Ronen Tamari 0:01 Hey everyone, we're about to get started with a set of 4 lightning talks. 0:08 Up next we're gonna have Ronan talking from Cosmic Network talking about Semble. 0:15 We'll give it a few minutes. 1:02 All right, we are going to get started with our lightning talks. 1:05 Ronan, please take it away. Speaker B 1:23 This thing on? 1:24 Okay, cool. 1:26 All right. 1:27 Hello. 1:29 Okay. 1:29 Paul, you gave me a tough act to follow with that demo, but we'll try nonetheless. 1:35 So I'm Ronen. 1:37 Great to be here. 1:38 My first AtmosphereConf, hopefully the first of many. 1:42 And I'm here to talk about trails. 1:44 So we're in the Pacific Northwest. 1:46 We all love the outdoors. 1:48 2/3 of Semble are Vancouver natives, so we're kind of made in Vancouver. 1:52 And maybe I can move here. 1:52 I'm trying to escape the United States at this point. 1:55 Off record. 1:58 So this talk is going to be about rediscovering the magic of trails online. 2:03 We draw a lot of inspiration from trails as a metaphor for our digital lives and connecting a lot to the themes that Aaron Kassane was talking about in the morning. 2:11 We have this problem— before we start with the problem, we have serendipity online, right? 2:16 We have aha moments that really change the way we see the world. 2:20 And I want people here to think for a second of some of your aha moments and think if they came from information that you found online. 2:28 And raise your hand if those aha moments that you come across are like online sourced. 2:33 Okay, cool. 2:34 Lots of people getting serendipity online. 2:38 Now think of your everyday browsing experience. 2:41 And I want you to raise your hand if it looks something like this. 2:46 Come on. 2:46 Yeah. 2:47 OK. 2:47 So— more tabs. 2:50 Yeah. 2:51 We need more on this slide. 2:53 So this is the brilliance and brokenness of the web. 2:56 We have these genuine moments of insight, but they are far outweighed by this routine sense of overwhelm. 3:04 Is this just the way things are? 3:06 Is it a law of nature that we have to learn to live with? 3:09 Or can we make aha moments probable and not just possible? 3:13 We think we can, and also that there has never been a better time for it. 3:18 To understand how, though, we'll need to understand how we even got here in the first place. 3:23 So the early web was like a new frontier, unspoiled commons, open trails, serendipitous discovery, but it was also wild, challenging. 3:33 It was hard to navigate, hard to add to, and underdeveloped. 3:39 Web 2.0 is the age of attention superhighways, which we unfortunately are still living in. 3:45 Platforms give us scale, they bring everyone online, they make it easy to find and create content, but they also paved over all those trails with the superhighway that you pay for with your attention and only takes you where the platform wants you to go. 3:58 Your likes feed the algorithm. 4:01 Platforms constrain our behavior. 4:02 They make us predictable like rats in a Skinner box. 4:06 Our bookmarks are piling up unused. 4:10 And yeah, the tab problem is still unresolved. 4:16 Instead of feeding algorithms or hoarding bookmarks, with Sembl, we're working on an alternative paradigm: collective human-driven mapping. 4:25 What if we could create trail networks together? 4:28 Semble lets you leave online trail markers for yourself and for others. 4:32 Our logo is a cairn, those small stone stacks hikers spontaneously build to mark trails. 4:39 If you've ever been out hiking and lost the path, you know how great it feels to find one of these, and we're trying to bring that feeling online. 4:49 We call Semble a social knowledge network. 4:51 It's a social tool for creating— I have to do this in Figma. 4:58 Is this going to work? 5:00 No. 5:00 Oh, there we go. 5:02 Okay. 5:02 How many of you have actually used Semble? 5:05 Oh, wow. Ronen Tamari 5:05 Cool. Speaker B 5:06 It's always surprising. 5:10 Great. 5:10 So yeah, so you're going to— you know the basics, a lot of you. 5:14 It's a tool for creating and discovering your knowledge trails. 5:18 And trails are really any kind of content you find meaningful or interesting. 5:21 Oh, this is— okay, yeah. 5:24 Just some good security here. 5:28 So yeah, the basic units of Sembull are cards and collections. 5:32 The basic activity is bookmarking links and adding them to collections. 5:36 And we call those bookmarks cards. 5:38 Everything in Sembull is on App Proto. 5:41 Here we're creating a collection. 5:44 You can create private collections that only you can add to, or you can create open collections that anyone can add to. 5:52 And how do we move this? 5:56 Cool. 5:58 On the discovery side, we can show you also, we have an explore feed that shows you recent activity from other users. 6:06 So you can see what other people are adding. 6:09 And you can see for each link the number there, like that +4, how many people have added it. 6:16 We also have a search page. 6:17 So you can just search the Sembel knowledge for anything you're interested in. 6:22 Here is me searching for AI coding agents, a popular topic. 6:25 I didn't do this. 6:26 This is before I knew about Paul's demo. 6:29 We detect link types so you can filter your search to show different media types. 6:34 So you have research, audio, video. 6:36 Books, whatever. 6:38 Um, and the cool thing about this is it's community-curated knowledge, so it's high signal. 6:43 It's not slop. 6:44 It's things that people found valuable. 6:46 And as Sembull grows, then it'll just become more valuable. 6:52 One of the other key features of Sembull is what we call the Sembull page. 6:55 So the Sembull page is an overlay. 6:58 And right now you're looking at a paper on science. 7:01 Uh, this was This is a pretty popular paper. 7:04 A lot of people are talking about it. 7:06 What we're missing here is what I said before. 7:08 We don't have any context. 7:09 What are people saying about this paper? 7:10 Is it true? 7:10 It's making a lot of big claims on human performance and talent acquisition. 7:15 But what is the juice behind it? 7:18 So the Semble page is that overlay layer. 7:20 You click on a button, you get to the Semble page. 7:22 Any URL has this. 7:24 And here is where you can see context from App Proto and beyond eventually. 7:29 There are a bunch of tabs here. 7:30 I'm not going to show you everything. 7:31 It's just a lightning talk. 7:33 We have mentions on Bluesky and on Leaflet. 7:37 We have collections in Sembol that it's been added to, notes people have created. 7:42 We have an especially cool feature that we're just really launching in the current, like, just in the next few days, connections. 7:49 So this is the tab I'm on right now. 7:51 Connections are a way to connect two URLs and let you say something about that connection. 7:56 So here, for example, I saw a really great comment on Bluesky about this paper and I want people to be aware of it when they look at this paper. 8:02 So I can make that connection and say this was helpful context. 8:05 So it's kind of like community notes but for any URL and for any note. 8:09 And we're really excited to see how y'all are going to use it. 8:13 We also have some cool notifications in Sembel that are a bit different than Bluesky. 8:17 So for example, you get notified if someone makes a connection to a card in your library. 8:23 That's kind of cool because it's instead of— yeah, it's you're adding your cards and then you're starting to see how other people build on the knowledge you're adding. 8:30 And it's a really interesting way to come across new links. 8:34 We also have following but for collections. 8:37 We call it faceted following. 8:39 And we think it's really interesting because it gives you a signal for specific kinds of content that people are interested in. 8:44 So maybe you're creating a bunch of stuff, but you see what people are following. 8:47 Maybe they're following your cat video collection or maybe they're following your research collection, but it gives you the idea of what are people actually interested in instead of just like your general stream of content. 8:59 Why now? 9:00 Well, we think we're in a unique moment as Paul was talking about. 9:04 And this unique moment is making all our work more urgent and more important, we think, because yeah, the combination of AI and social networks brings great risks and great opportunities. 9:16 The value of authentic human connection is going to skyrocket as AI companies are really going to try to mine our attention and build browsers that are going to record everything we do. 9:28 The bright side of this is that App Proto lets us gain meaningful ownership of our attention. 9:34 And this also helps us answer some of the questions people might have at this point, which is, haven't we already tried to build these annotation tools before? 9:44 We have, and there are a lot of different annotation apps. 9:47 But what is truly new is a post-app annotation app. 9:50 This is a meme that hangs by my bed. 9:54 It doesn't really, but if I was a person who hung things by my bed, it would hang there. 9:59 The idea is that the killer app for App Proto isn't an app, it's the ecosystem. 10:04 And we're starting to see early signs of this. 10:08 A great example is our interop with Margin, which is another popular App Proto annotation tool. 10:14 And we've also been plotting various interop schemes with many of you here in the audience. 10:21 So the way the margin-Semble interop works is when you're on margin, you see Semble activity, and when you're on Semble, you see margin activity. 10:28 It's kind of simple, but also kind of magical, and people really love it. 10:32 If you look carefully, you can also see one of Cameron's AI agents making annotations there. 10:36 We live in exciting times. 10:40 Alongside interop, another really unique part about building in, in App Proto is just the tinkering and hacking energy here. 10:47 And I absolutely cannot do justice to it in the time I have, but I'll just share a few examples. 10:52 One really cool pattern we've seen developing is living libraries. 10:56 So people are putting their personal link libraries on Protocol. 11:00 These are, yeah, just a few pages. 11:02 Nick Vincent here has done a literature review that's like living, a living literature Review backed by Sembull. 11:07 So he adds things to collections on Sembull and they appear on this cool library that people can search through. 11:13 And it's just, yeah, really exciting because, for example, it can be collectively curated and a bunch of people can add to these and they don't need to touch the HTML, they don't need to do Git pull requests to the repository. 11:25 People have also been creating really cool fusion between Sembull and tools for thought like Obsidian. 11:33 We actually— yeah, it's starting to become a thing. 11:36 People are very excited by the opportunity to connect their personal knowledge tools in new ways using @proto. 11:44 Another wonderful emergent pattern has been collectively curated symbol collections. 11:48 Shout out to Chris. 11:49 I don't know if he's still in the room. 11:51 Maybe not. 11:52 OK. 11:52 Chris Schenk has started the @news, which is powering the atmospheric weather report. 11:57 And there's several regular contributors here that are adding interesting links and they're collecting that. 12:03 And I want to end— I know Boris, you're signaling to me. 12:05 I want to end this talk with a thought about how we can build a brighter future together. 12:11 So information overload, one way to think about it is the result of a linear attention economy. 12:18 Information consumes our attention and the more information that becomes available, the more our attention is consumed. 12:24 Semble and App Proto Let us create circular attention economies. 12:29 Attention economies where we not only consume— information doesn't only consume our attention, but we actually share our attention traces. 12:37 As you can see over here, we share our attention traces, and by doing so, we help other people navigate information. 12:46 And this is kind of like upcycling, which is why I put this picture here of a community garden that I really like in Berlin. 12:53 Where people took shoes and they started planting plants in them. 12:58 And when we share our attention online, we're letting other people reuse our attention in interesting ways and helping them navigate information overload together, creating the trails that we need to, yeah, live online in this age of crazy information overload. 13:11 Thank you. 13:12 Thank you. Ronen Tamari 13:18 And you also happen to organize @Science. Speaker B 13:22 That too, yes. 13:23 I'm going to sleep well tonight. 13:24 Yeah. 13:25 I'm done with all my app proto obligations. Ronen Tamari 13:29 Amazing. Speaker B 13:30 Yes. Ronen Tamari 13:30 Thank you very much. 13:33 Tori. 13:36 Is Tori in the room? 13:42 Can a volunteer find me Tori, who's theoretically going next? 14:01 I don't want to move your slot because it will, it will mess people up who are, uh, uh, watching for the time. 14:09 If Tori does not show up, we're just gonna chill out. 14:13 Up next in this room, Jeremy, the future of open source is social. 14:18 And after that, we have burning down data walls in the US fire service with Stefan. 14:24 So hang around for that. 14:26 And we'll get started in about 8 minutes with Jeremy. 15:03 Okay, come on, Tori, you're gonna have