Hello everyone. My name's Dame. Thanks for coming to my talk. How has everyone been enjoying the conference so far? Has it been good? I've been loving it. So 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. And there's been some really interesting and weird references that have been made too, like for some really cool ones. Like we had Aaron yesterday talking about kelp. We had Blaine talking about cheese making. And then we had Lawrence talking about K-pop and the K-pop fandom.
I just love that all these references happened at this conference so far. And especially makes me uh feel good because uh it makes what I'm about to talk about seem not quite as crazy. Um because my talk is titled uh From Toilets to Moths, the future of social media is weird and not for everyone. Um so to kick things off, um I want to introduce myself a little bit for those who don't know me. Um I am not Three Moths in a trench coat, despite what my bio on Bluesky says, uh unfortunately, though sometimes I wish that I was.
I was born and raised in Appalachia around the exact same time that the worldwide web came into existence. So I've kind of grown up alongside of the web and seen it grow as I have. Um I am uh I'm an artist, I'm a tech worker, and I created the app, Anisoda, which some of you may have seen or tried recently. Um but my background is in communications, content, social media, and things like that. Um but I've been working in the decentralized web space actually for the past five years before Bluesky even existed. Um I was Bluesky user number 1216.
So I've been around in this community for quite some time. Um I've had a few breaks here and there, um, but I I really sort of came back and became more active in 2024 again and started making things on uh the app protocol. Um but uh as a result of my personal interests and professional obligations, um I have been relatively chronically online for various stretches of my life. Um and uh that has along with the fact that I grew up alongside the internet, um, it's really caused me to um both have kind of a love-hate relationship with the internet.
Um I I love the internet for I love Twitter, I used I love the old internet, I loved all these different things. Um but it's also been hard to watch how they've impacted my life, both good and bad. Um it's also been hard watching Twitter die. 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. Um But yeah, it has I mean it has impacted me in amazing ways though. Like I've gotten multiple jobs just from being on Twitter.
Uh I I met my partner online. Um yeah, it definitely like had these negative impacts of uh impacting society negatively, impacting my mental health negatively. Um I think what I ultimately realized as a result of all that was that yeah, these these apps and a lot of the web is not necessarily really built for me, necessarily for anyone in particular. It's it's often built for uh you know big tech shareholders, it's built for advertising, it's built for extraction, all these different things. Um it's more like we, or at least me, uh I've been able to make these things work in spite of all these things.
Um, but even then there have been so many limitations. Um 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. I wish we could go and return to the past. Um I think that's like a very um I I I get why I get that sentiment, but I also think that it's like it's kind of misguided and and maybe even a little dangerous at times of like we don't ultimately want to, I don't think we should make try to make the internet great again.
Um I think that uh I think and if we can't do that, and we shouldn't do it, um, at least that mindset, um I guess the question that emerges for me is what what should we do and what should that future look like? Um after working in the the decentralized web space for the past five years, um it's definitely given me some ideas and thoughts about what I think might be trying to emerge from this cocoon. And um and I say trying because uh I think despite like all of our excitement about the Atmosphere and the things that we're building and creating here, um none of it really is a guarantee.
Like we're we're sort of right now trying to make this thing happen. And it's uncertain. Thunder gets uncertain if it will happen or not. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. Because it's going to take a lot of work. 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 I was raising a monarch butterflies and I was streaming that. And you could see the butterflies emerging from their cocoons and all the or the chrysalises. 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 four or five of them didn't make it. Yeah, so I mean the same way, like this uh what we're doing here, uh it's not guaranteed to succeed. Uh we've made a lot of progress, I think, over the past, I mean, even the past six months, it's been pretty cool to see what's been happening and the number of people that are here today. Um let's let's let's dive a little bit more. Oh, I just realized I forgot to advance my slides here. Um let's 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.
Um so to get started, uh the very first thing I made was in 2024. It was literally a simple tool I built just for me uh to go through my my post archive and choose whether I wanted to keep something or delete something in sort of like that Conmari fashion. Um and this very much was while I have some I well, I have some background in doing some software stuff and like um you know uh making websites and HTML and CSS, I had never actually made a web app before, so this is like the first thing I ever did in that vein, um, and it was here in the Atmosphere.
Uh the second thing I did was this platform called Cred.blue. It was kind of a weird fun experiment in understanding the data model of the app protocol better, understanding what was possible, just like testing things and seeing what would happen. And it was just a way to like create uh uh a social score based on someone's profile. Um so that was that was the second thing I made. Uh the next thing I made was this uh more of an art project and creative thing. It was a dynamic avatar that runs off of my iPhone. And what happens is every day, every hour, my avatar automatically updates to match the sort of the way the sky, the sky gradient looks wherever I am in my local time.
So if you've seen my if you see my avatar on the feed and you've seen that changes colors, that's that's exactly what it's doing. It's been doing that now for I guess over a year. It's been running nonstop right off my iPhone. Um then after that I made this weird thing called flushes. Uh this happened about a year ago, uh, right around, I think exactly coinciding with last year's conference. Um it was basically an experiment to try to figure out one, how do I make an app view? I've never made an app view, I don't even really know what an app view is.
Um so it was better, it was going one step further and learning more about uh the app protocol and honestly asking this question of what can you easily make a new social network or a social platform really easily and how quickly can you do that? And this was made in like two days, and you know, it it went kind of like uh viral within the Atmosphere community and people started posting and using it a bunch the first few days. Um it was just interesting to see what would what happened there, and it but it taught me a lot about uh I guess what was possible.
Um and then after that, I uh I did I decided to move on to something a bit more serious. I wanted to um I wanted to start creating more serious projects in the Atmosphere, and I thought what what better way to do that than create some sort of umbrella brand which I can funnel all my projects through. Um so I made something even more serious. I made an app potato mascot, um, which is this little guy. Uh I designed him and put him all over the place. There's lots of stickers, I'm sure you've seen some out in the, you know, there's probably lots more out there if you want one.
Um and this is just amazing, this is this is kind of what I feel like sometimes. It's like, you know, as an artist or a communicator in more technical spaces, uh I feel a little out of my depth. Uh but uh 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, um, is this app uh called Anisoda, which is uh it started as a Bluesky client, a very unique Bluesky client. I call it a a new, more peaceful uh social interface that helps you be offline more and online better.
And uh Anisota was really asking the questions of what social media might could look like if I tried like rethinking things from the ground up from a more like artsy creative perspective. Um it all started uh literally, I guess I had this idea I guess a little over a year ago. I posted this on Bluesky. I said we need an extremely weird and avant-garde Bluesky client, And I think I'm gonna have to build it myself. So when I started working on it, I started brainstorming ideas and wondering what could I what direction can I take take this in and what should I call it and all these different things.
And I started looking to other areas of my life for inspiration, and uh one of those areas was uh my more recent interest in going mothing and uh learning about moths. Uh 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. Um it usually ranges from like starting at like 10 p.m. and going into like 3 a.m. at night. Um but I'll yes, set up my cameras and all that kind of stuff and document them and just learn about moths and uh yeah, now I've I I've seen so many different types of moths just in my backyard.
It's really incredible to see the range and diversity of what you can see in your backyard. Um from there I started thinking, what uh what could I name my app? And I really started honing in on moths. And this is the Anisota Moth. This is an oakworm moth by its more common name. And this this particular photo is a photo I took. This is a moth that showed up on my front door one day. I woke up, I went outside, and this was on my door. I'd never seen one before. It has these two little white dots, and it's very orange, it's very cute and fuzzy.
I just fell in love with it. It's probably my favorite moth now. And so I was like, that's it, that's what I'm gonna call the app. Um so I started really going deep into moths and learning all about them and all these different things. And this is what Anisota looks like, the app. Um, this is the interface for it, a very different kind of client. Um, this is all Bluesky data though. This is pulling in from people's Bluesky accounts. These are posts from Bluesky. But what you're looking at here in particular is this is what someone's profile looks like in Anisota.
Anisota is is not it is taking away the idea of infinite scrolling feeds. You don't really scroll through posts in Anisota. It's a card deck that you swipe through and you look at posts one by one. So what you're saying 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. And then as you swipe, you see posts one by one from that person based on recency and things like that. Um, things about Anisota, uh, you actually can discover moths in the app as you're browsing and swiping through posts.
You'll randomly discover a new moth. And these moths and moth data and images are pulled in via the iNaturalist API, which is I used iNaturalist uh when I started going mothing, I would start cataloging all the moths that I found using iNaturalist. And I thought what better way to introduce that more into the app than using their free open API. And it's really easy and incredible to use. Um other interesting things about Anisota that make it a little bit different are um uh uh a variety of different features. Like we have we now have this forest map.
Um every time you every time going into Anisota and browsing your social media feed an expedition to a forest, and it maps out your expedition. You'll see points on this topographic map with a fog of war, and you'll see moments where you've discovered moths or pick up items or things like that. Um we have waypoints, which is this feature that I concocted as more and more Bluesky, it's Bluesky clients and apps and Atmosphere things started emerging, people wanted ways to be able to hop between them. So in Anisota, 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.
Umtifications are really great in Anisota. It's uh there's lots of cool features like bash notifications, highlights, there's all sorts of things like that that makes them more digestible. Um there's a cool onboarding experience now with that sets sort of a tone and does some storytelling and and grants you some initial items to use in your journey if you choose the story mode of the app. Um and this is an example of uh what posts look like. So on the left you have a post in Bluesky, and then on the right you have the exact same post, but in Anisota.
Um Bluesky obviously is a more traditional Twitter style client. It has a lot of things going on here. It's got lots of icons, lots of numbers, um, and it's within the context of a feed of tons of other posts as you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. Um whereas Anisota, it's it's it's a bit more minimal. Um, and then in the bottom right, instead of uh engagement metric numbers, there is a rarity card that is similar, it takes inspiration for like trading cards that have rarity icons. It basically is just a calculation or like a simple algorithm that abstracts all the engagement metrics and displays them as a rarity icon that you can familiarize yourself with.
So you can start getting a sense for how engaged a post is without actually having to like see all that data and numbers right there in front of you. But you can hover over the rarity icon and see the actual numbers or flip the card on the back. You can flip cards over to see more things like those engagements or details. And then the last thing we did at the end of last year was uh sort of like a uh Spotify rap type experience within within Anisota using the sort of Anisota theme that basically recaps people's year on Bluesky.
It pulls in all they can search their account, it pulls in all their data, and it creates these you know cool visualizations and analysis. It shows you like the top words that you use that year, top connections or the people that you engage with the most, things like that. Um I think I I think uh when it initially launched and was shared, it ended up being used, I think, by like 50,000 unique people. It was really cool to see it spreading around the community. Um these are some of the things that I've like I've been working on and making in the Atmosphere, and they've taught me a lot.
And I think there's some ideas and themes that emerged that I want to share and talk about uh that it are basically lessons of what I think potentially might happen in the future or it might is already happening. Um scroll down through my notes. Um, first of all, um the future is decentralized, right? Do we think that's true? Um I've been working in the open web, like I said, for around five years now, and when I got here, like that was the theme is decentralization is the answer. This is the key. This is the thing we're trying to do here.
Um it makes sense uh initially. Um I still believe that it's somewhat true. Um, but I also think that it's a little misleading. Um I think that it's actually kind of the wrong goal. It's uh it's it's not really much to be chased after in and of itself. It's something that we're doing and using a quality that we're trying to use to obtain a specific goal or state. Um, but it's also kind of an illusion because it's a very ambiguous word that has so many different meanings in different contexts and different perspectives, and there's questions of is the Atmosphere decentralized?
Is Activity Pub decentralized? What about NoSter and all these different things? Um there's so many criteria which you can measure that by. Um and it ends up just becoming debates that we have endlessly on Bluesky. I'm sure many of you probably I know I have participated in some of those debates. Um 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, uh that you can't really escape. Uh if if Noster, if Atmosphere, all these different things are fully decentralized in this utopic way.
Uh at the end of the day, there's uh an internet service provider that can shut off your access to the internet, a government that can shut you off your access to the government. And at that point, it's like, well, it doesn't really matter. Um but also it there's a tendency with uh decentralization to think that, oh, I can separate myself from everyone else, I can become independent, I can control things, I can do what I want, I can, yeah, all these different things. But ultimately it's um we tend to forget just how, or even aware of just how like interconnected everything really is.
Um there's this great term uh by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, uh Tik Nathan. Uh 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 our existence is so intertwined with everything else, everyone else. Um it's just not really actually possible to like separate ourselves uh fully. Um so I like to keep that in mind. Um I think that it can potentially help us refocus to maybe some going beyond decentralization. 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?
Can I can I build something here? Can I can I make this my own? Um 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. Umleability specifically is one I really love. And it's funny because I was pretending 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, but it does really fit into what I had planned to talk about. There's this uh really great uh essay by Inc and Switch uh that they released, I forget some maybe sometime last year called Malleable Software.
And I love this essay. Um it's very long, but it's it has some great quotes like this one. Um the original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay, a malleable material that users could reshape at will, but instead we got appliances built far away, sealed and unchangeable. And for me, this, I don't know, this really resonates, and this makes me feel like, yeah, this is an apt description of what happened. And I do think that as a result of some things that some new technologies and and communities that are evolving now and converging, I think that it makes some malleable software much more of a potential reality than it ever has been in the past.
Specifically, I think that the Atmosphere, what 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 environ their their digital environments their own or make software experiences themselves. It makes it makes it a lot more possible. The Atmosphere gives people like a foundation that they can easily take and build upon. It gives you a social graph, it gives you pre-existing content, it gives you identities that you don't have to rebuild from scratch.
It's what makes something like flushes possible that I could do in two days. Another great quote from that essay that I want to highlight is this one. It says everyone deserves the right to evolve their digital environments. 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. And 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.
This brings me to like the second, the second point I want to talk about, which is this idea that I have of the client being the content. And I'm sure many of you reference, understand this reference, which is a uh a remix of a quote by Marshall McLuhan back in the 60s with his book The Medium is the Message. And to tie this a little bit back into Moss, um, Moths are interesting for a lot of reasons, but they're very different, obviously, from many other creatures and even obviously humans. Um, compound eyes that I think range from anywhere from like 200 to 200,000 uh 20,000 facets.
Um antenna are incredibly sensitive. Uh they can detect chemicals and things within the air and they help them fly. They have uh hearing organs which are kind of like ears but not quite like ears, but they can detect like ultrasonic frequencies. Um they have these like sensory organs that allow them to experience the world in a unique way. Um there's this term called, I think it's pronounced umwelt. It's a it's based on a German word, I believe. Um, but it means the specific way in which an organism which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems.
So I think that uh this is very uh apt for what we're experiencing now in this era of malleable software that is coming into existence. Um because previously uh previously in the old era of social media, we had uh 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. And it was basically kind of forcing them to experience the digital world in this one particular way. Um I think a good example of this is going back to this is there's two different ways that you can view data, or there's not just two, these are two examples of ways you can view data, um the same underlying data.
Um I think what I ultimately think and hope and I think is gonna happen is potentially we might see, again, to draw back to moths and the the animal kingdom is potentially a world in which there are so many different types of uh of clients that maybe they're forks of one client and they go off in one direction, they're very similar. Um, you know, the Anisota Moth has, I think there's like seven or eight different um species of Anisota Moths that all have slightly different variations. So you know, you have forks of the Bluesky 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.
So I think we could easily see a world in which you could almost like have a taxonomy of client interfaces for the Atmosphere. And in the same way, like again, moths. There are moths and butterflies are within the same uh order. It's the order of Lepidoptera. And uh Moths, there are like 180,000 known species of moths, but only like around 20,000 known species of butterflies. And even within all those different things, there's just an incredible diversity. Like these are all photos that I took in my yard. Um and it is I don't know, it's very stunning to see the differences.
Um but all this comes back to like this idea of yes, uh Facebook is one social client designed in a very particular way, trying to serve three billion people, and I don't think that makes sense and isn't very healthy. Um but with things like Anisota and other clients that are popping up, uh the goal for these things, and at least for me when I'm designing Anisota is to make it not for everyone, but to make it for a very particular type of person. Um is definitely not for everyone. Like uh there's lots of people that love what I'm doing and love you know the thing that I've made, but might not necessarily even use it themselves.
Um and that's fine. Like I know that's gonna be the case, and I didn't you know design it for everyone, and that's the case. Um same could be true of uh if some of y'all heard Maria's talk, she was talking about Leah, which is the client that she and Eugene are making for researchers, and it's incredibly different. It's not a client that I would use every day, but it's specific to their community with features that they need and want that other major apps would not even do. Um this really uh leads sort of to like one of my final points, which is uh abandoning the idea of one size fits all, one size fits all software, especially in contrast to you know Elon Musk's vision of the everything app, one app that is everything for everyone.
Um I think it was several months ago I I posted on Bluesky something to the effect of like uh we don't need an everything app and the Atmosphere can be an everything ecosystem. And so like that's that's kind of like the thing that is attracted me to the to the ecosystem and is my hope for like what this whole thing could become if we're able to make it work. Um to close it off, uh there's some interesting parallels, um one of which is just this idea that moths are attracted to light, and we people actually don't aren't really quite certain why that is.
There are like theories about why moths are attracted to lights, um, but it's there's no strong conclusions necessarily about that. Um now humans somehow are also attracted to these weird screens and lights that are drawing us in and we spend hours in front of and um when we don't really know quite what they're doing to us. 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. Um we don't really know what's happening exactly. Um 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 to control things themselves or at least adapt things to make them fit their own um their own needs, wants and desires, and even styles.
Um to close things out, I just am gonna show you one more picture of how amazing and diverse moths can be. These are all moths that I found in my backyard late at night. Um, so many different kinds. Um they're incredible and beautiful. I know some folks may be scared of moths or think they're weird and creepy or whatever, but some of them are, but they're also just incredibly beautiful ones. Um yeah, so that's uh that's what I get out of that Atmosphere, and that's what I hope more folks get out of the Atmosphere. Um we've got time for maybe one question.
Does anyone have a question? Are there many different types of moths have you seen in your outfit? I think. I can't remember exactly. I think I've seen I've only been doing it now and a half. I think I'm up to around different moths. I've heard mothers uh that can see up to a thousand, and depending on your location. So I'm gonna be doing from out and saying how far I can go. Follow-up question, did you see any moths here in in Vancouver? Not yet. Uh not yet. But I 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. I've got to be like