Ramalingam Saravanan 0:02 it in a moment. 0:04 But it's about a project called Skylimit I started in December. 0:07 And you can try it live if you like at skylimit.dev. 0:11 And there's my handle. 0:12 There's an article that appeared in New York Times just like 3 days ago, "The Terrible Cost of Infinite Scroll." It was in response to the Meta and YouTube judgment. 0:23 And I'm a scientist, and I don't like the infinite scroll. 0:26 And I interact with people who are not very popular by likes. 0:29 But I don't see their posts. 0:30 Okay, so I have a substack post that describes it. 0:36 The question, the subtitle there is, what if your social media feed worked like a newspaper instead of a slot machine where occasionally you get good posts but you don't know when you're going to get it? 0:45 A newspaper, I like a newspaper, I'm an old-fashioned guy. 0:48 I like sections, I read comics, and can I reproduce that in BlueSky? 0:53 And actually you can, so that's the point of the talk. 0:56 So in the post, I wrote that if more social apps are built around infinite scrolling, Sky Limit, as the name suggests, is built around finite scrolling. 1:06 I wrote this on March 25th, and the newspaper article came on the 26th, so I felt very good about that. 1:12 But finite scrolling can get you a long way. 1:15 This is what the app looked like. 1:17 It's basically a clone of Blue Sky. 1:21 And the various things that look similar. 1:23 But I'll show you the things that look different. 1:26 The first thing you'll notice is that it says how many posts I received per day and how many it shows. 1:32 So I received about 1,300, it shows 619 edited. 1:37 We'll come to the edited in a moment. 1:40 So that's new. 1:41 Other thing that's new is that it shows a number and a time. 1:45 So every post is numbered starting from 1. 1:48 At midnight. 1:49 So you know how much you're reading. 1:50 It's like a calorie counter. 1:51 My calorie count is 600. 1:53 I know how much I'm eating. 1:55 So every day I know how many posts I'm reading, how many I've left roughly, statistical. 2:00 So on weekends it's actually less, on weekdays it's more. 2:03 It's a probabilistic curation. 2:06 So I know exactly what I'm reading. 2:08 And the other thing you can see is— now I'm going to introduce myself. 2:13 So if you go to my profile on SkyLimit, so I'm a climate scientist and I have 600 followers, right? 2:23 How do I limit the number of posts I see? 2:26 If I'm going to see 600 posts a day, how do I limit that? 2:32 So this is also from the app. 2:34 The app has a live graph which shows for each followee, there are 600 of them, how many active ones are shown. 2:40 That's why it doesn't go up to 600. 2:42 How many they post is a logarithmic scale, and this updates every 2 hours in your app. 2:47 And I was very surprised when I saw this because I had no idea what I was seeing. 2:51 The yellow is how many people are posting, and the green is how much the app shows. 2:58 And the red is a cap it puts. 3:01 I call it the sky limit number. 3:02 It's about 3. 3:03 It's 2.7. 3:04 It basically takes the area here and caps it and makes that 600. 3:09 So if you're a quiet poster, and I'm a quiet poster, all your posts will be shown. 3:13 So I wrote the app for quiet posters. 3:16 But if you're a prolific poster, it'll only pick this many. 3:20 And beyond that, it's probabilistic, right? 3:22 And it automatically adjusts every 2 hours. 3:25 Everything is done in the browser in IndexedDB. 3:28 There's no server. 3:29 This runs on GitHub Pages. 3:30 So 100 million people could use it tomorrow, it'll still run if GitHub serves it or Cloudflare serves it. 3:35 So it's completely scalable. 3:37 And so this number can vary depending on your situation. 3:42 Let's see who those folks are. 3:44 So this is the sky limit number. 3:46 The other thing that it shows you in the same page as that, it has a sortable table. 3:52 You can sort it by each column. 3:54 How many posts my followers post, how many it allows, what the fraction that's shown. 4:00 I initialized this in 3 days. 4:02 So 80 protocols posting 54 posts per day. 4:06 I'm seeing 6% of them because of the cap. 4:09 So you can go down and you can check every 2 hours this gets updated in your app. 4:14 So you get a complete view of who's posting what, and you can sort it by various columns. 4:19 Like, it tracks engagement. 4:21 You can see who you're most engaged with, all of that. 4:24 And these are the amplification factors. 4:27 So the normal, it gives you a 3 limit, but you can make it 6, or you can amplify it if you wish. 4:34 And if you click on the number you saw, you can click on it, you can amplify the factors. 4:38 So you have complete control over how many posts are shown. 4:45 So that— back here, the other thing that you can see here, the sky limit number. 4:51 I put it in my profile. 4:53 I'm hoping everybody puts it in their profile. 4:55 And there's some really cool things that come out of this. 5:00 So one of the advantages of being the last talk here is that you know what other people are talking about. 5:05 And one of the things journalists pointed out, the opaque AI algorithms, they don't know who they're going to reach. 5:12 I don't post very much. 5:14 If I post something, I have no idea who will see it. 5:16 But if my followers are using Skylimit, I can make these assertions. 5:22 If your daily posting average is less than my 2.7 number, I will always see your posts. 5:28 That's guaranteed. 5:30 And there's a priority mechanism, so it can divide posts into priority and regular. 5:35 And by default, anything with a hashtag is considered priority. 5:38 But the user can actually configure it. 5:40 So, but it's not a convention in place, so right now it just takes any hash post as priority. 5:46 If your priority posting post is less than average than my sky limit number, it'll always be shown. 5:53 And posts matching addition criteria are always shown. 5:55 I'll talk about additions in a moment. 5:57 But this gives guarantees if my followers use sky limit, I can tell exactly how many people will see my post and they see a limited number and it'll actually tell them if they haven't read my post. 6:06 It counts the posts that haven't been read. 6:08 It says you haven't read this many posts. 6:10 And I'm okay with that number because it's a fixed number per day. 6:13 If it's too much, I'll cut it down. 6:14 Okay? 6:17 So the infinite linear feed is just a UI construct. 6:20 There's so much talk about custom feeds, but you can do more than custom feeds. 6:25 You gotta think outside the line of the feed. 6:27 I'll talk about editions, which is two-dimensional. 6:31 So I love newspapers, as I said. 6:33 So what you can do here is add the tab called Periodic Editions. 6:39 You can configure the editions. 6:40 So you can have many editions a day. 6:42 You can decide who your columnists are and what their sections are. 6:45 It's basically a Markdown file. 6:48 You can see all their posts or posts which match their Substack URL. 6:52 There are people I follow on Substack and they post about it. 6:55 I want to see it. 6:55 I don't want to miss it. 6:56 It'll automatically create that fixed times of the day. 7:00 And this is what an edition looks like. 7:02 So I said I like comics, so I follow XKCD and it only appears at noon It could have been posted yesterday, but I'll see it at noon. 7:09 I don't need to see it immediately. 7:12 It doesn't clutter up my post. 7:16 So you can collapse it so I have Blue Sky, and you can see Blue Sky as you want it. 7:21 And the other thing it tells you here, I don't think you can see it, it says how many posts are unread. 7:26 So you know if you read it, you don't have to go back to it. 7:31 So just parting thoughts. 7:34 Don't think of a linear feed, think of multiple options. 7:36 We had some talks earlier today at the Minnesota. 7:40 You can have newspapers in BlueSky. 7:42 It's already working. 7:45 And it's a very simple format. 7:46 You can do that. 7:48 And don't let your social media diet become an opaque AI construct. 7:52 I like AI. 7:53 I used AI to make this. 7:54 But I like to verify the answers. 7:56 So if you're using Addy to— generate things, I would want to know what it is. 8:01 I would want it to generate my digital layout and look at it, then use it. 8:05 So I think AI is helpful, but you want to check and you want it to be transparent. 8:10 But the nice thing about SkyLimit, it can limit your views and transparently rely on human followers to do your curation for you. 8:20 I follow people because I want to see their posts. 8:23 And this ensures that if you don't post too much, I will definitely see your posts. 8:27 And actually the one special hashtag which it recognizes is called #weekly. 8:32 Any post that has #weekly will always be shown, but it'll only be done once a week because it tracks that. 8:39 That way I can guarantee that if you post something, everybody who uses SkyLimit will see it. 8:45 So if you are someone who posts a weekly column, you can guarantee that it'll be seen. 8:52 I did manage good time, so I'm going to show a few other features. 8:57 Oh, you can't see it here. 8:59 The colors are washed out. 9:01 But when a post is read, the paper will actually age. 9:05 You can see it on my computer. 9:09 So the paper looks old after 15 minutes. 9:11 It tracks views. 9:12 So if you're scrolling down and you want to have it at this point, you'll see it immediately. 9:18 And finally, I'll leave it at why I'm writing this because I don't know if you've seen WALL-E. 9:27 This is what I'm afraid of, that you're sitting and watching your infinite doom scroll created by AI. 9:34 And I don't want that future. 9:35 I want to control my views. 9:37 So I'll leave you with those thoughts. 9:39 We have 15 seconds.