this concept of like the job to be done. 21:27 When I'm speaking to people, it's not to do @proto advocacy. 21:32 Like someone took their time out of their day to hear if I can solve a pain point for them. 21:38 I'm not gonna pitch you on on, you know, like, I'm not gonna pitch you on the cause. 21:43 I'm supposed to pitch you on, like, I can actually fix this thing that you're experiencing. 21:49 So if you, you know, a lot of the app protocol devs or the community, we're talking about record hydration, we're talking about Postgres optimizations. 21:56 You've gotten, those conversations are very far away from what the user is experiencing, unless your user is a developer, which they could be, But for us, we're trying to onboard communities of storytellers who are not sold on decentralized social media. 22:13 They're sold on community building as a tool, and then we said that this protocol allows us to get the things that you want out of it. 22:23 And yeah, so I spoke to many groups, many groups like this, along with AJ from Northwestern. 22:28 We spoke with Movement for Black Lives. 22:30 We spoke with Bull Factory, these are people who like, they're activist organizations, community builders with millions of followers on other platforms. 22:37 They've had people on their teams who've like built, they're like VPs of engineering at like social media companies, so they understand social media, they understand decentralized social media to a degree, very aligned, couldn't close those deals for various different reasons. 22:56 There were, and there were there were young folks at our South by Southwest talk who came to learn how decentralized social media can be a part of their content creator journey. 23:09 And if you— and this, which was like a little weird for me because it's like, you're in college and I think maybe do something else. 23:15 But, and then I gotta imagine how disappointing it was for you to like want to be— Rudy Fraser 23:21 get— Speaker B 23:22 you want to get lit on the internet and then you— we were talking to you about podcasting and RSS. 23:27 You know, but we can't write people off. 23:32 If we want this stuff to grow, right, like another— I posted about this one example, like there's a media organization, they wanted to reach a particular audience. 23:43 They wanted to reach Black Chicagoans. 23:45 We did not lose this deal because the complexity of that protocol, that wasn't hard to explain to people. 23:53 We didn't lose it because they were like, "Oh, masses don't exist." That's not why we lost it. 23:59 We lost it because they had a specific need. 24:02 They wanted to reach Black Chicagoans. 24:04 It's a decentralized network. 24:06 We don't have all that information. 24:08 It's disparate. 24:09 You may be on our PDS, but maybe some of you are on our PDS, other people are on other PDSs, you're on the feed, maybe you're using a different client app, all these different things that makes it hard, like even if we kind of knew these people existed, there wouldn't be a way to like do the same, 'cause they were able to then go to Facebook and Facebook's like, give us $20,000, we'll get you in front of a million people in the next year. 24:34 Can't promise that to people. 24:39 And yeah, and we've only ever done inbound. 24:43 We think that some things that maybe, we have some like theories that if we build out this project called Black Sky Cash, It will make the pitch more compelling to people, it'll make a clear monetization strategy, so maybe even if some things aren't necessarily all the way there yet, it's like, oh, here's a way that you can build community, do democratic governance, and have a way for you to fund things. 25:04 But the job to be done is never use App Proto. 25:08 The job to be done is solve the problem that I have. 25:16 Now, this one's very important. 25:17 Because we're pitching community builders, we are pitching the atmosphere in these spaces. 25:24 I'm not pitching Black Sky necessarily. 25:27 I'm pitching everyone's projects that are here. 25:31 I know I sometimes talk kind of crazy on the internet, but I am a lot of people's cheerleader. 25:41 I can't do all the things that y'all have done, but I do tend to get people to open up about their problems, and when they do, I pitch your products. 25:54 An example is like at South by Southwest, Karen Attia, who was fired from the Washington Post because of a post on Bluesky about Charlie Kirk, we were talking and she was like, you know, I wish there was a way to go live stream from my Bluesky account? 26:08 And I was like, there is. 26:10 Have you heard of Streamplace? 26:12 I was like, it's another app. 26:14 And she's like, well, why is it another app? 26:17 Um, and so we've had this pitch of like, you have, you know, there's the whole login with Bluesky, login with App Protocol. 26:26 That's even, that's even like a second step. 26:29 It's just like, why do I have to go to another place if you're saying that I can use this same thing? 26:35 Right. 26:36 So to me, this is like a tension in the atmosphere right now. 26:39 You can log into a dozen different apps with a single identity. 26:41 That's great to us. 26:42 But to everyday people being told, use this app for microblogging, use this one for live streaming, use this one for long-form content, it doesn't create delight. 26:52 It feels like what they already have, a bunch of apps. 26:55 And there's no even way to discover all the apps. 26:58 There's not an app store for App Protocol. 27:01 So there's no aha moment there for people. 27:04 Like, we have the aha moment. 27:06 We look at the firehose. 27:07 We look at your repository. 27:08 We know that all this data is on one account. 27:10 The user is just like, okay, this is another, this is another skin of a thing, right? 27:17 So for me, what would be compelling, and I think to the people that I've been talking to, is something like an app protocol browser, an app protocol app store, something that turns login with your identity across many apps from developer premise or a promise to a user experience. 27:39 So that's the question mark there. 27:40 It's like, I think we talk about app protocol as like the protocol and we use the comparison to the web. 27:50 Had debates about that even just in this trip. 27:53 I'm like, so what is the— well, the web has Firefox. 27:56 And I can go to any website with Firefox. 27:59 And it feels really simple, intuitive. 28:02 There's no universal app protocol client. 28:06 If you had to download— the equivalent is like downloading an app on your phone. 28:11 But then again, now we're just back to downloading a bunch of apps on your phone. 28:17 And if you have login with Google, then like, As a user, I'm like, what's the difference? 28:24 All right. 28:24 Finally, there is a book by Douglas Hofstadter called I Am a Strange Loop. 28:33 Oh, recognition. 28:34 Nice. 28:49 Of yourself perceiving the world, and that model changes what you perceive, which changes the model. 28:56 So when we started using moderation, we used Bluesky's Ozone. 29:02 It's open source, it works, but it wasn't built for us, right? 29:08 It was built for Bluesky's trust and safety team. 29:11 Our moderation team, it started out as like very community moderation, and we still want that to be that way. 29:20 We're even building more ways that the community can participate in moderation. 29:24 It's more like Ozone was built for a particular worldview, not necessarily a scale, because we can do peer moderation at scale. 29:35 Reddit does peer moderation at scale. 29:39 It's just a different opinion of how things work. 29:43 And so for us, our, like, Dr. 29:46 K, JD, they're community members. 29:48 They weren't, like, reviewing content for, like, a platform. 29:52 They were protecting a space that they're a part of. 29:56 And so Rishi on the team built Acorn and literally And from, as I understand it, because Rishi is very interested in coworking with people, because we're all remote right now, he and JD got on calls every day and just worked side by side. 30:16 And when JD ran into a problem, Rishi built something for it. 30:22 And so, and so, yeah. 30:24 And so what you're looking at on the screen is like the first thing a moderator sees when they open a session. 30:29 Not a queue. 30:30 A check-in. 30:32 How are you feeling right now? 30:33 Do you have water nearby? 30:35 You can step away. 30:36 Your well-being comes first. 30:39 There are session goals. 30:40 It could be time-based or item-based. 30:44 So moderators choose how much weight they can take on, because you could just loop, right, and just keep going, and that could be really, really heavy. 30:56 We're building collaboration tools in it. 30:58 We're building ways for us to govern our community from it. 31:01 We're going to build ways to issue badges to our community through it, where we use our feed, kind of works like a subreddit. 31:10 So Acorn is going to be built to manage the subreddit, where you can remove members, you can remove posts. 31:16 You could do this from your phone. 31:19 Our mods want to moderate from their mobile devices. 31:25 And yeah, Ozone doesn't, it just doesn't work like that. 31:29 It makes it really difficult to. 31:31 And again, that's not just 'cause it's some big platform, some billion person platform, it's just we built it the way our users, our community, our mods do things. 31:47 And so that's the strange loop. 31:48 Like you are the user. 31:51 You're also the builder, and the thing you build changes your user experience, which changes what you build next. 32:02 Toni Morrison said, "If the book you want to read doesn't exist, you have to write it." But it's deeper than that. 32:07 So once you write it, now it's out in the world, now it's coming back to you, right? 32:12 So the gift and the recipient keep changing each other. 32:15 So every lesson today comes from the same place. 32:19 We are the user, right? 32:21 I was the first one to migrate to the Black Sky PDS. 32:24 I also had the pain when it was just Goat, right? 32:27 I knew the, the app view had to work because, uh, like, the way that the community would expect it. 32:32 I knew follower counts had to be right. 32:34 Like, the first app view that I used that was independent from Bluesky, it was like half my followers. 32:38 Now this is weird. 32:40 Just so you just— you can predict these things, right? 32:44 And I know we have to get beyond just the dev community, right? 32:48 Like if we want it to be a big thing, like it has to be fun. 32:52 It has to be cool. 32:54 It has to have different, it has to have that delight, right? 32:57 It has to have these aha moments. 33:01 And so yeah, so that's the kind of thing. 33:04 We became, we become who we build for. 33:07 And that's not like a bug. 33:09 That's like the whole point. 33:10 And that's our practice of how we work. 33:12 Work on things. 33:14 Thank you. Rudy Fraser 33:37 Unfortunately, I have to hustle to