Dame 1:30 Hello everyone. 1:31 My name is Dame. 1:32 Thanks for coming to my talk. 1:34 How has everyone been enjoying the conference so far? 1:37 Has it been good? 1:37 I've been loving it. 1:43 Today's the last day of the conference, and we have heard a lot of really interesting talks from a lot of different people over the past couple days. 1:50 And there's been some really interesting and weird references that have been made too. 1:53 Like, some really cool ones. 1:54 Like, we had Aaron yesterday talking about kelp. 1:58 We had Blaine talking about cheese making. 2:01 And then we had Lawrence talking about K-pop and the K-pop fandom. 2:05 I just love that all these references happened at this conference so far. 2:08 It especially makes me feel good because it makes what I'm about to talk about seem not quite as crazy. 2:15 Because my talk is titled "From Toilets to Moths: The Future of Social Media is Weird and Not for Everyone." So to kick things off, I want to introduce myself a little bit for those who don't know me. 2:30 I am not 3 moths in a trench coat, despite what my bio on Blue Sky says. 2:35 Unfortunately, though sometimes I wish that I was. 2:39 I was born and raised in Appalachia around the exact same time that the World Wide Web came into existence. 2:47 So I've kind of grown up alongside of the web and seen it grow as I have. 2:54 I am an artist, I'm a tech worker, and I created the app Anasota, which some of you may have seen or tried recently. 3:02 But my background is in communications, content, social media, and things like that. 3:07 But I've been working in the decentralized web space actually for the past 5 years. 3:11 Before Bluesky even existed, I was Bluesky user number 1216. 3:17 So I've been around in this community for quite some time. 3:20 I've had a few breaks here and there, but I really sort of came back and became more active in 2024 again. 3:27 And started making things on the App Protocol. 3:32 But as a result of my personal interests and professional obligations, I have been relatively chronically online for various stretches of my life, and that has, along with the fact that I grew up alongside the internet, it's really caused me to both have kind of a love-hate relationship with the internet. 3:57 I love the internet for— I love Twitter, I love the old internet, I loved all these different things. 4:03 But it's also been hard to watch how they've impacted my life, both good and bad. 4:07 And it's also been hard watching Twitter die. 4:10 It's been hard watching so many things happen to so many of these apps and websites that we love, and sort of continually getting worse and worse in a lot of ways. 4:20 But yeah, it has impacted me in amazing ways though. 4:23 Like I've gotten multiple jobs just from being on Twitter. 4:27 I met my partner online. 4:31 But yeah, it definitely had these negative impacts of impacting society negatively, impacting my mental health negatively. 4:38 And I think what I ultimately realized as a result of all that was, yeah, these apps and a lot of the web is not necessarily really built for me, necessarily for anyone in particular. 4:49 It's often built for big tech shareholders. 4:52 It's built for advertising. 4:53 It's built for extraction, all these different things. 4:58 And it's more like we, or at least me, I've been able to make these things work in spite of all these things. 5:04 But even then, there have been so many limitations. 5:07 As a result of this, I feel like there's a temptation to look back, especially for folks like me who grew up alongside the early internet, there's a temptation to look back at it and be like, I wish we could go back there. 5:19 I wish we could go and return to the past. 5:22 I think that's like a very— I get that sentiment, but I also think that it's kind of misguided and maybe even a little dangerous at times. 5:31 Like, we don't ultimately want to— I don't think we should try to make the internet great again. 5:38 I think that And if we can't do that, and we shouldn't do it, at least that mindset, I guess the question that emerges for me is what should we do and what should that future look like? 5:52 And after working in the decentralized web space for the past 5 years, it's definitely given me some ideas and thoughts about what I think might be trying to emerge from this cocoon. 6:09 And I say trying because I think despite all of our excitement about the atmosphere and the things that we're building and creating here, none of it really is a guarantee. 6:19 Like, we're sort of right now trying to make this thing happen. 6:23 And it's uncertain. 6:26 It's uncertain if it will happen or not. 6:28 And I think it's important to keep that in mind because it's going to take a lot of work. 6:34 But it's kind of like, you know, if some of you may have followed me and watched some of my live streams on Streamplace last year, I was raising monarch butterflies and I was streaming that. 6:44 And you could see the butterflies emerging from their cocoons and all the chrysalises. 6:50 And, but the reality is some of them didn't make it, you know, like I had, I think, 12 different butterflies and I think 4 or 5 of them didn't make it. 7:00 Yes, I mean, the same way, like this, what we're doing here, it's not guaranteed to succeed. 7:05 We've made a lot of progress, I think, over the past, I mean, even the past 6 months, it's been pretty cool to see what's been happening and the number of people that are here today. 7:15 But so let's dive a little bit more. 7:18 I just realized I forgot to advance my slides here. 7:22 Let's dive a little bit more into what the future might look like through the lens of some of the things that I've been working on in the atmosphere over the past 12 months. 7:29 So to get started, the very first thing I made was in 2024. 7:34 It was literally a simple tool I built just for me to go through my post archive and choose whether I wanted to keep something or delete something in sort of like that KonMari fashion. 7:46 And this very much was— while I have some background in doing some software stuff and like making websites in HTML and CSS. 7:57 I had never actually made a web app before. 7:59 So this is like the first thing I ever did in that vein. 8:03 And it was here in the Atmosphere. 8:05 The second thing I did was this platform called cred.blue. 8:08 It was kind of a weird, fun experiment in understanding the data model of the app protocol better. 8:14 Understanding what was possible. 8:16 Just like testing things and seeing what would happen. 8:18 And it was just a way to like create a social score based on someone's profile. 8:24 So that was the second thing I made. 8:27 The next thing I made was this more of an art project and creative thing. 8:31 It was a dynamic avatar that runs off of my iPhone. 8:35 And what happens is every day, every hour, my avatar automatically updates to match the sort of the way the sky gradient looks wherever I am in my local time. 8:46 So if you've seen my avatar on the feed, and you've seen that it changes colors, that's exactly what it's doing. 8:51 It's been doing that now for, I guess, over a year. 8:54 It's been running nonstop right off my iPhone. 8:57 And then after that, I made this weird thing called Flushes. 9:01 This happened about a year ago, right around— I think exactly coinciding with last year's conference. 9:08 It was basically an experiment to try to figure out, one, how do I make an app view? 9:11 I've never made an app view. 9:12 I don't even really know what an app view is. 9:14 So it was better— it was going one step further and learning more about the app protocol. 9:20 And honestly asking this question of, what— can you easily make a new social network or social platform really easily? 9:29 And how quickly can you do that? 9:30 And this was made in like 2 days. 9:32 And it went kind of like viral within the Atmosphere community. 9:38 And people started posting and using it a bunch the first few days. 9:41 It was just interesting to see what happened there, but it taught me a lot about, I guess, what was possible. 9:46 And then after that, I decided to move on to something a bit more serious. 9:51 I wanted to start creating more serious projects in the atmosphere, and I thought, what better way to do that than create some sort of umbrella brand which I can funnel all my projects through? 10:03 So I made something even more serious. 10:05 I made a Nat Potato mascot. 10:07 Which is this little guy. 10:09 I designed him and put him all over the place. 10:11 There's lots of stickers. 10:12 I'm sure you've seen some out in the— you know, there's probably lots more out there if you want one. 10:18 And this is just— this is kind of what I feel like sometimes. 10:21 It's like, you know, as an artist or a communicator in more technical spaces, I feel a little out of my depth. 10:28 But finally, I just want to move on to the last thing, sort of the most recent thing that I've made and I've been working on a lot. 10:35 Is this app called Anasota, which is— it started as a blue sky client, a very unique blue sky client. 10:43 I call it a new, more peaceful social interface that helps you be offline more and online better. 10:50 And Anasota was really asking the questions of what social media might look like if I tried rethinking things from the ground up from a more artsy, creative perspective. 11:00 And it all started literally— I guess I had this idea a little over a year ago. 11:07 I posted this on Bluesky. 11:09 I said, "We need an extremely weird and avant-garde Bluesky client, and I think I'm going to have to build it myself." So when I started working on it, I started brainstorming ideas and wondering what direction could I take this in, and what should I call it, and all these different things. 11:23 And I started looking to other areas of my life for inspiration. 11:27 One of those areas was my more recent interest in going mothing and learning about moths. 11:34 So, so during the warmer months, I've started going out into my yard and other places and taking lights and cameras with me and creating these light traps that moths will be attracted to at night. 11:45 It usually ranges from like 10 PM and going into like 3 AM at night. 11:51 But I'll, yeah, set up my cameras and all that kind of stuff and document them and just learn about moths and I've seen so many different types of moths just in my backyard. 12:01 It's really incredible to see the range and diversity of what you can see in your backyard. 12:07 So from there, I started thinking, what could I name my app? 12:11 And I really started honing in on moths. 12:14 And this is the Annasota moth. 12:17 This is an oakworm moth by its more common name. 12:19 And this particular photo is a photo I took. 12:22 This is a moth that showed up on my front door one day. 12:24 I woke up. 12:25 I went outside and this was on my door. 12:27 I'd never seen one before. 12:28 It has these two little white dots and it's very orange. 12:31 It's very cute and fuzzy. 12:33 I just fell in love with it. 12:34 It's probably my favorite moth now. 12:35 And so I was like, that's it. 12:36 That's what I'm going to call the app. 12:39 And so I started really going deep into moths and learning all about them and all these different things. 12:44 And this is what Anna Soto looks like, the app. 12:47 This is the interface for it. 12:48 Very different kind of client. 12:51 This is all Bluesky data though. 12:52 This is pulling in from people's Bluesky accounts. 12:55 These are posts from Bluesky. 12:56 But what you're looking at here in particular is this is what someone's profile looks like in Annasota. 13:02 Annasota is not— is taking away the idea of infinite scrolling feeds. 13:07 You don't really scroll through posts in Annasota. 13:09 It's a card deck that you swipe through and you look at posts one by one. 13:14 What you're seeing right here is this is a profile page and the first card at the very top of the deck is representative of the person's profile. 13:22 And then as you swipe, you see posts one by one from that person. 13:26 Based on recency and things like that. 13:29 Other cool things about Anna Sota. 13:31 You actually can discover moths in the app as you're browsing and swiping through posts. 13:36 You'll randomly discover a new moth. 13:39 And these moths and moth data and images are pulled in via the iNaturalist API, which is— I use iNaturalist when I started going moth-ing. 13:48 I would start cataloging all the moths that I found using iNaturalist. 13:52 And I thought what better way to introduce that more into the app than using their free open API. 13:57 And it's really easy and incredible to use. 14:01 Other interesting things about Annosota that make it a little bit different are a variety of different features. 14:06 Like we have— we now have this forest map. 14:09 Every time you— every time going into Annosota and browsing your social media feed an expedition into a forest. 14:19 And it maps out your expedition. 14:22 You'll see points on this topographic map with a fog of war. 14:26 And you'll see moments where you've discovered moss or pick up items or things like that. 14:32 We have waypoints, which is this feature that I concocted. 14:36 As more and more Blue Sky clients and apps and Atmosphere things started emerging, people wanted ways to be able to hop between them. 14:43 So in Anasota, you can quickly tap at the corner of a top of a card and jump into that post and see it on Bluesky or Blacksky or Red Dwarf or any of these other clients. 14:51 Notifications are really great in, in Anisota. 14:53 It's, uh, there's lots of cool features like batch notifications, highlights, filters, all sorts of things like that. 14:59 It makes them more digestible. 15:01 There's a cool onboarding experience now that sets sort of a tone and does some storytelling and grants you some initial items to use in your journey if you choose the story mode of the app. 15:13 And this is an example of what posts look like. 15:15 So on the left you have a post in Bluesky, and then on the right you have the exact same post but in Anasota. 15:22 Bluesky obviously is a more traditional Twitter-style client. 15:25 It has a lot of things going on here. 15:27 It's got lots of icons, lots of numbers, and it's within the context of a feed of tons of other posts as you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. 15:35 Whereas Anasota, it's, it's, it's a bit more minimal. 15:38 And then in the bottom right, instead of engagement metric numbers, there is a rarity card that is similar. 15:44 It takes inspiration from trading cards that have rarity icons. 15:48 It basically is just a calculation or a simple algorithm that abstracts all the engagement metrics and displays them as a rarity icon that you can familiarize yourself with. 15:57 So you can start getting a sense for how engaged a post is without actually having to see all that data and numbers right there in front of you. 16:03 But you can hover over the rarity icon and see the actual numbers or flip the card on the back. 16:07 You can flip cards over to see more things like those engagements or details. 16:12 And then last thing we did at the end of last year was sort of like a Spotify Wrapped type experience within, within Anasota using the sort of Anasota theme that basically recaps people's year on Bluesky. 16:28 It pulls in— they can search their account, it pulls in all their data, and it creates these cool visualizations and analysis. 16:35 It shows you the top words that you used that year, top connections or the people that you engage with the most, things like that. 16:42 I think when it initially launched and was shared, it ended up being used, I think, by like 50,000 unique people. 16:50 It was really cool to see it spreading around the community. 16:54 So yeah, these are some of the things that I've been working on and making in the Atmosphere. 16:58 And they've taught me a lot. 16:59 And I think there's some ideas and themes that emerged that I want to share and talk about that are basically lessons of what I think potentially might happen in the future. 17:08 Or might is already happening. 17:11 Let's see, let me scroll down through my notes. 17:15 So first of all, the future is decentralized, right? 17:19 Do we think that's true? 17:20 So I've been working in the open web, like I said, for around 5 years now. 17:25 And when I got here, That was the theme, is decentralization is the answer. 17:29 This is the key. 17:29 This is the thing we're trying to do here. 17:31 And it makes sense initially. 17:34 I still believe that it's somewhat true. 17:37 But I also think that it's a little misleading. 17:42 I think that it's actually kind of the wrong goal. 17:45 It's not really much to be chased after in and of itself. 17:49 It's something that we're doing and using, a quality that we're trying to use to obtain a specific goal. 17:55 Or state. 17:57 But it's also kind of an illusion because it's a very ambiguous word that has so many different meanings in different contexts, in different perspectives, and there's questions of is the atmosphere decentralized? 18:11 Is ActivityPub decentralized? 18:12 What about Nostr? 18:13 And all these different things. 18:16 And there's so many criteria which you can measure that by. 18:20 And it ends up just becoming debates that we have endlessly on Blue Sky. 18:23 I'm sure many of you probably— I know I participated in some of those debates. 18:28 But it's an illusion in the sense that no matter how decentralized you think you can make something, ultimately there's always something underneath that is not decentralized. 18:40 That you can't really escape. 18:43 If Nostr, if Atmosphere, all these different things are fully decentralized in this utopic way, at the end of the day there's an internet service provider that can shut off your access to the internet. 18:54 A government that can shut off your access to the government. 18:56 And at that point it's like, well, it doesn't really matter. 19:00 But also there's a tendency with decentralization to think that, oh, I can separate myself from everyone else. 19:07 I can become independent. 19:08 I can control things. 19:09 I can do what I want. 19:10 I can, you know, all these different things. 19:12 But ultimately it's, we tend to forget just how, or even aren't aware of just how interconnected everything really is. 19:20 There's this great term by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk named Thích Nhất Hạnh. 19:24 Thich Nhat Hanh. 19:25 He coined this term "interbeing," and it's really about this idea of like focusing and trying to better understand and be aware of just how our existence is so intertwined with everything else, everyone else, and it's just not really actually possible to like separate ourselves fully. 19:47 So I like to keep that in mind, and I think that it can potentially help us refocus to maybe some going beyond decentralization. 19:55 Maybe we don't want to lose that phrase completely, but what a lot of people are trying to ask when they're thinking about these things and users are asking or feeling is these questions of like, can I leave this thing? 20:05 Can I, can I build something here? 20:07 Can I, can I make this my own? 20:09 And I think words and concepts like interoperability, autonomy, and malleability are actually a lot more helpful potentially because there's lots of ways that you can achieve those things. 20:22 And malleability specifically is one I really love. 20:25 And it's funny because as I was preparing this talk, I of course had no idea what Jay was going to announce the other, you know, just yesterday, or what she was planning. 20:34 But it does really fit into what I had planned to talk about. 20:36 There's this really great essay by Ink Switch that they released. 20:42 I forget, maybe sometime last year called "Malleable Software." And I love this essay. 20:46 It's very long, but it has some great quotes like this one. 20:49 The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay, a malleable material that users could reshape at will. 20:56 But instead we got appliances built far away, sealed, and unchangeable. 21:01 And for me this really resonates and this makes me feel like, yeah, this is an apt description of what happened. 21:08 And I do think that as a result of some things that— some new technologies and communities that are evolving now and converging, I think that it makes malleable software much more of a potential reality than it ever has been in the past. 21:23 Specifically, I think that the atmosphere we're participating in here with the app protocol, combined with what some of what Jay was talking about, these sort of agentic workflows with LLMs, they really can begin to bring down a lot of barriers to entry and allow people who previously probably wouldn't have tried or attempted to make their digital environments their own or make software experiences themselves, it makes it a lot more possible. 21:52 You know, the atmosphere gives people a foundation that they can easily take and build upon. 21:57 It gives you a social graph. 21:59 It gives you pre-existing content. 22:01 It gives you identities that you don't have to rebuild from scratch. 22:04 It's what makes something like Flushes possible that I could do in 2 days. 22:12 Another great quote from that essay that I want to highlight is this one. 22:15 It says, everyone deserves the right to evolve their digital environments. 22:18 It's an important way to fulfill our creative potential and maintain a sense of agency in a world that is increasingly defined in code. 22:28 I think this is really what I've been trying to do and what I think the atmosphere has helped enable me to do is it's allowed someone like me who does not have necessarily the resources, the ability to create an entirely new social network myself, but it allows me to engage with that digital environment in a way that feels more at home to me or fits better with my own needs and style. 22:52 This brings me to like the second point I want to talk about, which is this idea that I have of the client being the content. 22:59 And I'm sure many of you reference— understand this reference, which is a remix of a quote by Marshall McLuhan back in the '60s with his book "The Medium is the Message." To tie this a little bit back into moths, moths are interesting for a lot of reasons, but they're very different obviously from many other creatures and even obviously humans. 23:22 Moths have compound eyes that I think range from anywhere from like 200 to 20,000 facets. 23:31 Their antennae are incredibly sensitive. 23:36 They can detect chemicals and things within the air. 23:40 And they help them fly. 23:41 They have hearing organs which are kind of like ears but not quite like ears, but they can detect like ultrasonic frequencies. 23:50 So they have these like sensory organs that allow them to experience the world in a unique way. 23:56 And there's this term called— I think it's pronounced umwelt. 23:59 It's based on a German word, I believe. 24:02 But it means the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems. 24:13 So I think that this is very apt for what we're experiencing now in this era of malleable software that is coming into existence. 24:23 Because previously, previously in the old era of social media, we had things like Facebook, which was one user interface designed in Silicon Valley by tech giants and things like this, serving billions of people all over the world from different communities and contexts with different needs and wants and desires. 24:44 And it was basically kind of forcing them to experience the digital world in this one particular way. 24:50 And then I think a good example of this is going back to this, is there's two different ways that you can view data. 24:57 Or there's not just two, these are two examples of ways you can view data, the same underlying data. 25:04 And I think what I ultimately think and hope and I think is going to happen is potentially we might see, again to draw it back to moths and the animal kingdom, is potentially a world in which there are so many different types of clients that maybe they're forks of one client and they go off in one direction and they're very similar. 25:25 You know, the Anna Sodoma moth has, I think there's like 7 or 8 different species of Anisotomos that all have slightly different variations. 25:33 So, you know, you have forks of the Blue Sky client now that people can easily fork it and change it to be different colors or add new features that aren't in the official client and things like this. 25:42 So I think we could easily see a world in which you could almost like have a taxonomy of client interfaces for the Atmosphere. 25:49 And in the same way, like, again, Moss, there are Moss and butterflies are within the same order. 25:58 It's the order of Lepidoptera. 26:00 And moss— there are like 180,000 known species of moss, but only like around 20,000 known species of butterflies. 26:10 And even within all those different things, there's just incredible diversity. 26:14 Like, these are all photos that I took in my yard, and it is very stunning to see the differences. 26:21 But all this comes back to this idea of, yes, Facebook is one social client designed in a very particular way trying to serve 3 billion people. 26:31 And I don't think that makes sense and isn't very healthy. 26:35 But with things like Anasota and other clients that are popping up, the goal for these things— and at least for me when I'm designing Anasota— is to make it not for everyone, but to make it for a very particular type of person. 26:47 Anasota is definitely not for everyone. 26:51 There's lots of people that love what I'm doing and love the thing that I've made, but might not necessarily even use it themselves. 26:58 And that's fine. 26:59 I know that's going to be the case. 27:00 And I didn't design it for everyone. 27:02 And that's the case. 27:04 Same could be true of— if some of y'all heard Maria's talk, she was talking about Lia, which is the client that she and Eugene are making for researchers. 27:12 And it's incredibly different. 27:13 It's not a client that I would use every day. 27:15 But it's specific to their community with features that they need and want that other major apps would not even do. 27:23 And this really leads sort of to one of my final points, which is abandoning the idea of one-size-fits-all software, especially in contrast to Elon Musk's vision of the everything app. 27:38 One app that does everything for everyone. 27:43 I think it was several months ago I posted on Bluesky something to the effect of like, we don't need an everything app, and the Atmosphere can be an everything ecosystem. 27:54 And so that's kind of like the thing that has attracted me to the ecosystem and is my hope for what this whole thing could become if we're able to make it work. 28:06 To close it off, there's some interesting parallels. 28:11 One of which is just this idea that moths are attracted to light. 28:14 And people actually aren't really quite certain why that is. 28:17 There are like theories about why moths are attracted to lights. 28:21 But there's no strong conclusions necessarily about that. 28:26 And now humans somehow are also attracted to these weird screens and lights that are drawing us in. 28:31 And we spend hours in front of. 28:34 When we don't really know quite what they're doing to us. 28:36 Like, this is only— we've only been doing this for like 20 years, which is not very long whatsoever when you think about the grand scheme of things. 28:42 So we don't really know what's happening exactly. 28:47 But I think in that environment, it's incredibly important that if we don't know exactly what's happening or where this is going, we want people, I think, to be able to control things themselves, or at least adapt things to make them fit their own their own needs, wants, and desires, and even styles. 29:05 And to close things out, I am going to show you one more picture of how amazing and diverse moss can be. 29:09 These are all moss that I found in my backyard late at night. 29:13 Yeah, so many different kinds. 29:16 They're incredible and beautiful. 29:17 I know some folks might be scared of moss or think they're weird and creepy or whatever, but some of them are, but there are also just incredibly beautiful ones. 29:26 Yeah, so that's what I get out of that atmosphere, and that's what I hope more folks get out of the atmosphere. 29:32 Yeah. 29:43 Thank you so much, Dame. 29:45 We've got time for maybe one question. 29:47 Does anyone have a question? 29:52 How many moths have you seen in your backyard? 29:56 I think— I can't remember exactly. 29:58 I think I've seen— I've only been doing it for about a year and a half. 30:01 I think I'm up to around 160 different moths. 30:05 But I've heard of other moth-ers that can see up to 1,000, and depending on your location. 30:12 So I'm going to be doing that from here on out and seeing how far I can go. 30:18 Follow-up question: did you see any moths here in Vancouver? 30:24 Not yet, but I was— a very strong temptation to bring some of my portable gear and like go out at night, but I was like, I can't do that. 30:31 I've got to be like focused on talks and things like that, but I really wanted to. 30:35 I was like, oh my, there'll be so many cool moths out here. 30:42 I was very jealous, and yeah, but that's— yeah. 30:46 Thank you so much. 30:47 One more round of applause for Dame, please.