Hello. All right, start over for the stream. Hello, I'm Tyler Fisher. I make a project called SIL, which is a client on top of the Bluesky Post Lexicon that aggregates the top links in your network. It's a unique client experience that nothing else in the Atmosphere offers right now. And I think we need more unique types of clients. So I'm gonna talk about how we can achieve that today. Last year I moved to Harlem, a small city in the Netherlands. At the center of the city, we have the Grote Macht, a large public plaza that is overlooked by the Sint Bavelkerk, the giant church.
It's a grand plaza that on the weekends turns into uh a public square uh for uh local vendors, but at any time during the week, uh it's a lovely place to be. It's quiet, safe, comfortable. Um also notice in this photo it's car free. Um the Netherlands is famous for its pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, uh, but it wasn't always this way. The Gotenmarkt uh in the 1960s was more of a parking lot uh and a road and a traffic circle going through it. Um visitors visit the uh Gotenark today, uh they tend to think of it as it's always been this way.
This is an ancient public square that's been this way since the 1300s. Uh but it's not true. Uh the Grotemark was transformed as a result of sustained protest and uh community engagement in Harlem uh during the 1960s and 70s to rip out the roads, rip out the parking and make it a pedestrianized plaza. Uh this got me thinking about how cities transform uh to places that are designed more for people and what we can learn from walkable cities about transforming digital spaces. Ultimately, uh walkable cities are about getting people to walk or take some other form of uh mobility to their destination instead of driving a car.
Um the American city planner Jeff Speck uh gave a talk in 2013 about building walkable cities. Uh he says that uh a walk has to offer four things uh for somebody to walk and or take some other form of mobility instead uh instead of drive. It has to offer these four things simultaneously. There needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and the walk has to be interesting. I, like many of you, have been thinking about how do we grow the Atmosphere.
Building the Atmosphere is an infrastructural change to the internet on the level of transforming a city from one that is car-centric to one that is person-centric. So in thinking about this problem, I found myself revisiting spec's theory, but for the Atmosphere. There needs to be a proper reason to join the Atmosphere. The Atmosphere has to be safe and feel safe. The Atmosphere the Atmosphere has to be comfortable, and the Atmosphere has to be interesting. We can break this theory into four parts. Purpose, a proper reason to join the Atmosphere. Safety, the Atmosphere has to be safe and feel safe.
Comfort, the Atmosphere has to be comfortable. And interest. The Atmosphere has to be interesting. I like to propose this four component framing as a structure for how we think about uh building atmospheric clients. In this talk, I'm gonna walk through each of these four components and what they mean for client design. I'll talk about how I think about them in my own projects uh and offer some inspiration from elsewhere in the Atmosphere that I think do some of these things particularly well. Um, and discuss what opportunities I see for us to to further uh atmospheric clients uh in these four directions.
Let's start with purpose. Spec's original theory describes this as having a proper reason to walk. For this he means having a destination in mind. For a walkable city, you have to have uh schools and doctors, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, uh everything you need within walking distance. We're all here building new apps, new experiences trying to entice people to join the open social web, but why would they? Often we lead with uh pitches about data sovereignty, privacy, openness, and while these are critical features, it's why we're all here. Um, they should be a given for atmospheric applications.
People need more purpose than that. Um it's not enough to build the pedestrianized streets of the internet. They have to go somewhere. The inability to convince people to join new new social networks is um a long studied problem. Switching costs are real, people won't move unless their network is already moved. We can't solve this problem overnight. What's exciting about atproto is the opportunities offered by the PDS. There have been over 40 million signups uh for Bluesky so far, each with their own PDS. Each of those already have an account with your app too. But if you're offering your own experience in your own lexicon, separate from the Bluesky experience, this is somewhat cold comfort.
Um sign into your app, but if there uh is no real content and their people aren't on your lexicons yet, there's not going to be much for them to engage with. So how can we leverage the Bluesky existing network but offer new experiences that uh offer new motivations to join the Atmosphere? One option is to build clients on top of the existing lexicons but offer new experiences. And that's what I've done with SIL, my link aggregation client, uh that is built on top of Bluesky and Mastodon. Um SIL reads your following timeline, uh, finds the most popular links in your network and uh offers you a different picture of your feed by rank ordering the uh most popular links in your network.
Uh uh its most common use case for people is is as a news reader. Typically the most commonly shared URLs are news stories. Um use social media for news, and SIL offers them an optimized way to do so. Um, this is a new experience built on top of an existing lexicon. But sales read only. What if you wanted to offer a whole new social experience uh without having to bootstrap a whole new lexicon? Uh Sebastian uh VogelSounds Flashes offers a really compelling concept here. It's a photo sharing app akin to Instagram, um, but it uses the Bluesky Post lexicon as its route.
But rather than um limit itself to the limitations of the post-lexicon in terms of photo sharing, it adds sidecar records um on top of uh the Bluesky posts so that in the Flashes app you get a more full photo sharing experience. Uh but Bluesky users can still see and interact with those posts. So you're immediately getting the benefit of being on the Atmosphere uh while still offering a new experience. So now the Atmosphere as a whole has two separate uh experiences to offer people, microblogging and photo sharing, and they're seamlessly connected, letting everyone take advantage of the increasingly growing social graph.
As the Atmosphere grows, more lexicons will get adopted, offering more opportunities for extension, remixing and combination uh from the client experience. The community developing around standard.site is bearing a ton of fruit here. Um in the long form space, I would love to see uh more work around premium news reading experiences. Um there's both a supply and demand problem here of getting news onto protocol and getting readers to understand that there is news on the protocol. Um I'm gonna talk more about news on atproto uh at a panel tomorrow at 10 a.m. if you want to hear me talk more about that specifically.
Um back to spec's theory. Uh he says the walk must be safe and feel safe. This phrasing is specific. Uh there are in fact two related things here. Uh being safe and feeling safe. It's an important distinction and one we have to think about as we design digital spaces. Uh, when you first talk about safety uh in digital spaces, the first thing you're gonna think of is content moderation. Uh I have no personal experience with content moderation. It's not something I do in SIL beyond allowing people to mute uh words and domains and accounts. Um I'm I'm just not an expert, so I'm not going to say much about content moderation today, uh and I'd rather point you to the experts in the space.
So uh BlackSky just released Acorn, which is a community moderation tool that they built with uh prioritizing the health of the moderators, um, and I think that's a really awesome approach. Uh the team at Roost has released Osprey, which is a more uh automated approach to dealing with uh abuse uh on social media and automating that um that moderation burden. And then uh research by uh Aaron Cassane and Darius Kazemia from a few years ago, they did research on uh moderation in the Fetiverse and composable moderation. Uh it is about the Fediverse, but I think it offers a ton of lessons as we think about this in the Atmosphere as well.
Um I want to tackle safety uh from a different angle, which is how can our social media clients encourage healthier social media habits? Uh after all, even in a well-moderated network, uh, we can become addicted. Uh when the news is bad, we can fall prey to doom scrolling. Uh, even with reverse chronological timelines or algorithmic timelines, the context collapse of different topics smashed together uh can overwhelm and confuse us. With SIL, I want to find solutions to these problems. Uh by default, SIL aggregates to the top links in your network uh over 24 hours. So if you leave it at that default, uh SIL doesn't actually change very much throughout the day, and this is actually a good thing.
Um if your primary use case for for social media is reading news. Your network will surface the news that matters when uh and once it reaches you, there's going to be a ton of context from your network helping you process it, helping you understand it. Um as a story develops, you don't need to uh continue scrolling your timeline where only the every tenth post is actually the thing you're trying to learn about right now. Um groups it all together, uh keeping your mind focused and allowing you to read the story and and grapple with its ramifications without jumping to another topic and switching contexts.
Sills, these tactics are working with with SILS users who regularly report that it's helping them use social media less while still staying engaged. David Crespo says he stays logged out of Bluesky on his phone and only uses SIL on his phone. Robinson Meyer says he can dip in and out throughout the day. David Ziff says if you want to use Bluesky to file on the news but you find feeds overwhelming, SIL is a good alternative to that. This is giving users a lever of control over their experience, and this contributes to them feeling safe in the Atmosphere.
What other modalities can we offer in the Atmosphere that uh offer a more uh controlled experience over social media? I really love Anisoda, um, which is uh turns Bluesky into a uh a card swipe-based experience and layers on like a moth collecting game and all kinds of really neat like artistic uh approaches to social media. Um it also has similar motivations to SIL of calm and focus um rather than the real-time uh drip feed of social media, traditional social media design. It has a stamina meter, so if you swipe too much, it tells you you gotta stop, you're out of stamina.
It's a I think it's really brilliant and offers a ton of things to learn. Um, um, how else can we help users to leverage the collective intelligence of their networks uh without forcing them into the same tired designs that we've been using for social media for the last two decades. Uh we spend enough time with both chronological timelines and algorithmic timelines to know the problems well. So it's time to move beyond these and offer new experiences that for people that give them uh control and help them feel safe in the Atmosphere. Back to our walkable cities analogy, spec says the walk has to be comfortable.
In the physical space, I can mean quiet roads, accessible crosswalks, uh, well-paid paths. In the digital space, I think about comfort as meeting people where they are. Uh as joining the Atmosphere should not require a downgrade to their user experience. And this is a really tall task. Um we're gonna have to stretch ourselves. Many of us, uh, myself included, are believers in the web over native apps. Uh, but it's undeniable that users prefer and expect native apps, especially on their phones. Um with SIL, the number one question I get uh when I tell people less online than me about it uh is how do I get it in the app store?
Uh I it's a website, I say just put it in your in your web browser, SIL.social. Uh at that point I lose a lot of people. They might try it once while I'm there in the room with them. If I see them a week later, I ask them how it's going and they haven't gone back. Um they don't think about it, they're not in the web browser that way. Um I show them how you can add it to your home screen. SIL is a progressive web app. Um but after walking through that menu diving and explaining the differences between regressive web apps and native apps, I've already lost them.
Um they just want to be able to install it from the app store. So I built uh iOS app for SIL that's uh now in testing. And if you want to get on the test flight, here's a QR code. Um I hope to build an Android app after I get through the launch process of the iOS app. Um over half of SIL's web traffic comes from iOS users, uh, so that's why I started with iOS. And begrudgingly, I actually do now see how a fully data app for SIL offers some real benefits for those users. Uh with deep OS integration, I can offer push notifications.
Um this takes SILS notification feature that already existed to its natural conclusion, right? Now SIL can tell you based on parameters you define, SIL can send you a push notification when news is emerging in your network and it can find you when it happens. Sorry, lost myself. It can offer widgets um giving you uh a quick uh uh at a glance view of the top link in your network without ever having to really even open the app. Um I can offer a native share target. Uh SIL also does bookmarking. Um with the native share target, you can bookmark a link from anywhere you experience it within the operating system.
Um it is currently in beta, um, and you can yeah, join the Tesla if you you would like and let me know how it goes. Um I'd love your feedback. For all of big tech's faults and misalignments, um, they offer a comfortable experience to users. They employ legions of people to focus exclusively on user experience and they do it on every platform. Uh web, iOS, Android, and more. Many of us in the Atmosphere, myself included are founders or uh solo founders or uh small teams. Uh somehow we have to deliver on better user experiences for people with far fewer resources.
Uh but here's our advantage. For all big tech resources, they throw to throw at user experience, they often throw them in misaligned ends, misaligned with the interest of the everyday user. If we as a community can stay aligned on uh centering user needs and furthering the vision that we all have of a better internet, then we can collectively offer a better experience than our competition. I'm inspired by the interoperability story offered by Semble and Margin. Assemble is a uh sense making tool letting you collect collections of bookmarks and Bluesky posts and other things around the web in and you can organize them into various collections.
You can do that individually. You can do that in a public collection together uh with people in the Atmosphere. Um margin is an annotation layer for the web, uh, where letting you add comments and annotations to any web page and save that annotation to your PDS. Um they're working together so that you can uh your bookmarks from either margin or symbol both work within both tools as you're using them. Um so that allows Semble to focus on where its innovation is in, is in the shared collections and organizational tools, and margin can focus on its innovation of being able to annotate anything on the web.
But they all work together and they make each other better. And it's not a competitive experience, it's a collaborative experience. Um we need more shared infrastructure in order to pull things off like this. Um depending on your use case, it can be really hard to mix and match lexicons in the Atmosphere right now, especially if one of the lexons you want to use is a Bluesky one. Now you're talking about indexing terabytes of data if you want a full network backfill. Um I love like things like the microcosm set of tools offer a ton of really easy ways for people to uh jump in and pull different records from throughout the Atmosphere.
Um I'd like to see more tools that offer you know more use cases. Something I'd really love to see is a network-wide app view that's uh designed for aggregative workloads, uh, by which I mean you know, group buys is the types of fundamentally database queries that SIL is doing, right? Grouping by link, grouping by you can group by tangled star, you could find links within leaflet docs, uh standard site docs. I think it opens up a ton of interesting opportunities for experiences that collect the whole Atmosphere and not just focus on one app experience. Our last component, uh interest, um, is maybe the most surprising uh when you think about walkable cities for specs components, but for the Atmosphere, I think it's probably the most obvious one, right?
We have to build an interesting things. Um we're competing with the whole internet for everybody's time and we have to win. What sticks out to me when I think about making interesting things uh among the Atmosphere is they have to be interesting immediately. This is a place where I think the client experience can do a lot of work uh even if you're not interested in developing new lexicons. Uh but to do it right, it's gonna take some coordinated effort. Uh let's use SIL as an example of what I mean. With SIL, I've been thinking about how to onboard people into the Atmosphere if they don't already have uh a PDS.
Um I want to point them in the direction of trustworthy uh news that matches their needs and interests. Today SIL only really works if you've invested time in building your own network and your following graph so that it is a trusted network of information that you'd like. Um for people in this room that's probably pretty easy to do, but for new users, that's a really tough hurdle to climb. Uh people need help finding people. And while it had some flaws, uh one of the I think the key uh parts of growth of 20 uh Blue Sky's 2024 uh post-election growth was the starter pack.
Um and it was uh received well enough that the competition copied it. Meta has starter packs and threads. Uh Blue Sky's other competitive edge is custom fees and algorithmic choice. Umbining these two things, we can bootstrap a user's network based on their interests rather quickly. Uh this is not live and sale yet, I haven't started building, but here's how I see a SIL possible onboarding experience working. Uh users without an Atmosphere account can register with a PDS. Um, still doesn't need to run that PDS. I don't want to run a PDS, but I'm open to partnering with anybody uh who uh is operating a PDS and thinks something like this would be interesting to host new users.
Um and I'd especially love if it wasn't Bluesky so that we can further the decentralization story of the Atmosphere at the same time. Um after they register with a PDS, uh they can come back to SIL and tell SIL a bit about what publications they read, what topics they're interested in, and through a combination of starter packs lists and custom feeds, I can immediately bootstrap their graph, and then SIL is ready and useful on day one as soon as they lock as soon as they finish that process, and they can go over to the Bluesky app or whatever other client, and it's already set up and ready to go.
But maybe you see the problem with this idea. It requires maintaining a complex set of feeds, lists, and starter packs. Keeping all those maintained over time as people leave and join the network. It would become my full-time job if I was going to do that alone. I wouldn't be able to work on the app. I would just work on maintaining feeds. So making sense of the Bluesky social graph uh has many uses for many applications. So this is something I think we could maybe take a collective approach to in trying to uh find the bubbles that exist already.
I know there's been some mapping projects that people have done, and I wonder if we can build on top of those to automate some starter packs and some feeds and point people in the right direction uh as soon as they get started. Uh sports, I think offer a really unique opportunity here. Um a lot of Bluesky, my understanding is a lot of blue sky's post-2024 for growth has come from sports. Um usage tends to peak around major American sporting events like the World Series and Super Bowl. Uh but sports are also a place where acts and other uh social networks maintain a strong foothold.
So how can we use community-driven feeds and starter packs to easily onboard people uh with art the already vibrant sports network that Bluesky has and how might we use those networks to encourage activity and the Atmosphere overall. Um I can imagine an onboarding clients that ask you what's your favorite team and then just setting up your graph immediately based on your your favorite teams and favorite favorite leaks. Transforming the internet uh from the walled gardens of web 2.0 to the openness that the Atmosphere promises uh is no smaller effort than transforming a city from one centered around the car to one centered around the person.
Just last week Paris elected uh a new mayor after 12 years of socialist mayor and Hidalgo. Mayor Hidalgo's reign ushered in a slew of changes. Paris now has a bigger bike network network than Amsterdam, uh thousands of new pedestrianized streets, and a whole new uh public transit line that came came about around the Olympics. While politically controversial at the time, Hidalgo spent 12 years in office making changes that made Paris more walkable. This year she chose not to run for a third term. So Paris had the opportunity to maybe reset if they didn't like these changes.
They elected Emmanuel Gregoire, who was her deputy for six years, um and fellow member of the Socialist Party. Uh the city was given an opportunity to vote for a similar party program, and they took it. I believe that once people experience the Atmosphere and everything it can offer, they're gonna choose it again and again and again. But only if we nail the client experience. When you're designing a client experience, you can use uh just four principles to round out the implementation purpose, safety, comfort, and interest. Thank you.
Which of the four do you think is the most important to you or SIL? Yeah, um for me the most important is safety and the feel-safe thing. I think people get a lot of value out of having a different, calmer, controlled experience and not and not have to feel like that they have to do and scroll to keep up with the news. Um I was interested in your your comment about you know we need stroke beyond the the feed. Um I feel a lot of the tools today have really been focused around like the humanistic elements of all this technology and uh understanding users and meeting the way they are and not taking things for granted about that experience.
I wonder how how you think about balancing trying to push new paradigms while to users making kind of meeting them where they are, understanding it's not like the algorithm feeds off very popular and avoiding being too eternalistic about like no, I know the better way to do this instead of the mock. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. Um I loved the uh and to rephrase for the stream, um just uh uh summarize your question. How do we uh design new experience with that while not being paternalistic about it and just saying we know better, here's a new design.
Um there was a great session uh on Thursday about user research that um I don't know if anybody in this, I don't know if any of the people in this room were uh the group that ran it, I don't think so, but it was really excellent and was a reminder to me that we should be basing a lot of our work in user research and understanding user needs directly by talking to them. Um was a great opportunity to do it in the room there as a solo founder. I sometimes find it hard to find the time for that kind of thing.
But um again, maybe it's another thing we can do collectively to uh figure out what users really want and need from social experiences. Uh yeah, I'm uh building an app called Flex that it's like a client app and I'm kind of curious how do you see that happening? Yeah. He asked uh about my uh idea about uh like a sports onboarding client. Um my my full pitch is basically three phases. One is just sort of a sign up onboarding service that asks you what are your favorite teams, and then this project I thought about building would would run some feeds maybe on Graz for every team, and I maintain like a set of Wikipedia scrapers or something to get roster data and build the feeds off of those keywords.
Um so it would set up your feeds and and set up your uh you know starter packs based on the league that you're interested in. Um step two would be to then build actually a full client experience on top of that, specific for sports, right? You could layer in live sports data, you could layer in like highlights, uh you know, do some you know fancy algorithm stuff to find like the big highlight from the game you missed or something like that. Um and then step three is you know going past the live experience, something like fantasy sports on atproto or something like that, like what sort of community building things can we do with a specific niche like sports um while still staying within the the Bluesky universe.
Yep.
Most of my colleagues are more thinking about study climate, and most of the climate scientist on the internet. Yeah. So I think for the general dump exports make it look for the whole sub group of scientists, the network effect, once the big players move to Bluesky, they would have to do it. Yeah, yeah, scient. Um the comment was that uh the scientific community really has moved to Bluesky. Uh and I think that that's an excellent example of like different reasons. Yeah, totally. Right uh yeah, different groups have a different reason. Um Should I uh move on?
How are we on time? We have three more minutes. Three minutes. Any more questions? If not, thank you.