Tyler Fisher 0:02 Hello. 0:02 All right, let's start over, uh, for the stream. 0:06 Hello, I'm Tyler Fisher. 0:07 Uh, I make a project called Syl, which is a client on top of the Bluesky post lexicon that aggregates, uh, the top links in your network. 0:15 It's a unique client experience that nothing else in the atmosphere offers right now, uh, and I think we need more unique types of clients, uh, so I'm going to talk about how we can achieve that today. 0:26 Last year I moved to Haarlem, a small city in the Netherlands. 0:30 At the center of the city we have the Grote Markt, a large public plaza that is overlooked by the Sint-Bavoelkerk, the giant church. 0:38 It's a grand plaza that on the weekends turns into a public square for local vendors, but at any time during the week it's a lovely place to be. 0:49 It's quiet, safe, comfortable. 0:52 You'll also notice in this photo it's car-free. 0:55 The Netherlands is famous for its pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, but it wasn't always this way. 1:00 The Grote Markt in the 1960s was more of a parking lot, and a road and a traffic circle going through it. 1:08 When visitors visit the Grote Markt today, they tend to think of it as it's always been this way. 1:14 This is an ancient public square that's been this way since the 1300s. 1:18 But it's not true. 1:20 The Grote Markt was transformed as a result of sustained protest and community engagement in Harlem during the 1960s and '70s to rip out the road, to rip out the parking, and make it a pedestrianized plaza. 1:33 This got me thinking about how cities transform to places that are designed more for people, and what we can learn from walkable cities about transforming digital spaces. 1:44 Ultimately, walkable cities are about getting people to walk or take some other form of mobility to their destination instead of driving a car. 1:53 The American city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk in 2013 about building walkable cities. 1:59 He says that a walk has to offer 4 things for somebody to walk or take some other form of mobility instead of drive. 2:08 It has to offer these 4 things simultaneously. 2:10 There needs to be a proper reason to walk. 2:12 The walk has to be safe and feel safe. 2:15 The walk has to be comfortable. 2:16 And the walk has to be interesting. 2:20 I, like many of you, have been thinking about how do we grow the atmosphere. 2:24 Building the atmosphere is an infrastructural change to the internet on the level of transforming a city from one that is car-centric to one that is person-centric. 2:35 So in thinking about this problem, I found myself revisiting Speck's theory, but for the atmosphere. 2:41 There needs to be a proper reason to join the atmosphere. 2:43 The atmosphere has to be safe and feel safe. 2:46 The atmosphere— the atmosphere has to be comfortable, and the atmosphere has to be interesting. 2:52 We can break this theory into 4 parts: purpose, a proper reason to join the atmosphere; safety, the atmosphere has to be safe and feel safe; comfort, the atmosphere has to be comfortable; And interest. 3:04 The atmosphere has to be interesting. 3:06 I'd like to propose this 4-component framing as a structure for how we think about building atmospheric clients. 3:14 In this talk, I'm going to walk through each of these 4 components and what they mean for client design. 3:18 I'll talk about how I think about them in my own projects and offer some inspiration from elsewhere in the atmosphere that I think do some of these things particularly well and discuss what opportunities I see for us to further atmospheric clients in these four directions. 3:34 Let's start with purpose. 3:35 Speck's original theory describes us as having a proper reason to walk. 3:40 For this, he means having a destination in mind. 3:42 For a walkable city, you have to have schools and doctors, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, everything you need within walking distance. 3:52 We're all here building new apps, new experiences, trying to entice people to join the open social web. 3:58 But why would they? 3:59 Often we lead with pitches about data sovereignty, privacy, openness, and while these are critical features, it's why we're all here, they should be a given for atmospheric applications. 4:10 People need more purpose than that. 4:12 It's not enough to build the pedestrianized streets of the internet. 4:15 They have to go somewhere. 4:18 The inability to convince people to join new social networks is a long-studied problem. 4:23 Switching costs are real. 4:25 People won't move unless their network has already moved. 4:28 We can't solve this problem overnight. 4:31 What's exciting about AT Proto is the opportunities offered by the PDS. 4:35 There have been over 40 million signups, uh, for Bluesky so far, each with their own PDS. 4:41 Each of those already have an account with your app too. 4:43 But if you're offering your own experience and your own lexicon separate from the Bluesky experience, this is somewhat cold comfort. 4:50 40 million people can sign into your app, but if there is no real content and their people aren't on your lexicons yet, there's not going to be much for them to engage with. 5:00 So how can we leverage the Bluesky existing network but offer new experiences that offer new motivations to join the atmosphere? 5:10 One option is to build clients on top of the existing lexicons but offer new experiences. 5:14 And that's what I've done with Syl, my link aggregation client. 5:17 That is built on top of Bluesky and Mastodon. 5:20 Syl reads your following timeline, finds the most popular links in your network, and offers you a different picture of your feed by rank ordering the most popular links in your network. 5:33 Its most common use case for people is as a news reader. 5:37 Typically, the most commonly shared URLs are news stories. 5:41 Many people use social media for news. 5:43 And CIL offers them an optimized way to do so. 5:46 This is a new experience built on top of an existing lexicon. 5:50 But CILs read-only. 5:51 What if you wanted to offer a whole new social experience without having to bootstrap a whole new lexicon? 5:58 Sebastian Vogelsang's Flashes offers a really compelling concept here. 6:02 It's a photo-sharing app akin to Instagram. 6:04 But it uses the Blue Sky post lexicon as its root. 6:08 But rather than— limit itself to the limitations of the post lexicon in terms of photo sharing. 6:13 It adds sidecar records on top of the Bluesky posts so that in the Flashes app you get a more full photo sharing experience. 6:23 But Bluesky users can still see and interact with those posts. 6:26 So you're immediately getting the benefit of being on the Atmosphere while still offering a new experience. 6:33 So now the Atmosphere as a whole has two separate experiences to offer people—microblogging and photo sharing—and they're seamlessly connected, letting everyone take advantage of the increasingly growing social graph. 6:46 As the atmosphere grows, more lexicons will get adopted, offering more opportunities for extension, remixing, and combination from the client experience. 6:55 The community developing around standard outside is bearing a ton of fruit here. 6:59 In the long-form space, I would love to see more work around premium news reading experiences. 7:05 There's both a supply and demand problem here of getting news onto protocol and getting readers to understand that there is news on the protocol. 7:12 I'm going to talk more about news on ATproto at a panel tomorrow at 10 AM if you want to hear me talk more about that specifically. 7:20 But back to Speck's theory, he says the walk must be safe and feel safe. 7:25 This phrasing is specific. 7:27 They're in fact two related things here: being safe and feeling safe. 7:32 It's an important distinction and one we have to think about as we design digital spaces. 7:36 When you first talk about safety in digital spaces, the first thing you're gonna think of is content moderation. 7:43 I have no personal experience with content moderation. 7:45 It's not something I do instill beyond allowing people to mute words and domains and accounts. 7:51 I'm just not an expert, so I'm not going to say much about content moderation today. 7:56 And I'd rather point you to the experts in the space. 7:58 So Black Sky just released Acorn, which is a community moderation tool that they built with prioritizing the health of the moderators. 8:06 And I think that's a really awesome approach. 8:09 The team at Roost has released Osprey, which is a more automated approach to dealing with abuse on social media and automating that moderation burden. 8:20 And then research by Aaron Kassane and Darius Kazemi from a few years ago, published research on moderation in the Fediverse and composable moderation. 8:29 It is about the Fediverse, but I think it offers a ton of lessons as we think about this in the atmosphere as well. 8:34 I want to tackle safety from a different angle, which is how can our social media clients encourage healthier social media habits? 8:42 After all, even in a well-moderated network, we can become addicted. 8:46 When the news is bad, we can fall prey to doomscrolling. 8:49 Even with reverse chronological timelines, Or algorithmic timelines, the context collapse of different topics mashed together, uh, can overwhelm and confuse us. 8:59 With Syl, I want to find solutions to these problems. 9:02 Uh, by default, Syl aggregates the top links in your network, uh, over 24 hours. 9:07 So, if you leave it at that default, uh, Syl doesn't actually change very much throughout the day, and this is actually a good thing, um, if your primary use case for, for social media is reading news. 9:16 Your network will surface the news that matters when— and once it reaches you, there's going to be a ton of context from your network helping you process it, helping you understand it. 9:26 As the story develops, you don't need to continue scrolling your timeline where only the every 10th post is actually the thing you're trying to learn about right now. 9:35 So it groups it all together, keeping your mind focused and allowing you to read the story and grapple with its ramifications without jumping to another topic and switching context. 9:48 SILs— these tactics are working with SILs users who regularly report that it's helping them use social media less while still staying engaged. 9:59 David Crespo says he stays logged out of BlueSky on his phone and only uses SIL on his phone. 10:05 Robinson Meyer says he can dip in and out throughout the day. 10:11 David Ziff says if you want to use BlueSky to follow news but you find feeds overwhelming, SIL is a good alternative to that. 10:19 This is giving users a lever of control over their experience, and this contributes to them feeling safe in the atmosphere. 10:29 What other modalities can we offer in the atmosphere that offer a more controlled experience over social media? 10:36 I really love Anasota, which turns Bluesky into a a card swipe-based experience and layers on a moth collecting game and all kinds of really neat artistic approaches to social media. 10:50 It also has similar motivations to still have calm and focus rather than the real-time drip feed of social media, traditional social media design. 10:58 It has a stamina meter, so if you swipe too much, it tells you you got to stop. 11:02 You're out of stamina. 11:04 I think it's really brilliant and offers a ton of things to learn. 11:09 Overall, how else can we help users to leverage the collective intelligence of their networks without forcing them into the same tired designs that we've been using for social media for the last two decades? 11:20 We've spent enough time with both chronological timelines and algorithmic timelines to know the problems well, so it's time to move beyond these and offer new experiences for people that give them control and help them feel safe in the atmosphere. 11:34 Back to our walkable cities analogy, spec says the walk has to be comfortable. 11:38 In the physical space, that can mean quiet roads, accessible crosswalks, well-paved paths. 11:43 In the digital space, I think about comfort as meeting people where they are. 11:47 Joining the atmosphere should not require a downgrade to their user experience. 11:52 And this is a really tall task. 11:54 We're going to have to stretch ourselves. 11:55 Many of us, myself included, are believers in the web over native apps. 12:00 But it's undeniable that users prefer and expect native apps, especially on their phones. 12:07 With Sill, the number one question I get when I tell people less online than me about it is, how do I get it in the App Store? 12:16 It's a website. 12:16 I say, just put it in your web browser, sill.social. 12:19 At that point, I lose a lot of people. 12:21 They might try it once while I'm there in the room with them. 12:24 If I see them a week later, I ask them how it's going, and They haven't gone back. 12:28 They don't think about it. 12:29 They're not in the web browser that way. 12:32 I'd show them how you can add it to your home screen still as a progressive web app. 12:36 But after walking through that menu diving and explaining the differences between progressive web apps and native apps, I've already lost them. 12:43 They just want to be able to install it from the App Store. 12:46 So I built an iOS app for Syl that's now in testing. 12:50 And if you want to get on the test flight, here's a QR code. 12:52 I hope to build an Android app after I get through the launch process of the iOS app. 12:57 Over half of Syl's web traffic comes from iOS users, so that's why I started with iOS. 13:02 And begrudgingly, I actually do now see how a fully native app for Syl offers some real benefits for those users. 13:08 With deep OS integration, I can offer push notifications. 13:12 This takes Syl's notification feature that already existed to its natural conclusion, right? 13:16 Now Syl can tell you, based on parameters you define, Syl can send you a push notification when news is emerging in your network. 13:25 And it can find you when it happens. 13:28 Sorry, I lost myself. 13:32 It can offer widgets, giving you a quick at-a-glance view of the top link in your network without ever having to really even open the app. 13:42 I can offer a native share target. 13:44 Syl also does bookmarking. 13:46 So with the native share target, you can bookmark a link from anywhere you experience it within the operating system. 13:53 So it is currently in beta and you can, yeah, join the test flight if you would like and let me know how it goes. 13:58 I'd love your feedback. 14:02 For all of big tech's faults and misalignments, they offer a comfortable experience to users. 14:08 They employ legions of people to focus exclusively on user experience and they do it on every platform, web, iOS, Android, and more. 14:17 Many of us in the atmosphere, myself included, are founders or —solo founders or small teams. 14:23 Somehow we have to deliver on better user experiences for people with far fewer resources. 14:29 But here's our advantage. 14:30 For all big tech's resources they throw at user experience, they often throw them at misaligned ends. 14:36 Misaligned with the interest of the everyday user. 14:40 If we as a community can stay aligned on centering user needs and furthering the vision that we all have of a better internet, then we can collectively offer a better experience than our competition. 14:52 I'm inspired by the interoperability story offered by Semble and Margin. 14:56 Semble is a sensemaking tool letting you collect collections of bookmarks and Bluesky posts and other things around the web, and you can organize them into various collections. 15:07 You can do that individually. 15:09 You can do that in a public collection together with people in the atmosphere. 15:14 Margin is an annotation layer for the web, uh, where you add comments and annotations to any web page and save that annotation to your PDF. 15:22 They're working together so that you can, uh, your bookmarks from either Margin or Sembull both work within both tools as you're using them. 15:31 So that allows Sembull to focus on where its innovation is in, is in the shared collections and organizational tools, and Margin can focus on its innovation of being able to annotate anything on the web. 15:43 But they all work together and they make each other better. 15:46 And it's not a competitive experience, it's a collaborative experience. 15:51 We need more shared infrastructure in order to pull things off like this. 15:55 Depending on your use case, it could be really hard to mix and match lexicons in the atmosphere right now, especially if one of the lexicons you want to use is a blue sky one. 16:03 Now you're talking about indexing terabytes of data if you want a full network backfill. 16:08 So I love, like, things like the Microcosm set of tools offer a ton of really easy ways for people to jump in and pull different records from throughout the Atmosphere. 16:18 I'd like to see more tools that offer, you know, more use cases. 16:22 Something I'd really love to see is a network-wide app view that's designed for aggregative workloads, by which I mean, you know, group bys, the types of fundamentally database queries that Syl is doing, right? 16:34 Grouping by link, grouping by— you group by Tangled star, you can find links within leaflet docs, standard site docs. 16:42 I think it opens up a ton of interesting opportunities for experiences that collect the whole atmosphere and not just focus on one app experience. 16:53 Our last component, interest, is maybe the most surprising when you think about walkable cities. 16:59 For specs components, but for the atmosphere, I think it's probably the most obvious one, right? 17:03 We have to build interesting things. 17:04 We're competing with the whole internet for everybody's time, and we have to win. 17:10 What sticks out to me when I think about making interesting things on the atmosphere is they have to be interesting immediately. 17:16 This is a place where I think the client experience can do a lot of work, even if you're not interested in developing new lexicons. 17:24 But to do it right, it's going to take some coordinated effort. 17:27 Let's use Syl as an example of what I mean. 17:29 With Syl, I've been thinking about how to onboard people into the atmosphere if they don't already have a PDS. 17:38 And I want to point them in the direction of trustworthy news that matches their needs and interests. 17:44 Today, Syl only really works if you've invested time in building your own network and your following graph so that it is a trusted network of information that you'd like. 17:53 For people in this room, that's probably pretty easy to do. 17:56 But for new users, that's a really tough hurdle to climb. 18:00 People need help finding people. 18:02 And while it had some flaws, one of, I think, the key parts of growth of Bluesky's 2024 post-election growth was the starter pack. 18:12 And it was received well enough that the competition copied it. 18:15 Meta has starter packs in Threads. 18:18 Bluesky's other competitive edge is custom feeds and algorithmic choice. 18:23 Combining these two things, we can bootstrap a user's network based on their interests rather quickly. 18:28 This is not live in Sill yet. 18:30 I haven't started building. 18:30 But here's how I see a Sill possible onboarding experience working. 18:35 Users without an Atmosphere account can register with a PDS. 18:38 Sill doesn't need to run that PDS. 18:39 I don't want to run a PDS. 18:41 But I'm open to partnering with anybody who is operating a PDS and thinks something like this would be interesting. 18:47 To host new users. 18:49 And I'd especially love if it wasn't Bluesky so that we can further the decentralization story of the Atmosphere at the same time. 18:57 After they register with the PDS, they can come back to Syl and tell Syl a bit about what publications they read, what topics they're interested in. 19:05 And through a combination of starter packs list and custom feeds, I can immediately bootstrap their graph. 19:10 And then Syl is ready and useful on day one as soon as they finish that process. 19:14 And they can go over to the Bluesky app or whatever other client, and it's already set up and ready to go. 19:21 But maybe you see the problem with this idea. 19:23 It requires maintaining a complex set of feeds, lists, and starter packs. 19:28 Keeping all those maintained over time as people leave and join the network, it would become my full-time job if I was going to do that alone. 19:36 I wouldn't be able to work on the app. 19:37 I would just work on maintaining feeds. 19:40 So making sense of the blue sky social graph has many uses for many applications. 19:45 So this is something I think we could maybe take a collective approach to in trying to find the bubbles that exist already. 19:53 I know there's been some mapping projects that people have done. 19:55 And I wonder if we can build on top of those to automate some starter packs and some feeds and point people in the right direction as soon as they get started. 20:04 Sports, I think, offer a really unique opportunity here. 20:07 A lot of Bluesky— my understanding is a lot of Bluesky's post-2024 growth has come from sports. 20:13 Usage tends to peak around major American sporting events like the World Series and Super Bowl. 20:18 But sports are also a place where X and other social networks maintain a strong foothold. 20:24 So how can we use community-driven feeds and starter packs to easily onboard people with the already vibrant sports network that Bluesky has? 20:34 And how might we use those networks to encourage activity in the atmosphere overall? 20:39 I can imagine onboarding clients that ask you, what's your favorite team? 20:43 And then just setting up your graph immediately based on your favorite teams and favorite leagues. 20:49 Transforming the internet from the walled gardens of Web 2.0 to the openness that the atmosphere promises is no smaller an effort than transforming a city from one centered around the car to one centered around the person. 21:01 Paris elected a new mayor after 12 years of socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo. 21:06 Mayor Hidalgo's reign ushered in a slew of changes. 21:09 Paris now has a bigger bike network than Amsterdam, thousands of new pedestrianized streets, and a whole new public transit line that came about around the Olympics. 21:18 While politically controversial at the time, Hidalgo spent 12 years in office making changes that made Paris more walkable. 21:23 This year she chose not to run for a third term, so Paris had the opportunity to maybe reset if they they didn't like these changes. 21:30 They elected Emmanuelle Grégoire, who was her deputy mayor for 6 years and fellow member of the Socialist Party. 21:36 The city was given an opportunity to vote for a similar party program, and they took it. 21:40 I believe that once people experience the atmosphere and everything it can offer, they're going to choose it again and again and again, but only if we nail the client experience. 21:48 When you're designing a client experience, you can use just 4 principles to round out the implementation. 21:55 Purpose, safety, comfort, and interest. 21:57 Thank you. 22:02 We have a lot of time for questions. 22:15 Which of the 4 do you think is the most important to you or SIL? 22:19 Yeah. 22:21 For me, the most important is safety and the feel-safe thing. 22:25 I think people get a lot of value out of having a different, calmer, controlled experience and not have to feel like they have to doomscroll to keep up with the news. 22:34 Yes, I was interested in your comment about your need to go beyond the feed. 22:44 I've noticed a lot of the talks today you say, have really been focused around the humanistic elements of this technology and understanding users and meeting them where they are and not taking things for granted about that experience. 22:57 I wonder how you think about balancing trying to push new paradigms onto users with kind of meeting them where they are, understanding their design— like, obvious algorithm feeds are very popular, right? 23:10 And what do you think paternalistic about, like, no, I know a better way to do this than— Yeah. 23:16 Yeah, no, that's a really good point. 23:18 I loved the— and to rephrase for the stream, to summarize your question, how do we design new experience while not being paternalistic about it and just saying, we know better, here's a new design? 23:31 There was a great session on Thursday about user research that I don't know if anybody in this— I don't know if any people in this room were the group that ran it. 23:40 I don't think so. 23:40 But it was really excellent and was a reminder to me that we should be basing a lot of our work in user research and understanding user needs directly by talking to them. 23:51 It was a great opportunity to do it in the room there. 23:54 As a solo founder, I sometimes find it hard to find the time for that kind of thing. 23:58 But again, maybe it's another thing we can do collectively to figure out what users really want and need from social experiences. 24:09 Uh, yeah, I'm, uh, building an app called Flux that it's like a client app, and I've similar— similarly been thinking about the sports things. 24:16 It's— yeah, I'm kind of curious how, like, how do you see that happening? 24:21 Yeah, labelers, or is there something else? 24:24 Yeah, uh, uh, he asked about my, uh, idea about, uh, like a sports onboarding client. 24:32 My full pitch is basically 3 phases. 24:34 One is just sort of a sign-up onboarding service that asks you what are your favorite teams. 24:40 And then this project I thought about building would run some feeds maybe on Graze for every team. 24:44 And I maintain like a set of Wikipedia scrapers or something to get roster data and build the feeds off of those keywords. 24:52 And so it would set up your feeds and set up your starter packs based on the league that you're interested in. 25:00 Step 2 would be to then build actually a full client experience on top of that specific for sports, right? 25:05 You could layer in live sports data. 25:08 You could layer in highlights, do some fancy algorithm stuff to find the big highlight from the game you missed or something like that. 25:16 And then step 3 is going past the live experience, something like fantasy sports on AT Proto or something like that. 25:23 Like what sort of community building what things can we do with a specific niche like sports while still staying within the blue sky universe. 25:34 Yep. 25:35 Just a comment that I'm an atmospheric scientist. 25:38 I said you realize most of my colleagues are moved to East Carolina. 25:43 I study climate and most of the climate scientists are at East Carolina. 25:47 Yeah. 25:47 So I think for the general public, sports may be a hook, but the whole subgroup of scientists Network effect. 25:52 Once the big players move to BlueSky— Yeah. 25:55 Yeah. 25:57 The comment was that the scientific community really has moved to BlueSky. 26:01 And I think that that's an excellent example of like— Yeah. 26:05 Yeah, totally. 26:06 Right. 26:07 Yeah, different groups have a different reason. 26:09 Should I move on? 26:10 How are we on time? 26:11 We have 3 more minutes. 26:13 3 minutes. 26:14 Any more questions? 26:18 If not, thank you.