Ramalingam Saravanan 0:00 There's an article that appeared in New York Times just like 3 days ago, The Terrible Cost of Infinite Scroll. 0:07 It was in response to the Meta and YouTube judgment. 0:11 And I'm a scientist, and I don't like the infinite scroll. 0:14 And I interact with people who are not very popular by likes, but I don't see their posts. 0:19 So I have a Substack post that describes it. 0:25 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. 0:33 A newspaper, I like a newspaper. 0:35 I'm an old-fashioned guy. 0:36 I like sections. 0:37 I read comics. 0:39 And can I reproduce that in BlueSky? 0:41 And actually you can. 0:42 So that's the point of the talk. 0:44 So in the Post, I wrote that if more social apps are built around infinite scrolling, SkyLimit, as the name suggests, is built around finite scrolling. 0:54 I wrote this on March 25th, and the newspaper article came on the 26th. 0:57 So I felt very good about that. 1:00 But finite scrolling can get you a long way. 1:03 This is what the app looked like. 1:05 It's basically a clone of Blue Sky and the various things that look similar, but I'll show you the things that look different. 1:14 The first thing you'll notice is that it says how many posts I received per day and how many it shows. 1:20 So I received about 1,300. 1:22 It shows 600 and 19 edited. 1:25 We'll come to the edited in a moment. 1:28 So that's new. 1:29 Other thing that's new is that it shows a number and a time. 1:33 So every post is numbered starting from 1 at midnight. 1:37 So you know how much you're reading. 1:38 It's like a calorie counter. 1:39 My calorie count is 600. 1:41 I know how much I'm eating. 1:43 So every day I know how many posts I'm reading, how many I've left roughly, statistical. 1:48 So on weekends it's actually less, on weekdays it's more. 1:51 It's a probabilistic curation. 1:54 So I know exactly what I'm reading. 1:56 And the other thing you can see is— now I'm going to introduce myself. 2:01 So if you go to my profile on SkyLimit, so I'm a climate scientist. 2:07 And I have 600 followers. 2:11 How do I limit the number of posts I see? 2:14 If I'm going to see 600 posts a day, how do I limit that? 2:20 So this is also from the app. 2:22 The app has a live graph which shows for each followee, there are 600 of them, only the active ones are shown, that's why it doesn't go up to 600, how many they post. 2:31 There's a logarithmic scale and this updates every 2 hours in your app. 2:35 And I was very surprised when I saw this because I had no idea what I was seeing. 2:39 The yellow is how many people are posting and the green is how much the app shows. 2:46 And the red is a cap it puts. 2:48 I call it the sky limit number. 2:50 It's about 3. 2:51 It's 2.7. 2:52 It basically takes the area here and caps it and makes that 600. 2:57 So if you're a quiet poster, and I'm a quiet poster, all your posts will be shown. 3:01 So I wrote the app for quiet posters. 3:04 But if you're a prolific poster, it'll only pick this many. 3:08 And beyond that, it's probabilistic. 3:10 And it's automatically adjusted every 2 hours. 3:13 Everything is done in the browser in IndexedDB. 3:16 And there's no server. 3:17 This runs on GitHub Pages. 3:18 So 100 million people could use it tomorrow. 3:20 It'll still run if GitHub serves it or Cloudflare serves it. 3:23 It's completely scalable. 3:25 And so this number can vary depending on your situation. 3:30 Let's see who those folks are. 3:32 So this is the sky limit number. 3:34 The other thing that it shows you in the same page as that It has a sortable table. 3:40 You can sort it by each column. 3:42 How many posts my followers post, how many it allows, what the fraction that's shown. 3:48 This— I initialized this in 3 days. 3:50 So 80 protocols posting 54 posts per day. 3:54 I'm seeing 6% of them because of the cap. 3:57 So you can go down and you can check every 2 hours this gets updated in your app. 4:02 So you get a complete view of who's posting what And you can sort it by various columns, like it tracks engagement. 4:09 You can see who's the most engaged with, all of that. 4:11 And so, and these are the amplification factors. 4:15 So the normal, it gives you a 3 limit, but you can make it 6, or you can amplify it if you wish. 4:22 And if you click on the number you saw, you can click on it, you can amplify the factors. 4:26 So you have complete control over how many posts are shown. 4:33 So that— back here, the other thing that you can see here, the Sky Limit number. 4:39 I put it in my profile. 4:41 I'm hoping everybody puts it in their profile. 4:43 And there's some really cool things that come out of this. 4:48 So one of the advantages of being the last talk here is that you know what other people are talking about. 4:53 And one of the things journalists pointed out, the opaque AI algorithms. 4:58 They don't know who they're going to reach. 5:00 I don't post very much. 5:02 If I post something, I have no idea who will see it. 5:04 But if my followers are using SkyLimit, I can make these assertions. 5:10 If your daily posting average is less than my 2.7 number, I will always see your posts. 5:16 That's guaranteed. 5:18 And there's a priority mechanism, so it can divide posts into priority and regular, and by default, Anything with a hashtag is considered priority. 5:26 But the user can actually configure it. 5:28 So, but it's not a convention in place. 5:31 So right now it just takes any hash post as priority. 5:34 If your priority posting posts are less average than my sky limit number, it'll always be shown. 5:41 And posts matching addition criteria are always shown. 5:43 I'll talk about additions in a moment. 5:44 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. 5:54 It counts the posts that haven't been read. 5:56 It says, "You haven't read this many posts." And I'm okay with that number because it's a fixed number per day. 6:01 If it's too much, I'll cut it down. 6:02 Okay? 6:04 So the infinite linear feed is just a UI construct. 6:08 There's so much talk about custom feeds, but you can do more than custom feeds. 6:13 You gotta think outside the line of the feed. 6:14 I'll talk about editions, which is two-dimensional. 6:18 So I love newspapers, as I said. 6:21 So what you can do here is add the tab called Periodic Editions. 6:27 You can configure the edition so you can have many editions a day. 6:30 You can decide who your columnists are and what their sections are. 6:33 It's basically a Markdown file. 6:35 You can see all their posts or posts which match their Substack URL. 6:40 The people I follow on Substack and they post about it, I want to see it. 6:43 I don't want to miss it. 6:44 It'll automatically create that fixed times of the day and this is what an edition looks like. 6:50 I like comics, so I follow XKCD and it only appears at noon. 6:55 It could have been posted yesterday but I'll see it at noon. 6:57 I don't need to see it immediately. 7:00 It doesn't clutter up my post. 7:04 So you can collapse it so I have Blue Sky and you can see Blue Sky as you want it. 7:09 And the other thing it tells you here, I don't think you can see it, It says how many posts are unread. 7:14 So you know if you read it, you don't have to go back to it. 7:19 So just parting thoughts. 7:21 Don't think of a linear feed, think of multiple options. 7:24 We had some talks earlier today at the Any Soda. 7:28 You can have newspapers in BlueSky. 7:30 It's already working. 7:33 And it's a very simple format. 7:34 You can do that. 7:36 And don't let your social media diet become an opaque AI construct. 7:40 I like AI. 7:41 I used AI to make this. 7:42 But I like to verify the answers. 7:44 So if you're using Addy to generate things, I would want to know what it is. 7:49 I would want it to generate my digital layout. 7:51 I look at it, then use it. 7:53 So I think AI is helpful, but you want to check. 7:56 I want it to be transparent. 7:58 But the nice thing about Skylimit, you can limit your views and transparently rely. 8:05 On human followers to do your curation for you. 8:08 I follow people because I want to see their posts. 8:10 And this ensures that if you don't post too much, I will definitely see your posts. 8:15 And actually the one special hashtag which it recognizes is called #weekly. 8:20 Any post that has #weekly will always be shown, but it will only be done once a week because it tracks that. 8:27 That way I can guarantee that if you post something, Everybody who uses Sky Limit will see it. 8:33 So if you are someone who posts a weekly column, you can guarantee that it'll be seen. 8:40 I did manage good time, so I'm going to show a few other features. 8:45 Oh, you can't see it here. 8:47 The colors are washed out. 8:49 But when a post is read, the paper will actually age. 8:53 You can see it on my computer. 8:57 So the paper looks old after 15 minutes. 8:59 It tracks views. 9:00 So if you're scrolling down and you want to have it at this point, you'll see it immediately. 9:06 And finally, I'll leave it at why I'm writing this because I don't know if you've seen WALL-E. 9:15 This is what I'm afraid of, that you're sitting and watching your infinite doom scroll created by AI. 9:21 And I don't want that future. 9:23 I want to control my—