Anuj Ahooja 2:01 Accept the love, the love. 2:06 Go, you know where. 2:08 Now I can see, I just stare. 2:17 I'm still alive. 2:24 I'm still alive. 2:28 I'm still alive. 3:04 Is there something wrong? 3:07 She said, of course there is. 3:12 You're still alive, she said. 3:15 Oh, do I deserve to be? 3:18 Is that the question? 3:20 And if so, if so, who answers? 3:24 Who answers? 3:26 I, I'm still alive. 3:35 You ready? Speaker B 3:52 Okay, so it's getting my other screen. Anuj Ahooja 4:12 All right. 4:18 I am. Speaker B 4:18 Yeah, that's why I want to— Anuj Ahooja 4:20 I was like, yeah, everything up. 4:30 Oh, it's good. 4:30 Thank you, man. 4:33 I'll throw you up in, uh, Oh, there we go. 6:47 I'm going to give you my love. 6:49 I'm going to give you my love. 9:20 my love. 9:22 I'm going to give you every inch of my love. 9:31 I'm going to give you my love. 9:39 Yeah, all right, let's go. 9:49 Way down inside One more. 9:57 You need— Shake for me, yeah. 10:32 I want to be your backdoor man. 10:38 Hey, oh, hey, oh, hey, oh. 11:27 A love so full it could save us always. 11:30 And I want you to surrender all my feelings arose today. 11:41 And I want you to remain. 11:44 The power of children can amaze you. 11:49 I'll try not to complain. 13:00 Can it come to place? 13:02 There is no love in space. 13:14 Lying in this bed. 13:19 Can it come between us? 13:27 Can it come between us? 13:30 Lying in this bed. 16:08 Thank you, guys. 17:24 I can do these. 17:25 You have ACC? 17:27 Uh, yeah, I do. Speaker B 17:28 So we can just stick that in there, see what happens. Anuj Ahooja 17:38 Okay, I believe. 17:40 And so what are you in? 17:44 Oh, you might have to handshake. 18:14 Okay. 18:14 No, I don't think you're— This through all 5 horizons, revolve around the sun, the Earth to the sun. 18:33 Now the air I tasted and breathed has taken a turn. 19:16 What was everything? 19:19 All the pictures said all men wants to play. 19:31 That too, everything. 19:34 I take a walk outside. 19:37 I'm surrounded by some kids at play. 19:43 I can feel their laughter. 19:48 So why do I feel— twisted thoughts that spin around my head? 20:04 I'm spinning, oh, I'm spinning high with the sun can't drive away. 20:12 Now I'm feeling Hands. 20:21 Free or broken glass of what was everything. 20:28 All the pictures said, all been washed in blood. 20:34 Tattooed everything. 20:37 All the love or bad. 20:40 Turned my world to black. 20:43 Tattooed all I see. 20:47 All that I am. 20:49 All I'll be. 21:24 How can it be? 21:33 How can it be? 25:38 everybody down to deliver. 25:41 Give it away, give it away, give it away now. 25:45 Give it away, give it away, give it away now. 26:01 Give it away, give it away, give it away now. 26:09 That's a good thing, a little won't tell. 26:14 What I got, you gotta get it, put it in you. 26:18 What they got, you gotta get it, put it in you. 26:23 What I got, you gotta get it, put it in you. 26:29 Bring it with the feeling, don't stop, continue. 26:36 I realize I don't wanna be a miser. 26:39 Gone find where sly, I be the wiser. 26:39 Just break this 11 up, rise up. 26:39 Up from everybody, wanna keep it like the Kaiser. 26:40 Give it away, give it away, give it away now. 26:40 Give it away, give it away, give it away now. 26:41 Give it away, give it away, give it away Sal. 26:48 You can't have the hate that it breaks. 27:03 You can help my. 27:08 Everything. 27:10 Tear down my reason. 28:31 Help me get away from myself. 28:32 I don't wanna fuck you like an animal. 28:36 I don't wanna feel you from the inside. 28:42 I don't wanna fuck you like an animal. 28:50 My heart is just in so far. 29:22 Salvation. 29:24 You can have the hate that it brings. 29:30 You can have my absence of faith. 29:36 You can have my everything. 29:42 You can help me tear down my reason. 33:54 Testing, testing. Speaker B 34:14 I have the power. 34:18 We're going to get started in just a moment. 34:20 I'm going to give a couple of people the chance to enjoy their coffee, put it down safely without spilling over the floor, give the person next to them a high five saying, man, I'm so excited for this next— Is it showing up? 37:01 Oh no. 37:02 Can everyone hear me at least? 37:02 Okay, good. 37:03 All right. 37:04 Wow, I was not expecting this many people at the end of a conference, but we're gonna roll with it. 37:08 I'm still recovering from last night, so we're gonna do our best. 37:12 It's Nick's fault, actually, so you can blame him. 37:15 So today I wanted to talk about at least my year about building Bridgy and breaking down the walls of the OpenSocial web. 37:21 My co-founder Ryan Barrett's been doing it much longer than I have. 37:25 But, yeah, please clap. 37:27 Please clap for Ryan Barrett. 37:28 He's an amazing person. 37:31 But, yeah, it's been a year for me. 37:35 And over the last year, I think we've built a lot. 37:39 But more importantly, I think through that building, I've learned a lot more about not just about the ecosystems and how they operate and what we need to start caring about, but about the way that we can start building as well. 37:49 And so I wanted to share some of those findings. 37:52 A little introduction to myself. 37:53 I'm Anuj Ahuja. 37:54 I'm the executive director at AnuSocial. 37:57 We are— our goal is to liberate people's online relationships from any one technology. 38:03 We're a nonprofit, and we've been operating for about a month and— a year and change. 38:08 A month. 38:09 That was last year. 38:11 I also write on my blog Augment where I'm actually experimenting with a bunch of OpenSocial web tools as well. 38:16 But today I wanted to focus on the work work that we've been doing at aNewSocial. 38:20 And I always like to start these presentations with the statement that I remind myself of. 38:25 And it's a promise that I make my friends, my family, and my colleagues whenever I introduce them to the idea of the OpenSocial web. 38:32 And it's this concept of you can follow anyone from anywhere and leave for another platform at any time. 38:38 And I think the only thing that bothers me about this statement is the fact that I always have to add the caveat of "kinda." And we all know why. 38:45 I'm not going I'm not going to get into the reasons, but to me, the fact that there's a kind of really sucks. 38:50 And so the thing that we're trying to do at a new social is trying to make that kind of smaller and smaller and smaller over time until it no longer exists. 38:57 So that's really the basis of the work that we're trying to do. 39:01 I introduced a version of that idea back last year at Atmosphere Conference where I had my presentation Bridges and the Last Network Effect. 39:08 I have a blog post about it. 39:10 I'm not going to recap too much about about that presentation in particular, but at the time when I did that presentation, a new social was like a new foundation. 39:19 We just started and a lot of the stuff that I was saying on stage were really just like dreams. 39:24 It was more of a multi-year vision. 39:26 And quite frankly, I actually didn't think most of it was possible. 39:30 But it turned out that it wasn't a multi-year vision because with Ryan Barrett, I was able to do it in a single year. 39:38 We actually ended up building most of the stuff that I talked about there, or at least the foundational layers of what we had to build. 39:43 Today I wanted to go through some of the highlights of that year and specifically talk about some of the lessons I learned while we were doing it. 39:51 So let's talk about 2025. 39:53 We— our biggest launch of the year was probably Bounce. 39:56 It was an eject button for the OpenSocial web where you could actually migrate your social graph between protocols, keeping all of your followers and as many bridged follows as possible. 40:05 This ended up being way bigger than I thought. 40:06 I thought a bunch of protocol nerds would get excited. 40:09 Turned out everyone was excited, um, and we got a bunch of users to try it out for the first time. 40:13 People are reviewing their social graphs on there all the time. 40:16 We thought it was just like a neat UI trick. 40:18 Turns out people really care about their social graphs and finding out how multi-protocol they are. 40:22 Um, very surprising. 40:23 I did not expect that at all. 40:25 Um, but what I learned was we could actually do a lot more with the bridge than I originally thought. 40:30 And that was like the biggest lesson for me was this bridge is more than just connecting communication. 40:35 We could actually start doing a lot more if we use it as the foundation for other products. 40:41 We also launched a settings page. 40:42 We launched a bunch of features for that last year, so I don't want to go into each thing, but the one thing that I wanted to call out that I was really excited about was launching App Proto blocklists on BridgeyFed, which meant that Fediverse users could take advantage of an Atmosphere feature. 40:55 And it was the first time where it clicked for me where I was like, we're not just bridging profiles and posts, we can actually bridge full-blown features across across ecosystems using BridgyFed. 41:04 And like, huh, that like really unlocked something in my brain. 41:07 And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since we launched it. 41:11 The other thing that we launched was unbridged notifications, which if someone was on the other side of the bridge and they communicated with you, but they weren't bridged themselves, we couldn't show it on your native platform. 41:19 That sucks. 41:21 There's no visibility of trolls or like people that you actually care about interacting with you. 41:25 And so we gave you some visibility into that over notifications over for your DMs. 41:29 That was a really neat trick that Ryan put together for us. 41:33 And then finally, we started seeing a bunch of platforms just putting bridging as a part of their platforms, which was really cool. 41:40 One that I want to call out is AltStore. 41:42 They're— yeah, clap for AltStore, they're freaking amazing. 41:45 They're here, by the way, you should talk to them, they're awesome. 41:48 And the cool thing about AltStore is they're also breaking down walls, specifically the walled garden of Apple, which should have been broken down a long time ago, but That's a whole other story. 41:57 We also learned something much bigger this year, at least to me. 42:01 It was that BridgyFed actually hosts some of the most active users on either network. 42:06 We have about 150,000 accounts on BridgyFed now, and they are some of the most power user people, and they don't care about who they're talking to and where they are. 42:17 They just want to build a community, and all they care about is connecting with people regardless of the platform they're on. 42:22 Um, that was just a statement I made that last year, turns out like a lot of people agree with that and they're some of the most active users everywhere. 42:31 Um, with Bounce as well, um, I recently learned that we're doing about 6 to 8 migrations every month, which is a whole lot more than I expected for protocol migration. 42:40 I know that's small numbers when you compare it to the crazy numbers that folks are doing on PDS Mover and Black Sky, um, but protocol movement's a lot more complicated and a lot more scary and we're still in beta and most Most people don't even know we exist. 42:51 And so 8 to 10 migrations a month— sorry, 6 to 8 migrations a month kind of blew my mind. 42:58 But the thing is, like, these numbers don't really mean a lot to me. 43:01 I don't really look— like, Ryan will tell you this— I don't look at DAOs, I don't look at DAOs, I don't really look at the activity that's happening on this stuff. 43:07 In fact, I poked Ryan for these numbers like last minute because I was like, I should probably say some of these numbers while I'm on stage as like the executive director. 43:15 But like, to me, this stuff it doesn't really matter. 43:17 And I think Lawrence Hoff of Connected Spaces wrote it better than I could ever say it. 43:21 He said that tools like Bounce suggest the direction of the OpenSocial web is less about specific protocols and more about expanding user agency. 43:28 And I think he kind of nailed it. 43:30 The way that we say it, which I think is less creative, is we just think these things should exist and that people need them. 43:37 And so we build them because they need them. 43:39 And that's really it. 43:40 Maybe 5 users are going to use it. 43:41 Maybe 150,000 people are going to use it, but to us these things need to exist because people care about connecting with people and using the tools that work best for them. 43:50 And so that's why we build the things that we build. 43:52 Or as David Pierce on The Verge said about Bounce, "The idea that I can just pick up my stuff on a social network and put it down on another social network, like, that's it, baby. 44:01 That's the stuff." And so this year we're going to keep doing that stuff because clearly that stuff matters and we really want to keep doing that work. 44:13 And so we've already hit the ground running with 2026. 44:15 It's only been 3 months and we've actually launched a bunch of stuff. 44:19 I want to quickly go over some of those things. 44:21 For one, we launched the Fediverse version of blocklists for Atmosphere users. 44:25 So now we've bridged a feature from the Fediverse over to the Atmosphere, and we've actually given people some options from reputable sources who give you full-blown blocklists right away. 44:33 So you don't even have to think about it. 44:34 You just go to our page, you click a few blocklists, and then you don't have to worry about some of the worst trolls on the Fediverse. 44:40 We also improved unbridged notifications with a full UI. 44:43 So when people interact with you and they can't bridge themselves and they're not bridging themselves, sorry, you can just go to the BridgyFed UI. 44:49 You can like, repost, block, or reply to them. 44:52 And to me, this was like another unlock because I realized that, hey, we can actually just do one-way interactions once in a while and it's not that big of a deal. 44:59 And we also did it in a way where it preserves the privacy of the other user. 45:03 Like if they don't don't want to be on the Atmosphere or the Fediverse, they don't have to be. 45:06 They can still interact with people on either side. 45:08 And I think that that's really important as well. 45:11 And the biggest, most exciting thing that's happened so far this year, at least for me, was long-form bridging. 45:15 We're now bridging standard.site, connecting blogs across the Atmosphere, the Fediverse, and the web all at once. 45:23 It's really, really exciting to me. 45:25 And I want to give a huge shout out to Leaflet Pocket and Offprint, who not only created standard.site, but also helped us a lot in the process of us building standard.site into BridgyFed. 45:36 I'm really excited to see people start using this. 45:39 I'm already using it on my blog, and I've already heard from a few people who've started using it as well. 45:43 So I'm super excited about this. 45:45 I also want to take an opportunity to apologize to Jared. 45:47 I don't think he's in the room, but Jared was at a conference in Europe, and he was about to promote Leaflet and standard.site, and then we exploded their app view. 45:56 Like overnight because we didn't tell him that we were doing this and we just turned on our fire hose and he was like, dude, what's happening with my app view? 46:03 He messaged me, he was like, I don't think we did anything, and Ryan's like, yeah, we did. 46:07 So yeah, I just wanted to publicly apologize to Jared, but we can just do things, so yeah, we did it. 46:14 But yeah, so that's what we've done so much so far with BridgyFed, but one of the neat things we did with the standard outside integration is we actually made it way easier to add other lexicons to BridgyFed to bring bridge to the Fediverse. 46:23 And so if you're building a new product with its own lexicon and you think it deserves more distribution across these ecosystems, across the web, across the Fediverse, please reach out to us. 46:33 We've actually made it like dead easy and we'd love to work with more people. 46:36 And I think the distribution is really important to the users that are on your platforms. 46:40 So we'd love to work with you. 46:41 If you look at our GitHub, you might notice that we've also been playing around with some other protocols. 46:46 I'm not going to talk too much about that today, but you can probably take a look and find out out within a couple of minutes. 46:51 Hopefully something to announce later this year. 46:53 So that's BridgyFed. 46:56 Then there's Bounce. 46:56 Um, Bounce was a really exciting project as I said before. 47:00 Um, but one of the limitations that we had in the original version of Bounce is you actually had to have an existing account at least on one side. 47:06 So if you wanted to move from the Fediverse to the Atmosphere, you had to have an Atmosphere account. 47:09 If you wanted to move from the Atmosphere to the Fediverse, you had to have a Fediverse account already. 47:13 Um, with the Fediverse, that doesn't matter as much because you can merge accounts. 47:16 So if you had an Atmosphere account that was bridged, we just merged the bridged version of your account in. 47:22 But the other way is not possible. 47:23 You cannot merge Atmosphere repos. 47:26 And so we'd have to actually drop one of your accounts. 47:29 And oftentimes that was the bridge version of the account. 47:31 So we actually had some users that migrated from the Atmosphere to the Fediverse and they wanted to go back and we had no way to send them back. 47:36 And it really, really sucked. 47:39 But the reason we didn't launch with that was for one, Blue Sky, wasn't allowing migrations back into their PDSs at that time. 47:45 They do now, so that's changed. 47:47 And the other thing that's changed since then is that there's just a lot more PDS providers, which is like just really exciting. 47:53 Kudos to everyone running their own PDSs, people running PDS migration services. 47:57 We've taken a lot of inspiration from you guys. 47:58 And so I'm really excited to announce that in the next couple of weeks, we're actually going to launch full migrations from the Fediverse to the, to the Atmosphere, to any PDS that you want you want, whether that's BlackSky, EuroSky, your own self-hosted PDS or self-hosted social. 48:14 It's your choice. 48:15 You get to choose the PDS where you go, and you can migrate all of your Fediverse followers in as you go. 48:21 Thank you. 48:21 Yeah, personally very excited. 48:26 I really wanted to launch with that, but yeah, limitations were there. 48:30 A cool byproduct of that though is that because we're able to move people to PDSs and Fediverse accounts and merge Fediverse accounts, we can actually give people a credible exit from BridgyFed itself. 48:40 There's a lot of other bridges and multi-protocol services out there now, and they also have tools like Bounce that are fully integrated into them. 48:48 And so we want to give you the opportunity to be able to leave BridgyFed if one of those other services or platforms actually serves you better. 48:55 And so now you can actually split your BridgyFed account in half, create two native accounts, and then do what you will from there. 49:00 It's your choice. 49:00 It's your accounts, it's your life. 49:03 So we're really excited to give people finally a credible exit from BridgeyFed. 49:06 We don't want to be the only people here, we don't want to be centralized, we want as many bridges out there as possible. 49:11 So we're really excited to be able to give people that opportunity. 49:14 The other thing that we're going to be launching later this year is being able to reconnect with unbridged follows. 49:18 So when you bounce, we can bring all of your followers with you, but anyone that isn't bridged who you used to follow, we can't You can't follow them. 49:27 They're not bridged. 49:28 They don't show up in your native account. 49:29 So one of the things we're going to do to circumvent that is actually keep stock of all the users that— all of the people that you can no longer follow. 49:36 And if they ever bridge that account in the future, we give you a notification so that you can immediately reconnect with them when they arrive natively to your platform. 49:44 So we're getting closer. 49:45 You can follow anyone from anywhere and leave for another platform at any time. 49:49 And it's still kind of, but I think in the last year we've done a pretty great job of making that kind of a whole lot smaller. 49:55 There's also a whole bunch of APIs that we launched that I didn't get the chance to talk about here, that you can use a lot of these features natively in your client. 50:02 So if you have a client and you're building on the social web, please reach out to us. 50:06 You can actually make a lot of this stuff feel a lot more native and make that kind of even smaller on your platform. 50:11 So please reach out to us for that. 50:13 Before I leave though, I know I'm running out of time. 50:16 Sorry, I'm so sorry. 50:18 I had so much to say. 50:20 I had a bunch of dreams that I said last year that we accomplished. 50:22 But if there's one thing that I've learned in the last year is that I need to dream a little bit bigger because Ryan is just insane. 50:28 He can build literally anything I throw at him. 50:30 So I'm going to dream way bigger. 50:32 I didn't even tell Ryan I'm going to say this, by the way. 50:36 Paul Fraze said something really interesting yesterday in his presentation. 50:39 He said that one of the biggest benefits of the Atmosphere is that you have a single account that works across multiple different services and shares data across all of those services. 50:47 I've been calling that the everything account. 50:49 I'm not the only one that's been calling it everything. 50:50 I think Dame has been calling it the everything ecosystem. 50:53 So like, I'm not the only one saying this, but I've been using the everything account because that's what's been making sense to me and some other folks. 51:00 But the everything account isn't like an everything account. 51:03 It's an everything account for the atmosphere. 51:05 And with BridgyFed, if there's one thing that I've realized over the course of the last year is it can actually help make the atmosphere account and everything account for for everything. 51:13 And so my dream over the next few years, maybe it's going to be multi-year or maybe Ryan's going to push some code tonight, but my dream for the future is actually to make your Atmosphere account, your everything account for everything. 51:24 And so that's the mission that I'm on for the next few years with Ryan and the rest of the Indoo Social team. 51:29 So thank you guys very much. 51:30 I'm sorry for going over. 51:34 We are a nonprofit with 2 full-time volunteers for the last year, so if you believe believe in our mission, please go to our Patreon, patreon.com/anusocial. 51:43 You can get People Not Platform merch on store.anusocial, store.anu.social, and you can find me all over the atmosphere. 51:50 Thank you guys so much, and I'm really sorry for taking