Speaker B 0:25 All right, let's go. 0:51 My name is Sebastian Vogelsang. 0:56 I'm from Berlin, Germany. 0:59 I'm wearing kind of two hats today, as I've been doing for the last year, I think, almost. 1:08 First off, I'm the founder of Birdsong Apps, which is super creative since it's just the English translation of my last name. 1:18 I had to make that choice overnight. 1:25 That company has published two apps. 1:28 The first one is Skeets. 1:31 Skeet is a term that is short for sky tweet for those of you not familiar. 1:42 It is a— it was the first native iOS app the first iPad app for BlueSky and the first and so far I think one of the only really accessible apps for BlueSky. 1:59 Sorry? 2:01 Yes. 2:01 No, no, also for motor impairment, but also for visually impaired people. 2:07 Thank you, Ivan. 2:08 So, yes, those are the two apps that Birdsong Apps has published. 2:15 The other hat I'm wearing today is for EuroSky and that's what I want to talk to you about today. 2:20 For the next slide, content warning, disturbing image. 2:26 Children, maybe cover eyes. 2:28 This is from January 25th. 2:34 For those of you not familiar, this is Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk. 2:41 Does anybody know where this is? 2:43 Probably, right? 2:44 Okay. 2:45 So this is the front row at Trump's inauguration. 2:48 And in the weeks that followed this event, A lot of these platforms took drastic decisions. 2:55 Meta ended its fact-checking. 2:59 So basically on this day, Big Tech, they didn't just comply with stuff. 3:04 They basically raced to the front of the room. 3:07 And since then, the US administration has increasingly targeted independent media. 3:13 And with X, this had— already been started 2 years at this point, being used as a political instrument, not only in the US but also in Europe, where Musk tried to influence elections, not only in Germany but I think also in Hungary. 3:32 And we need to ask ourselves, when Musk acquired Twitter, what was actually captured here? 3:37 It wasn't a company and it wasn't an algorithm. 3:40 It was actually infrastructure. 3:42 The pipes that your media and your journalism runs on, the identity layer, the distribution layer, the moderation layer, all captured overnight by one acquisition. 3:54 When you look at companies like X, this is what the stack currently looks like. 3:57 You have identity storage, you have distribution, you have moderation, you have apps and interfaces. 4:04 And when you combine all this in one company, in one stack, that's It's not just an app that's infrastructure with a product on top. 4:13 Try to democratically govern this right now. 4:16 Identity verification, ranking, advertiser relationships, speech rights across jurisdictions, moderation appeals, data privacy, et cetera, PP, all at once, all in one place. 4:30 And the complexity is actually the point here. 4:32 The monolith protects itself by being too tangled to just regulate. 4:36 And we see this in Europe right now. 4:38 On an everyday basis where the EU government tries to regulate big tech and just can't. 4:45 Thinking back to Trump's inauguration, you now have this concentrated, unaccountable power over public discourse. 4:53 And we've seen it and we've watched it happen again. 4:56 And my wife told me not to make this reference, but I'm from Germany and like, this matters to me. 5:06 Sorry. 5:06 So what does democratic infrastructure actually look like? 5:12 Well, it turns out we sort of have an answer to this from another area, and that's public broadcasting. 5:19 What you see here is a map of national media landscape in Germany after World War II, in which the regional broadcasters had all been merged into one national network by the Nazis to create a powerful means of propaganda, the Allies insisted on a decentralized independent structure for German public broadcasting. 5:41 They created these regional public broadcasting agencies that by and large still exist today. 5:48 All these services are mainly financed through license fees paid by every household in Germany, and they're governed by councils. 5:56 Of representatives of the societally relevant groups. 6:01 And Catherine will be happy to talk to you about that if you want to know more, because she has been doing that for years. 6:11 So what was built here is infrastructure that cannot be captured by government or by money. 6:18 And we need to do that again for social media. 6:22 When we think about— I stole this from Robin, by the way. 6:25 When we think about social media, we usually have the wrong mental model. 6:29 We usually think it's like this. 6:31 Everybody's happy, social media apps are like fun, and we can just like post memes on them. 6:37 But the actual right model analogy is this, it's roads. 6:41 They're hard to replace, they have many downstream users, and whoever owns these roads sets the rules for everyone on them. 6:49 So, the people owning these routes have the durable power over everything that moves on them. 6:57 You all, or most of you, have knowledge of the protocol that we're talking about at this conference, the A2 protocol, and you know what the pieces are. 7:07 And you also know how open protocols like ADProto let you operate these components independently of each other, thus guaranteeing that there will be not too much power in one corner, right? 7:19 I've witnessed this empowerment myself last year when I built the app I talked about, Flashes, which is sort of a visual social media on 80 Proto. 7:28 Some say it's an Instagram clone. 7:31 I was able to take advantage— screw those people, right? 7:39 I was able to take advantage of Bluesky's existing infrastructure here, and thus I didn't have to rebuild identity, social graph, distribution, I could just focus on the user experience. 7:51 But when it came to the stuff that wasn't covered by Bluesky or their app view, like moderation for my own custom lexicons in there, I either had the choice to build this on my own, put money in it, raise capital, or actually do it the protocol way and get together with people and find a common solution that everybody can use. 8:14 And other developers can use. 8:15 And luckily I chose the latter and joined forces with Ivan and Robin and Sharif, who were previously working on Free Our Feeds. 8:24 I don't know if you talked about this, but it was an initiative that set out last year to promote AD Proto outside of the realm of the inner blue sky ecosystem. 8:35 And this is how EuroSky and the Model Foundation got founded. 8:39 EuroSky isn't an app or a platform. 8:42 It's not a competitor to anything you're building here. 8:46 It's shared infrastructure for the ATproto ecosystem. 8:50 It's operated in Europe under EU law. 8:53 And we're aiming at providing developers like myself with the same benefits that I got to enjoy when I built on the back of Bluesky's infrastructure. 9:02 Like, right now we're providing PDSs, relays. 9:06 We're working on agnostic app views and moderation pipelines. 9:09 And all that as European commons, not as a US commercial product. 9:18 Here's why we think it's necessary for Europe. 9:21 We like to say we can just build things, but this is what happens when you just build things in Europe. 9:27 We got this the first week after we unofficially launched our PDS, and it reads to the privacy officer Under Article 15 of the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, I am requesting a copy of all personal data you hold about me associated with this email address. 9:44 Please provide me the information in a commonly used electronic format with a statutory 1-month period. 9:53 And as a developer, you can either, like, try to handle this on your own. 9:59 And if you know the GDPR, you're probably able to this. 10:03 There are already a lot of apps out there that just don't deploy to Europe because they are afraid of this. 10:11 So you either know how to handle this or you just skip Europe. 10:15 I mean, obviously you should not save too much data for the clients that you provide. 10:21 You shouldn't log IP addresses if it's not necessary. 10:25 But this is something that I myself had to learn over years dealing with GDPR because this also didn't happen overnight in Europe, right? 10:35 So of course where your infrastructure runs determines what laws apply to it. 10:40 So GDPR, DSA, data residency. 10:44 With EuroSky, this will all be handled at the infrastructure layer. 10:49 So you just build your app and we handle the compliance plumbing and give you the European market actually at scale without routing data through the US. 11:00 Talking about the stack, we just soft launched our PDS. 11:04 We worked through the pre-registration list. 11:10 And we're almost at 2,000— oh no, 9,000 users migrate. 11:17 I think we're by now the largest third-party PDS in the atmosphere except for the bridging PDS for the Fediverse, and we managed to do this within 2 weeks. 11:31 Why isn't this— 2 weeks. 11:33 Yeah. 11:38 This was with invites only, like with invite codes, so it's not even publicly launched yet. 11:45 We managed to pull this off by implementing our own migration tool and we called it EU-Hall. 11:55 Thank you. 12:02 Why? 12:03 We're ready to rename it at any time. 12:07 So the thing is when we ran tests with the existing tools out there, which are awesome, I want to put this down, Bailey built PDS Mover, which is phenomenal tool, but we saw drop-off rates of up to 50% with the users we tested it with, and not because the existing migration solution's bad or anything, but because we're actually dealing with non-tech-savvy users, right, that are used to starting processes and closing their window or closing the laptop when they started it, and then the migration fails. 12:40 So we decided to ship something server-based. 12:44 That would continue running in the background while not invading your privacy more than necessary. 12:50 For example, we encrypt the tokens that we generate for the transfer during the migration, delete them right after, all GDPR conformance. 13:01 Yeah, I think it worked pretty well. 13:05 So that was EU Hall. 13:06 Now to something that we'd like to premiere here today. 13:11 Isn't public yet? 13:11 Yeah. 13:14 One more thing. 13:18 Like I said, we're not trying to be the next Twitter or X for Europe, but rather a portal to the atmosphere. 13:26 So to reflect that, Emilia, who I'm saying hi to on stream, she's in Berlin, who most of you know from the ecosystem, has built something for us that we're going to be launching really soon and that will let anyone experience what this ecosystem is about. 13:41 It will look something like this. 13:43 This will be EuroSky's portal site. 13:46 So you can either create your EuroSky account there. 13:55 We'll let users set up new accounts without going through the usual apps, so they can do it right there. 14:03 We'll get you rid of the invite codes. 14:06 You can obviously just log into your accounts. 14:10 Goes without saying, given that Emilio worked on it, it's relying 100% on OAuth. 14:17 And this is what it will look like for now when onboarding. 14:24 As you will see, we are not going to give you our own content there, but we will rather feature all the applications that are active on the Atmosphere. 14:37 So all of your applications will be in that board. 14:42 So people can jump right into any of these applications. 14:46 And we'll start featuring applications. 14:48 Of course, since it's EuroSky, we'll have a European section to feature European apps. 14:52 But essentially, we're trying to give people access, fast access, quick access to the tools that are already out there. 15:00 Instead of trying to build our own. 15:02 So we hope by doing this and explaining what each app is and what it does that we'll get more traction to these apps. 15:15 Oh, thank you. 15:20 Little preview of what's coming afterwards. 15:22 We're currently setting up a PLC mirror and a relay, and that should be ready to go in the coming weeks. 15:31 Next on our list would be an app view very much like Blue Skies or Black Skies app view because we believe that social media data can already incubate so many applications that deal with followers, likes, and posts. 15:44 I think it's in the public interest to have an app view that can serve all these different apps that we already have today. 15:53 But we're also looking at— I talked to Chad yesterday— running For example, slices or— sorry, constellation mirrors or gazetteers for ATGeo projects. 16:04 So if you have something that you think is public infrastructure or should be public infrastructure, come talk to us and we'll see if we can make it happen and make it run for everybody on our infrastructure. 16:16 In parallel, we're start working on compliance pipelines for developers. 16:22 Ultimately the goal is to have a sort of shared moderation experience for app developers that share certain lexicons, and we're currently talking to Roost over there about integrating Coop and Osprey for this. 16:38 So, yeah, this will be the step after the next step. 16:45 EuroSky is also participating in two European tenders right now. 16:49 One is called SocialPets and it will implement a couple of things. 16:54 One of which is a privacy-preserving training and inference for decentralized social media recommender algorithms. 17:02 It will also, I'm reading this because I cannot remember it. 17:06 [LAUGHTER] The other one is quantum-resistant privacy-preserving zero-knowledge credentials for age gating, reputation, and anti-abuse without tracking. 17:15 The last one will be privacy-preserving trust and safety collaboration across relays and servers via multi-party computation. 17:24 This will let different instances in the network signal abuse signals to each other without exposing private data. 17:33 We're hoping to hear from that. 17:35 It's an EU Horizon grant. 17:37 These things take months to apply for and then it takes the double amount of months for them to decide whether you get it or not. 17:45 So we've been waiting for 6 months. 17:47 This would be awesome. 17:49 The other tender we're currently working on with TU Dresden and with the advisory of GreenEarth, namely René Di Resta, Glenn Weil, and Jonathan Stray. 18:00 And the goal with this one will be to develop a production pro-social feed, basically a bridging algorithm. 18:08 That creates engagement without polarization. 18:11 That will then be open sourced and incorporated into our EuroSky infrastructure and thus be made available to anyone who builds on EuroSky and who wants to have a good recommender algorithm in their app. 18:30 We started this talk with infrastructure being captured. 18:34 How do we make sure that EuroSky cannot be captured and screw us all? 18:38 Well, Ivan kind of laid it out already. 18:42 The mentioned components are all embedded in this nonprofit, the Modal Foundation, and that's not because we couldn't raise capital, but because public infrastructure must not be embedded in like one company whose incentives could diverge from the ecosystem's needs. 19:01 And this is not a criticism of anyone building in this space in that way. 19:06 I think it's just good infrastructure design. 19:10 Basically the same logic as public broadcasting. 19:13 So no single point of capture, and that includes us. 19:17 So we're making ourselves accountable to the mission and we can't be sold from under the people who depend on it. 19:25 The business model Oh, we don't need to talk about that, right? 19:30 [LAUGHTER] Well, okay. 19:35 It will be grants for now and funding by the EU later. 19:39 Furthermore, we're looking at services running on our infrastructure that can then maybe back-finance our expenses. 19:48 That is the general direction for now. 19:52 And like I said at our launch event in November last year, we'll be interoperable with all of Yul, all of the other people building on this right now will even bridge to Mastodon. 20:04 So we're not asking anyone to choose any of these platforms. 20:08 We're just adding a layer that makes the whole network stronger and more legally resilient, more accessible to builders who need European compliance. 20:19 If you want to meet us, this will be the next opportunity. Speaker C 20:22 Yes. Speaker B 20:23 We'll be in Amsterdam June 4th, 5th, and 6th of June. 20:27 And we're doing this together with New Public, who is presented over there. 20:31 Then of course the Atmosphere Conf, SafeSocial, the Fetty Forum, and the ZDF, which is a public broadcaster from Germany. 20:41 And with that, I thank you. 20:43 And we have, like I anticipated, 10 minutes for questions and— [APPLAUSE] [Speaker:CHRIS WILSON] Excellent. Speaker D 20:55 Thank you very much. 20:56 Questions from the room? 20:58 Go ahead and start putting up your hands and we'll get ready. 21:01 I already have a question here from the chat. 21:03 So just shouting out to the chat here. 21:07 Coming from artwo.xyz. 21:09 It's the under the EU law part that is not really assuring— reassuring. 21:15 If you make an app view, how the ID verification will be handled? Speaker B 21:20 Interesting. 21:21 We don't know yet because we're waiting for legislation to pass and see how it happens. 21:26 But we're not alone in this. 21:29 Ultimately, we're talking about the youth ban in social media, and that's still a very recent and very hot topic that we kind of have to wait for. 21:41 I mean, there are techniques on a zero-knowledge base to solve this kind of stuff. 21:47 We definitely don't want to have copies of IDs on our servers. 21:54 Like I said, we're talking to people to find good solutions for this. 21:58 But my personal opinion is ultimately I think in the end this will— Meta will win with the lobbying they did to push this to Apple and Google. Speaker D 22:09 As we saw by the lobbying numbers from two presentations ago. 22:12 Exactly. 22:13 How much money they're pouring into this. Speaker B 22:14 It will probably end up there. 22:16 It will suck for the open web. 22:18 So, um, anything in between, we're currently too small. 22:22 We can just like look for solutions once we're faced with them, um, to somehow comply with it and see what we can do to not screw everybody. Speaker D 22:33 No, that might not be it. 22:34 That might not be a concluding answer, but it's definitely not. 22:37 It's definitely a better answer than— oh, you can add something. 22:40 Okay. 22:40 Robin, let me get you the mic. Speaker E 22:43 Um, no, just to add to what Sebastian was saying. 22:47 We've been talking to a number of like lawmakers who are considering age verification, you know, social media bans for teens and all that. 22:56 They a lot of the time understand the downsides of these things. 22:59 They understand that it doesn't work, but there's tremendous populist, popular pressure to do something and they don't see what else they can do. 23:09 And so the reason I'm bringing this up is that folks in this room like ourselves who see other things that could happen It's on us to like make the effort of like, you know, figuring that shit out, explaining it, writing it up, etc., etc. 23:22 Because if we give them solutions, they will be interested in like, you know, picking them up. 23:26 Everyone knows that in Australia it's not working at all. 23:29 And like, so, so like, it's not like it's a surprise. Speaker B 23:32 And I mean, the ultimate goal would be to regulate big tech's algorithms, and this is the, the goal that everybody tries to follow. 23:41 At least in Europe, but you know, politics. 23:47 US politics, tariffs, all that is in the way of just regulating right now. 23:53 So the governments kind of jump ahead now, the countries' governments in Europe, and start with these, with kind of trying to move the most vulnerable out of the way. 24:07 We'll see. Speaker D 24:08 All right. 24:09 Just so we make sure that we get everybody out here, out of here early enough to go over to the big thing. 24:14 So Paul and Jay, and you can hear about how Jay's going to blue sky, blue sky. 24:19 It's going to be very exciting. 24:20 Let's just finish off with one last question here from Catherine. Speaker C 24:23 So Sebastian, just for my usual question is, I don't really understand. 24:31 So EuroSky isn't like Blue Sky for Europeans. 24:37 It looks like a— what I'm seeing is like a window into all the other apps that have been already created. 24:42 You're not replicating a Bluesky experience on Eurosky or a Gander experience on Eurosky. Speaker B 24:49 It's— imagine Bluesky without the app. 24:53 Like everything. Speaker C 24:54 So don't you think though Europeans would have like a pent-up demand feeling for wanting to have their own BlueSky? Speaker B 25:01 There will be apps that— Speaker C 25:03 But you're not building that. 25:05 You guys aren't building that. 25:06 And why not? 25:06 I don't understand why not. Sebastian Vogelsang 25:08 The EuroSky brand, we're not. 25:10 We already have— Hi. 25:15 So Sebastian already has built 2 of them. 25:20 And you can use them today. 25:21 And there are others. 25:22 And there's a whole other development pipeline that's Or the hanging man. 25:30 There's— we have in our development pipeline the idea for lots of different apps and potentially a Venture Studio that would support lots of people to do lots of different kinds of building. 25:40 We are not at present seeking to build a Blue Sky clone, if that's your question. 25:47 But maybe in the future, but that's, you know, that means running a microblogging business, as you know. Speaker D 25:55 Yeah, and other people are free to do so, and you can use your SkyHandle to log in and all that lovely stuff. Speaker B 25:59 Interoperability, yay! Speaker D 26:01 Excellent. 26:01 Okay, we're gonna shut it down here and let you guys get over to the next room. 26:04 Thank you once again to Sebastian. 26:08 Enjoy the next session, folks, and I hope to see some of you back here afterwards. 26:12 Thank you.