I started in December, and you can try it live if you like at skylimit.dev. And there's my handle. There's an article that appeared in the New York Times just like three days ago. The terrible cost of the infinite scroll, it was in response to the meta and YouTube judgment. And I'm a scientist and I don't like the infinite scroll. And I interact with people who are not very popular by likes, but I don't see their posts. Okay. So I have a substantial post that describes it. The question, the subtitle there is what if your social media feed work like a newspaper instead of a slot machine where occasionally you get good spot uh good posts, but you don't know when you're gonna get it.
In newspaper, I like a newspaper, I'm an old fashioned guy. I like sections, I read comics. And can I reproduce that in Bluesky? And actually you can, so that's the point of the talk. 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. I wrote this on March 25th, and the newspaper article came on 26, so I felt very good about that. But finite scrolling can get you a long way. Um this is what the app looked like. It's basically a clone of Bluesky and the various things that look similar, but I'll show you the things that look different.
The first thing you'll notice is that it says how many posts I received per day and how many it shows. So I receive about 1300, it shows 600 and 19 edited. We'll complete the edited in a moment. So that's new. Other thing that's new is that it shows a number and a time. So every post is numbered starting from one in the midnight. So you know how much you're reading. It's like a calorie counter. My calorie count is 600. I know how much I'm eating, okay? So every day I know how many posts I'm reading, how many are left roughly statistical.
So on weekends it's actually less, on weekdays it's more. It's a probabilistic curation. So I know exactly what I'm reading. And uh the other thing you can see is now I'm going to introduce myself. So if you go to my profile on uh Sky Limit, um, so I'm a climate scientist, and uh I have 600 followers, right? How do I limit the number of posts I see? If I'm going to see 600 posts a day, how do I limit that? Okay. So this is also from the app. The app has a live graph which shows for each followe, there's 600 of them.
Only the active ones are shown, that's why it doesn't go up to 600. How many they post is a logarithmic scale, and this updates every every two hours in your app. And I was very surprised when I saw this because I had no idea what I was seeing. The yellow is how many people are posting, and the green is how much the app shows. And the red is a cap it puts, I call it the sky limit number, it's about three, uh, it's 2.7. It basically takes the area here and caps it and makes that 600.
Okay. So if you're a quiet poster and I'm a quiet poster, all your posts will be shown. So I wrote the app for quiet posters. But if you're a prolific poster, it'll only pick this many. And beyond that, it's probabilistic, right? And it's automatically adjusts every two hours. It everything is done in the browser in index db. And there's no server, it just runs on GitHub pages. So 100 million people could use it tomorrow, it'll still run if GitHub serves it or Cloudfair serves it. So it's completely scalable. And so this number can vary depending on uh your situation.
Let's see who those folks are. Uh so this is Sky Limit number. The other thing that it shows you in the same page as that, it has a sortable table. You can sort it by each column. How many posts my followers post, how many it allows, what the fraction that's shown. This I initialize this in three days. So AD protocol is posting 54 posts per day. I'm seeing 6% of them because of the cap. So you can go down and you can check every two hours this gets updated in your app. So you get a complete view of who's posting what, and you can sort it by various columns, like it tracks engagement.
You can see who's your most engaged with, all of that. And so you and these are the amplification factors. So the normal it gives you a three limit, but you can make it six. Or you can amplify it if you wish. And if you click on the number you saw, you can click on it, you can amplify the factors. So you have complete control over how many posts are shown. So that I'm back here. The other thing that you can see here, the sky limit number. I put it in my profile, and I'm hoping everybody puts it in their profile.
And you can there's some really cool things that come out of this, okay. So one of the advantages of being a last talk here is that you know what other people are talking about. And one of the things journalists pointed out that opaque AI algorithms, they don't know who they're going to reach. I don't post very much. If I post something, I have no idea who will see it. But if if my followers are using Skylimit, I can make these assertions. If your daily posting average is less than my 2.7 number, I will always see your post.
That's guaranteed. And there's a priority mechanism. So it can divide posts into priority and regular. And by default, it's anything with the hashtag is considered priority. But the user can actually configure it. So but it's not a convention in place. So right now it just takes any hash post as priority. If your priority posting posts are less average than my sky limit number, it'll always be shown. And post matching addition criteria are always shown. I'll talk about editions in a moment. But this gives guarantees if my followers use Sky Limit, I can tell exactly how many people will see my posts and they see a limited number, and it'll actually tell them if they haven't read my post.
It counts the posts that haven't been read. It says you haven't dead this many posts. And I'm okay with that number because it's a fixed number per day. If it's too much, I'll cut it down. Okay. So the infinite linear feed is just a UI concept. There's so much talk about custom feeds, but you can do more than custom feeds. You have to think outside the line of the feed and talk about editions, which is two dimensional. So I love newspapers, as I said. So what you can do here is another tab called periodic editions. You can configure the edition so you can have many editions a day.
You can decide who your columnists are and what their sections are. It's basically a markdown file. So posts which match their substack URL. The people I follow on Substack and they post about it, I want to see it, I don't want to miss it. It'll automatically create that fixed times of the day, and this is what an edition looks like. 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. It doesn't, I don't need to see it immediately. Okay, it doesn't clutter up my post.
So you can collapse it, so I have Bluesky and you can see Bluesky as you want it. And the other thing it tells you here, I don't think you can see it, it says how many posts are on red. So you know if you read it, you don't have to go back to it. So just parting thoughts. Don't think of a linear feed, think of uh multiple options. We had some talks earlier today at the Anisoda. Um you can have newspapers in Bluesky. It's already working. Um it's a very simple format, you can do that.
And don't let your social media diet became an opaque AI construct. I like AI, I used AI to make this, but I like to verify the answers. So if you're using AD to generate things, I would want to know what it is. I would want it to generate my digital layout. I look at it, then use it. So I think AI is helpful, but you want to check and you want it to be transparent. But the nice thing about Sky Limit, it you can limit your views and transparently rely on human followers to do your curation for you.
I follow people because I want to see their posts. And this ensures that if you don't post too much, I will definitely see your posts. And actually the one special hashtag which it recognizes is called hashtag weekly. Any post that has hashtag weekly will always be shown. But it will only be done once a week because it tracks that. That way I can guarantee that if you post something, everybody who uses Sky Limit will see it. So if you are someone who posts a weekly column, you can guarantee that uh it'll be seen. Um I did manage good time, so I'm gonna show a few other features.
Um, you can't see it here. The colors are washed out. But when a post is read, the paper will actually age. Okay. You can see it on my computer. So the paper looks old after 15 minutes, it tracks views. So if you're scrolling down and you want to have a red this post, you'll see it, you'll see it immediately. And finally, I'll leave it at uh. Why I'm writing this because I don't know if you've seen Wally. This is what I'm afraid of that you're sitting and watching your infinite Doom Scroll created by AI. And I don't want that feature.
I want to control my my views. So I'll leave you with the thoughts. We have 15 seconds.