Here's Mike. Oh, it's so awesome to see you guys. I am loving this conference. So many amazing people building so many incredible things. I uh my background is I've been building browsers since the early 90s, if you can believe that. I've built voice browsers, I've built 3D browsers. I've built I worked on browsers that are really about giving access and discovery to people who are on an open protocol or on an open network. And um, this was a browser I worked on. I'm very proud to have been one of the team members of Netscape Navigator back in the day.
Uh it was an incredible time. At that time, when I joined Netscape, people told me I was crazy because why would you uh AOL was how everyone was online. Uh AOL was super easy to use. You put a CD ROM in your computer. Crazy, but I know, but uh that's what you did, and everyone thought that was awesome. And uh when you would talk about the web, they were like, hold on a second, I have to download something? What does that even mean? Um I have to put in HTTPS, like I'm not doing that. That's going nowhere, right?
And the web really was um kind of sort of moving along but at a sort of a slow pace. What happened was two things. First of all, people started building amazing websites, completely awesome websites. And those websites ultimately uh started to attract people to the web. And what Netscape DID and what the browser did is it acted as a gateway of discovery to find those websites in the first place, and then allow you to easily surf those websites across the web. And this was uh this was basically the beginning of a virtuous cycle because as more people discovered more websites and could see what it could do way beyond AOL, they ultimately made more websites and more people joined, and this virtuous cycle happened.
And ultimately AOL was dethroned as the primary walled garden and the main way that we spent time online. So, fast forward to today, we have a new set of walled gardens. And these walled gardens are more insidious because they actually own all of our connections to each other. Think about that. All of the connections between humans online are owned by just a few companies. You guys all know this. But this is a huge problem, and these companies need to be dethroned. So how do we do that? Well, let's get another virtuous cycle going. There's already some amazing things that are happening on the social web.
And when I say the social web, I mean Atmosphere, activity pub. These are two open protocols that have allowed people to have allowed us to standardize human connection online. That is very, very fundamental. And so, of course, what I've been working on again is yet another browser. Uh, this is a new kind of browser. This is a browser for a new kind of web, the open social web. This browser is called surf. It's available as a private beta right now. You can actually download it. Um actually, if you go to surf.social, uh, you can sign up for the beta, uh, and anyone who signs up today or tomorrow will make sure you get in.
So uh operators are standing by. Uh and um and what Surf does is it allows you to not so much browse websites but browse feeds. We think of feeds as the new website, as a new destination that people can go to on the social web. Custom feeds are one of the most important things that Bluesky innovated on. Uh, and there's a whole ecosystem of people who've already made amazing feeds on things like Grays, is Dev is Devin here, uh on all sorts of other really fantastic tools. Um what we want to do is help people discover all those amazing feeds.
And not just by the way, on atproto, but also on Activity Pub. Um and there's a whole other dimension of the web, which is built on RSS, another kind of feed model. So what Surf lets you do is it lets you basically browse and discover and surf any feed on the social web, atproto, Activity Pub, RSS, and even more interestingly, bring them all together into totally new kinds of feeds. So I'll show you a little bit about how you do that. Um what you're seeing here is surf on the desktop web. This is actually a preview.
We're gonna be launching this in knock on wood, hopefully a few days uh uh later uh this coming week. Uh and uh up at the top you can see you can search all posts um across the social web on ActivityPub, App Proto, or RSS. Uh and they're organized into lots and lots of different feeds. And then of course we can also feature different feeds. So we're featuring some fantastically awesome feeds that are on the social web. Shout out to Rudy with BlackSky. This is one of the it's it, you know, BlackSky is more than just a feed to be clear, but people can experience it as a feed.
It's a highly moderated experience. It's a destination. It's not just one of many things that you see and follow in Bluesky and shows up on your timeline. It's a destination, it's a place to go, it's highly moderated, it's amazing. Um also uh you can see here film feed. Uh is David Amel in the audience. Shout out to David Amel. He made this. He's a film photographer, and um, he's effectively created Instagram for film photographers here. Uh you see posts that are federated via threads that come from Instagram and make their way through threads and an activity pub and end up in this feed.
You see podcasts, you see YouTube channels. Uh it's I'll show I'll show it to you in a second. Um we also have uh Andra's news feed here made on Grays. There's Devin. Uh shout out to Devin. Um Andrea is she here, she's amazing as well. She's made some incredible feeds. Andrea, just incredible. And uh and so you can what we want to try to do with Surf is bring the social web to the masses, to to my mom, to my teenage daughters, and have them discover all these incredible feeds that people have been making. We also want to make it easy for people to make feeds as well.
Kind of more a little bit more of like uh a fun way to make some feeds and ways that are like uh that bring those multiple protocols together RSS, ActivityPub, and App Proto, and then publish those feeds to Bluesky and ultimately to the web. So let me show you how that works. So I'm just gonna scroll down here and I'm gonna make a feed. And I'm gonna make a feed about backpacking. So let's go ahead and I'm just gonna type in backpacking here. And here are some sources right away that we're gonna recommend to you.
And because we we use atproto and activity pub and RSS, these are coming from all these different places. So um I'm gonna start with just adding in a hashtag uh backpacking. Now, what's cool about this hashtag is it's multi-protocol. So if someone posts on threads with hashtag backpacking, or they post on Bluesky, or on BlackSky, or on PixelFed, or on Skylight, or on YouTube, or on Flipboard with that hashtag, that post will show up in this feed that I'm making. Um I'm gonna go ahead and add some YouTube channels here, um, backpacking TV, backpacking.
There's a ton of these great YouTube channels. I can always go just search for specific YouTube channels if I want to add them. Also, we've got podcasts, because we support RSS that gives us access to the world of podcasts. So every podcast on Earth you can put into a feed. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick some of these. This is really fun to do too because a lot of times you don't even know these podcasts existed, and so you can just pull them all together. Um then also what's really neat is that feeds um we think of feeds as like building blocks.
So you can put feeds inside of feeds. It's sort of like iFraming a website. It's it's actually kind of cool. So I I actually made a feed called The Backpacker, where I went and found all my best YouTube channels, my favorite podcasts, my favorite newsletters, my favorite people on at on Bluesky, on Mastodon, and I pulled them together into one awesome backpacking feed. So I'm just gonna make that a source. And then um I'm gonna add uh a few more feeds in here. These are from Flipboard magazines, which have been federated by uh Flipboard uh on activity pubs.
So these are publishers, these are users curating their favorite backpacking articles. I'm gonna add an RSS feed here for section hiker, uh which is a fantastic gear review site. I can put in RSS URLs in here and go and specifically add specific RSS feeds. I can even add Bluesky lists or Bluesky starter packs. So let's go ahead and add a couple of those. Uh so I'm gonna add uh two of these here, uh two starter packs. And you can add Bluesky custom feeds as a source too. So I'm gonna add a British Columbia hiking and backpacking feed.
And now I'll hit next and make my I'm gonna give it a name, backpacking. And I can add a community hashtag to it. I'm gonna make this about Pacific Northwest backpacking. So I'll give it a hashtag. And now we're going out across the social web and pulling together all these different sources in this one really cool feed. Now, as I scroll through this, um, you're gonna see some stuff that isn't actually on topic, like this one here, because I added some starter packs, right? People, as we know, post about all sorts of things. Just because they're in the backpacking starter pack doesn't mean they're not gonna post about politics.
So what I can do here is dial in this feed a bit further. I'm gonna go into settings, and I'm gonna go ahead and say, you know what, let's keep this feed on topic. So uh I'm gonna say, let's have all these posts that get into this feed just be about backpacking. I can also go ahead and turn off politics if I want. Um I can turn off news. I can turn off even Elon Musk. I don't want any Elon Musk in my feed, right? And uh and then I can hit save and then reload this feed.
And you should see a very different looking feed that has nothing but wall to wall backpacking goodness. Podcasts, videos, articles, conversations all about pod uh backpacking. Then what I can do is say, all right, let's publish this feed to Bluesky. So I can go just go over here and say publish, and now this backpacking feed is on my profile in Bluesky. You can go and see it now and pin it to your home. And then let's also publish it to the web as a social website. So I'm gonna go ahead and say, let's just call this backpacking and hit publish.
And now at backpacking.surf.social, if you go there, you'll see this awesome feed that I made. And you can try it right now. Um and this is really cool because now if I open up in a private window and I go to backpacking.surf.social. And I've never heard, let's say I've never heard of Bluesky or the Atmosphere or or any of those things. But I love backpacking and I my friends love this backpacking feed. I can just go to backpacking.surf.social and I can see everything that's in this feed. I can go in and I can watch all the videos.
We have this like really cool sort of TikTok style watch mode. Um, you can go look at all the articles, just the articles in this feed or all the podcast episodes in this feed. And then if I like this feed, I can just say join community. And then I can join with my Bluesky account or my Mastodon account uh or both. I can sign up for a completely new account, which is super easy, which behind the scenes creates an atproto actor and an activity pub actor, so I can just seamlessly engage with anyone wherever they're posting.
And I'll just show you one last thing here. This is how cool this um this can be. So this is David's film feed. If you go to filmfeed.surf.social. Um, you'll see here this is after putting a little bit of time and energy into kind of making the feed look really cool. You can make it look awesome. And here's here's what this looks like. Um, nothing but like amazing film photography by really cool film photographers, curated YouTubers and podcasts that David has hand selected, great pictures being shared by those photographers. And I can go in and hit like or reply.
This is a post from Pixel Fed. Um, here's a post from threads, and I can hit like. Um, I can repost these things. You'll see Bluesky posts in here, you'll see YouTube videos. So this gives you a sense of just how amazing the social web really is. And our goal is to really make it super easy to discover all the good stuff that's happening on the social web, get people excited about that, join the social web super easily, which then will inspire a lot more people to build even more cool things and we'll get that whole virtuous cycle going and we'll finally dethrone these walled gardens that have owned our human connections for the last 20 years on the internet.
Thank you. Mike in