Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble

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29:08Welcome back. I'm talking with Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider about how he makes decisions. I got to ask you the other decoder question because I'm very curious where this idea came from and how you decided to bet on it. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions? Yeah, I mean, you talked a little bit earlier about the reversible and irreversible decisions. The hardest thing about running any project is just, especially if it's successful, it's just an endless flow of things you have to prioritize and decide on. So I find you could make that a lot less daunting and exhausting if you move a lot of decisions into this category of just, they're not that big a deal.

29:51Let's make it easy to experiment and reverse things and really only focus on the truly long-term impactful things that we have to get right. And then, so you sort of have this lightness or almost playfulness about some of these things where it's like, it's just not that big a deal. Let's just try something. Like, let's be creative and improvisational about it. This is a lot of how automatic runs. and I actually credit a lot of that to Matt Mullenweg's approach to first running an open source project. And then inside Automatic, there are a lot of jazz analogies because Matt started out as a jazz musician.

30:35And just this sort of improvisational, like, don't take it so seriously if you don't have to. But then there are very serious decisions we have to make as well. And those, I like spending a lot of one-on-one time with the leaders and then just gathering and going through the list and talking through the trade-offs and just making sure that at least, you know, in a good cadence, monthly or maybe quarterly, we go through and make those hard trade-off decisions and don't leave the room until we're like, no, we're only doing these two things on the important list, right? It's like, we can't do everything and let's voice all the ideas, but get to agreement on the few things we're trying to get done.

31:27If we get those done, then we're actually in good shape and we keep making forward progress. And that's kind of the ongoing sort of flow that we go through. And it seems to be working. I have to call out an email I got from a listener, ex-Amazon, who said, everyone always comes on your show and talks about reversible decisions and irreversible decisions. And I just want to point out, if you have enough money and time, every decision is reversible. And I was like, yeah, that's right. Especially at Amazon scale, that's certainly right. What's the line for you? What makes the decision irreversible?

32:05How much money and how much time does it take to reverse it? to me it's less the money it's more the time i mean some things just take years to unwind so i think anything that's like you'd say let's call it like a five-year time horizon where it just be really painful to change course or maybe on the positive framing it's more like hey if we get this right we don't have to think about it again for five years and it's just then that's that's kind of the category of things where um you know people talk a lot about like for examples with startups, it's your investors, right? Especially early on, the first investors you work with, they're going to be with you for five or 10 years.

32:46And that's a pretty big decision. Like you shouldn't just take the first check that comes along. Like you should really think that through because I've lived that. You know, I've invested in 500 startups for the last 20 years and we've seen every possible way that that plays out. And that's a good thing to really, really pay attention to early on, not just rush. Early in my career, I was like, I just need money. Just give me a check and I'll keep building. I just want to build things. So that's kind of an example of the timeframe where I feel like, yeah, you don't, it's really nice when it just works for several years.

33:29You have to go back and invest more time, more money to reverse something. So I want to put two decisions in practice here. And your framing here is perfect for this question. You decided to be the CEO of Blue Sky, to become the permanent CEO of Blue Sky. You're calling that a 10-year decision, right? I mean, it's in your note. We've talked about it here. How did you make that decision? Did they come to you and say, you're going to be the CEO now? Sorry, we're stripping the title away. Did you have to write a memo? How did that all happen? I was a gradual process. The job is great. The team is great.

34:05The mission is what I want to work on for the next 10 years. So that was not a hard decision. It was really that I already had a job and just figuring out a way to make those two pieces work together and to make a transition work. And the Blue Sky team and board from early on said, hey, we think this is working really well. Can we make this permanent? And then it was probably a couple months of just, yeah, working through how a transition would work. So you were the interim CEO for two months, and you spent two months figuring out how the transition worked, and then you became the permanent CEO.

34:39Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. It's quite a timeline. And then the second one, maybe much more importantly, is, okay, we're going to make this big bet on private communities. We're going to extend the protocol. Logically, you're going to have to extend the Blue Sky app itself. You're going to have to make a big bet on both the standard itself and how the consumer app will work. I would say, and maybe this is too reductive, the Blue Sky – the community on the Blue Sky app does not like change. So you're going to have to endorse some change with them. This is a bet. This is a big decision.

35:12This has to be the future of the protocol, the future of the atmosphere. How did you make that decision and what made you convicted that it was the right one? The decision to extend the protocol has been underway. I think that, I don't know if that's a year or two years ago, or maybe even from the very beginnings of the protocol, people are like, hey, what are we going to do about private data? And so that's been building. And it's kind of natural. I mean, once people start building on your protocol, it's the first question, right? It's like, oh, this is great, but I do have some private data.

35:44Even inside the Blue Sky app, we have DMs. Those aren't on the protocol. You don't want those out in the public right so we have features inside the app that we had to build off protocol because it couldn't support private data so we have our own use cases we got lots of and so that that's kind of an obvious like we just have to do it that how it affects the community that's what our app team is working through right now so one of the things that i feel like we've we've gotten better at in the last few months is to do that out in the open So Alex Benzer, who's our head of product, who makes those decisions around what goes in the app and what doesn't, has been posting about it and just inviting feedback and saying, look, this is coming.

36:30What do you think? What kind of communities do you want? Do you want them? How similar should they be to the current app? How different? I think we've got 500 people who've signed up to want to give us feedback. So we're going through user interviews. And people are already building communities on Blue Sky, actually, because we have this functionality where people can make custom feeds. It's a whole, you know, one of the huge differences in Blue Sky is, right? No algorithms. You get to make your own. You can plug in your own. People have made over 100 ,000 feeds. And some of those are really communities themselves.

37:08There are things like BookSky and AstroSky where it's just communities of people talking about a certain topic within custom feed. So people have sort of taken what we have to kind of bend it into a community shape. So it's already happening in the network. So that makes it a lot less scary. It's not like, oh, we're going to stop one thing and pivot somewhere else. It's like, no, we're just doing more of a thing that some users are already doing. And I think we can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt. Like, if you never want to join a private community, you don't have to. Like, you can still use, like, Blue Sky, the app as it stands today, isn't going to change.

37:52Like, the public part of it is, you know, it's popular, it's growing. So we're not going to mess with that. Well, let me ask you about Blue Sky, the app isn't going to change. Because I think that's the thing that I'm poking at. It feels like every other social network is sort of, you know, everything evolves into a crab. Everything is evolving into TikTok. We can just see it happening every single day. And Meta today announced a test in which the big blue Facebook app will open for some set of users into just full screen video. They're just screw it. We're just going to turn Facebook into TikTok.

38:25Everything heads in that direction. X has headed in that direction. That's the competition. And maybe that's the thing the market wants. You're saying, okay, we're going to build private data. have a more Reddit-like experience. Blue Sky may be the last really text-first social platform of its kind that exists. Do you feel that pull into different directions, into different formats? Because that's a thing that your user base also pushes against. This is the beauty of an open protocol. Like, let somebody else build the TikTok of AppRoto. Let somebody else go push into new formats. We're perfectly happy with text-first microblogging network.

39:07We love it. We think, honestly, I'm glad if others are chasing off in other directions because we like what we have. We talked earlier about traffic. So a lot of these other networks, as you know, you've coined the term Google Zero right there. All these walled gardens, all these other platforms are getting more and more walled, right? They're like, okay, once we're open enough to attract an audience, and then once you're here, we're not going to let you go. We're just going to keep trying to find ways to keep you in there. Blue Sky is the opposite. Because of the protocol, it's locked open by default.

39:41We couldn't keep you in there even if we wanted to. We want people to build other apps and experiment with other things. We want people to find great content on Blue Sky and leave. We're still a place that we don't downrank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send, I think it's 2 million clicks a day to publishers. And we're the number one referrer to a bunch of publishers. And we want to do more of that. I think we love that way that the open web works. And just people come to Blue Sky to connect, to learn, to have fun, and then to find interesting things to go to. And there's no way we're going to change that.

40:25I think I'm curious, if someone wants to build the TikTok of the atmosphere, is there a bunch of protocol-level work that needs to be done to support it? I know there are attempts to do this. Skylight, I think, is a TikTok-like app on the atmosphere. There are others. But all of your technical innovation on the standard itself is kind of pointed at text. And I'm wondering if there's something you need to do to be better at video to compete with what all of the closed platforms are chasing at much larger scale. No, I think at the protocol level, it's easy to do. You can define your own records on the protocol.

41:02I mean, yes, ours are text-focused, their posts, their followers, their likes, things like that. But there's already people publishing all kinds of different things on the protocol. I saw yesterday that somebody's publishing a bunch of patent database onto iProto, so everybody else can just tap into that patent information. There's somebody who's publishing the health data off of their Apple Watch onto their PDF, so they're just live streaming their health data onto the protocol. People are putting all kinds of things. The protocol can be used for anything. and what's harder is that you need people there right so when you you build the next you know the tick tock on app proto um that when you launch that app it launches into you know millions and millions of people who are already there and that's what we're working on to just keep getting more and more people onto the atmosphere so that you don't have that cold star problem as a as a new developer right where you have to you want enough people we don't need you know eventually our 10-year goal is a billion people on that proto.

42:09You don't need a billion to have success with a new product, but you need a critical mass so that when people show up, they're like, oh, where are my friends? But this is the dynamic that I'm really interested in with the Blue Sky app and then the protocol itself. So it's no secret that I've been talking about federating the verge for like 100 years. And we're going to do it one of these days. And one of the issues here is we publish in a lot of formats in a lot of different places. And if I just immediately federate the Verge tomorrow, we have a lot of video. Where's the video going to go? And it's just going to go out in the network.

42:47And maybe I can convince a lot of people to download a Verge app and they'll see a bunch of stuff in it. And that would be great. But if what you're describing is Blue Sky, the app will be the entrance point for a lot of different people. And Blue Sky, the app has not prioritized video, right, is part of the core part of the user experience for any number of reasons why you might not prioritize video, then that part of the network won't get that effect, right? It won't get what feels like a network effect, which is, oh, there's lots of people here. The way that if I federate the verge, I'm like, look at all these great posts from other tech writers.

43:21I could do that tomorrow, right? Like, it's almost, like, easy to do at least, it's easy to vibe code that prototype, I will tell you. It's hard to, like, get it all the way to the finish line. that's the dynamic, right? If you want the blue sky, the consumer app to be the entry point to the diversity of the network, the app itself has to be diverse in a way that might dilute the app and make it lose its product market fit. How do you think about that back and forth? Yeah, I think what we're seeing works well, and I'll go back to the standard side example, is if the other piece of content that's not text is something that can show up inside a post, So we call them link cards, and that could be a video.

44:06It could be a game. It could be something where somebody can post about it and say, hey, check out this new game. And somebody can see it and then go there. That's a perfect fit because then it fits our mode of how people discover things. But then when they want to engage with it, we send them off to that place. So same with video, right? As long as somebody can sort of embed it and promote it on our end, we're not going to try and become a video network where we then say, oh, all video has to be watched on Blue Skies. Like, no, no, no. Go off to the verge. Go somewhere else. Go explore. It's just, I think Blue Skies and App is a great place to surface things and notify people of new things.

44:51But it does have to somehow fit inside the pod. So, it can give people a preview, essentially. and say, okay, now go play this game, go subscribe to this publication, go donate to this cause, go, you know, that's the kind of action we're trying to surface for everybody else in the atmosphere and then just send people off on their way. I want to ask you to compare your role at Blue Sky to your role at Automatic when you're the CEO of Automatic, right? These are big companies or they want them to be big companies that operate on standards and protocols and the open web in different ways. At BlueSky, you control the standard itself, right?

45:30This is like a very important piece of the puzzle that the standard is in development and you're making products on top of it. You want other people to build on top of the standard. A lot of people can say a lot of things about Automatic's relationship to the web, but technically you don't control the standard, right? And maybe it has enough scale so that the way Automatic does it becomes the way everyone else does it. But at Automatic, you didn't make the browsers. You weren't on the steering committees of the big standards in a way that allowed you to actually dictate what they were. you were making a web server product that interacted with an ecosystem of other open products.

46:00Do you want BlueSky to get there where it's just one player among many, or do you want to retain control of the standard too? And how do you think that's different from how automatic exists in the web ecosystem? We 100 % do not want to control the standard at BlueSky. We are actually very actively doing everything in our power to divest control of it. We first was to design the network in a way that if Blue Sky goes down or goes away, the rest of the network is fine. So that's a big test case for us. It actually, a couple of months ago, got tested, not the way we had hoped. But we got a DDoS attack on the Blue Sky network, a very, very massive one.

46:45And it did take us down for several hours. Other parts of the network, like I mentioned BlackSky earlier, they operate it just fine, totally independently. So that's a big part, just the practicality of it is, can other nodes in this network operate independently? Are there things left that BlueSky runs that everybody else is dependent on? And if so, what can we do to fix that? um the a big part of that too is when people look at this you know this gets a little nerdy into the whole like stack and the protocol but people look at the design of this network and they you know like to find out like is it truly decentralized or not and there is one thing at the heart of it that is absolutely like no company should control and that's the the identity directory like the lookup to the actual you know when you log in your identity in the atmosphere like where does that lookup happen and it's kind of like dns on on the web right when um somebody looks up a a url and so we have been running that core directory and we're actually in the process we've set up a a swiss non-profit with a separate board completely separate entity and we've handed over that directory and they're in the process of handing over the domain to it.

48:14So that's one example. We also, the protocol spec itself, were handing to the IETF. There was last week, the IETF met in Vienna, and AppRoto is now a work stream, an official work stream to take that out of blue guy and hand it to the ITF and it's going to become a blessed internet standard with you know run by completely separate entity so we're constantly sort of taking all the pieces that we have to bootstrap and handing them off to other other entities and we're super serious about that so the end state is that we yes we are one app of of many one company of many running in this protocol and we won't control the protocol.

49:02The parallel to Automatic is that WordPress, the core software that Automatic is hosting, is open source and it's GPL. So anybody can use it, but anybody who uses it and changes it has to give back to open source. So in our case, it's a protocol where anybody can build on the protocol and the beauty of building on AppRoto is as a developer is all the data is owned by users and it's accessible to any other app but you as an app then your data also goes into those user repositories so it makes it better for everybody else on network so there's a similar to the way open source gets better through collaboration the this network gets better through just everybody having their data shared and remixable and interoperable.

49:56And when you get that balance right, or you have a company that helps bootstrap the whole thing, but by definition keeps itself separate and makes sure it can't control the shared resource, then it can work. And we did this successfully with Automatic and WordPress. Automatic became a big company. WordPress became a huge open source ecosystem. And then tons of other companies formed around it. And we always, our test case was always, okay, what if Automatic goes out of business or gets acquired by somebody evil? Is WordPress going to be okay? And that's why we put the WordPress trademark into a foundation so the company couldn't mess with it.

50:37And it's, you know, it's complicated to set those things up. And this is one of those, like, not even five years, like 20 years out decisions. Like, if this thing gets big, will it be truly independent? Or could somebody come in and change their mind and mess with it? And we think about that constantly at Blue Sky and getting that balance right. And again, handing off pieces so that it's not going to work if one company tries to control it. We're just right back at square one and we're just another walled garden, which is completely the opposite of what we're trying to achieve.

51:14We're going to take another quick break here. We'll be right back.

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53:49welcome back i'm talking with blue sky ceo tony schneider about an existential question for the company how is it going to make money there's a lot of drama with wordpress and the open source community and other companies monetizing open source in different ways there's drama with the foundation i'll set that all aside people can go listen to matt's episodes we did it in detail and certainly will have him back. I like talking to Matt a lot. But that's all coming for you too, because at some point, all of this has to make money. And a real theme on Decoder is we've set up complicated structures so that capitalism can't ruin everything.

54:24We just had Proton on the show, complicated Swiss foundation structure so that capitalism can't ruin everything and all the promises they make to their customers. You don't have that problem yet. As far as I can tell, there's no revenue flowing into this and probably thus no push to make that revenue number go up in bad ways. At some point, there is going to have to be some revenue. You're an investor. I'm assuming you want to get paid out into your own fund. How is Blue Sky going to make money on the app level? And how is the protocol going to make any money? The way we're going to make money as a company, we're only interested if that model, if that economic model works for the entire atmosphere.

55:05So we make money when everybody else makes money. So that rules out a bunch of things that would be purely app-based. I'm not ready to announce the specifics, but we will start monetizing this year. And the way I look at it is there's already money being made on this network. People are, again, we're sending lots of traffic to people who then convert that traffic into subscriptions and i think our job is to just help more of that happen so that you know we're right now it's it's just organic and we can um we can build things into our app and into the protocol that just make it easier for people to start making a livelihood on this protocol and start doing commerce with each other so that's that's the direction we're headed in um we're going to do it in a way again where the whole idea is for the pie to get huge and for us to be a small slice of a big pie and for everybody to make money.

56:06And if we can help you as a publisher make more money, then we can do business together. I know you said you weren't going to do specifics, but I have to poke at this a little bit. But your options, if you want a small piece of a big pie, are we're going to let you run ads for your subscription newsletter, and then that'll convert. And so that's Facebook's model, right? We're going to let you run ads at whatever CPM, and your return on ad spend will be high enough so that enough subscribers signed up based on how many ads you were on. And the other one is we're just going to take a percentage of every sign-up fee.

56:46Which direction do you think you're headed in? It would definitely be the latter, but we would only take a percentage of anything that we actually enable. So if we sent extra traffic to you, then it would be a percentage of that. So basically affiliate-style monetization. So if I'm selling a newsletter for$10 a month and you send me a new subscriber, you're going to get some of that back. Affiliate-style and in a way that works for the entire network. So anybody on the network that sends you traffic can participate. We want everybody to have a part in it. Can you decentralize the billing and financial layer of that?

57:28We can make it work in a decentralized network. Billing does require some centralized trust. And that's certainly something we're looking at. I asked you that question because I was terrified of a crypto scheme, basically. But it does not sound like you're going to do crypto schemes. No, no. It's, I mean, you know, similar intentions, but definitely not a crypto approach. One of the things that you've been describing is we have to build all these structures to withstand the bad incentives, right? If somebody shows up and buys Blue Sky and they've got bad intentions or they just want to use it to do crypto schemes, we have to build a structure that will withstand it.

58:09Adding monetization in whatever form. And I agree the network should be monetized in some way. That creates a bunch of these incentives at first blush, right? It will be your first contact with those incentives. You have some experience with this. Certainly you've been thinking about it. How do you expect that to go both with your team and with the user base of Blue Sky itself? The team is eager to figure this out because we realize that there has to be an economic model for this network. Otherwise, you know, we're in the early bootstrap phases still, and lots of people are getting excited to build on this.

58:44But it's the number one question, you know, from my team, from the rest of, you know, from all the people buildings like, so how, what's that model going to be? So everybody's eager to figure this out and to do it in a way that, yeah, we don't fall into the traps of trying to create the incentives that we've seen in other networks just cause all kinds of unintended consequences. Looping back on the WordPress example, it can work really nicely. I mean, WordPress, it's a slightly different model because it's a hosting model. But there are thousands and thousands of WordPress hosts out there that are doing just fine.

59:22and it just works. You can host your site anywhere. You can move it anywhere. They compete to be the best host for your content. But it's a very good model that hasn't, as far as I can tell, it hasn't created anybody to take all the market share or create these weird incentives where the product gets worse. There's a very nice dividing line there between, well, I'm your host and then you go and do whatever you want. You can build an ad network if you want. You can build a store. You can build something else. Our business model doesn't dictate what your business model should be, which is kind of what happens in these other networks when it's only ads.

1:00:03Like, you know, you're like, oh, yeah, come here. Build your following on here, and then we're going to put ads on it. And if you want to do anything else, like, no, no, no, it's going to be ads. So it's, you know, those are the kinds of things we, yeah, we think about. And yeah, talking about irreversible decisions, I mean, that's going to be a huge one, right? When we start to zero in on the right model to make sure that, again, we can picture this scaling to billions of users and all kinds of businesses emerging on this network, not just one type that we happen to think about. You've mentioned Black Sky a handful of times in this conversation.

1:00:44I've been lucky enough to be at a dinner with Rudy, who runs Black Sky. He's prolific in talking about what it's like to actually build on the atmosphere and what a lot of the challenges have been, right? Because it hasn't yet really truly been decentralized. And now it's my turn to say I won't go into the weeds of the protocol. But there are parts of the Blue Sky stack and parts of the atmosphere that have been pretty heavily centralized up until fairly recently. Is it easy to stand up a competitor in the way that you're describing people can stand up competitors to WordPress and operate in their own universe using the same tools and same access to end customers?

1:01:21Or is there still work to be done there? Because it hasn't been easy up until now, at least using the example of BlackSky. Rudy deserves a lot of credit for taking those early risks when it was much harder to build. and being the first to prove that it can be done. But it's getting easier and easier. We are seeing more and more blue sky and black sky style networks pop up pretty often. And we're actually seeing a whole bunch of energy in Europe. We've got Eurosky. We've got WSocial just launched. There's another one I think that's about to launch. So it's getting easier. and we're investing a lot to make it as easy as possible.

1:02:07In addition to being an open protocol, all of Blue Sky is open source. So you can take the Blue Sky app and just fork it and go do your own Blue Sky. And that's great, but we're really also interested in people building other things that aren't micro logging on the network and making that super easy. So we're seeing, what's the exact, like Tangled is an example that a lot of people like to use recently because it's a great project. They raised VC funding. It's a social coding platform, like a social GitHub that's growing really nicely using AppRoto for the social layer of the social coding aspect.

1:02:44There's nothing to do with microblogging, but it's another thing that we can collaborate and integrate. So people use both Tangled and Blue Sky, it all just works together. But those are examples where it's getting really easy to just build a new app on AppRoto and make it, you know, have social functionality. It doesn't have to be an entire blue sky style network that you have to run. We put effort into making it easier. But yeah, it was, you know, when Black Sky started two, three years ago, it was a big lift. You had to be very technical to do it. now it's gotten easier and easier. And finally, we haven't talked about AI yet.

1:03:30AI makes it even easier. I mean, a lot of the growth we're seeing now is, you know, you can point one of the AI coding tools at AppRoto and say, hey, build me a social app, build me a community. And that just makes it that much easier. And those are some of the tools and integrations that we're working on on Jay's new team. But that really changes the game pretty substantially for just how easy all this stuff is getting. I do have to ask you the AI question. You're a software CEO again. How do software companies work in the age of AI? Have you rethought your teams? Do you have the traditional product manager, designer, engineer trio?

1:04:09Or is everybody doing everything? It's a small team. And you're the new CEO. So you have lots of opportunity to rethink everything. It is very empowering. once you get it right. And when we have to use our exploration team as an example, I mean, that's a three, four person team that's launching at very high velocity, launching brand new products. It's really fun when you have an existing company with existing resources and, you know, very senior talented people can then go after a new greenfield opportunity with these new tools. That's when you see a ton of velocity. If you have an existing product with all the complexity of how it's been built, that's you know ai helps but you're still dealing with that same complexity for a while but i i see it accelerate everything just in terms of the development pace but yeah you still need great product managers you need great designers you need like you need like the like how to build the building part is faster but what to build and the ideas are just as hard as ever actually in a way harder because it's there's so much noise out there and so many things popping every day.

1:05:19So setting yourself apart, building something just really great that lasts is, you know, just because it's faster with AI doesn't make it any easier. We've talked a lot about standards and making protocol in the atmosphere a more standardized project at the IETF and whatever Swiss Foundation is going to do name lookups. It feels like we're going to recapitulate ICANN, but again, that's a totally different episode of Decoder and we'll come to that drama when everything is successful. There is another standard that has already gone through all this. There's ActivityPub. Mastodon runs an ActivityPub.

1:05:55Famously, Threads runs an ActivityPub to whatever extent Threads runs an ActivityPub. There's an argument that Meta did all of that just to satisfy European regulators, and that's all it's there for. Have you talked to the Threads team about integrating with ActivityPub or moving them to the atmosphere? Once you become an official standard, I imagine that must be easier for them to continue throwing bones to European regulators. That would be the big unlock, right? That is the hundreds of millions of users on a nominally open network. Have they shown any interest? We have not talked to threads.

1:06:31We're definitely talking to Mastodon and ActivityPub. They definitely feel we're very aligned. I mean, our missions are very aligned. We're all on team open together. And these are two different standards that do slightly different things. And some use cases for ActivityPub are great, and some are great for AppRoto. What are use cases that are good in ActivityPub, and what are use cases that are better in AppRoto? So ActivityPub is based around this notion of a server. At the heart of it is you set up your own server, you control it, you run it, that's your community. And then all the servers can federate, if you want.

1:07:06You don't have to you can just run run it by yourself or you can have you know you can plug into the federation into the fediverse and then that's how their system works so it works really well if you like i think they have a lot of successful like governments who want to set up their own server infrastructure and run their own community infrastructure um at proto as it has a different goal. We don't have a server at the heart of it. We have the PDS, the personal data server that is your data. So the heart of AppRoto is personal identity and portability and ownership of that so that whatever you create and the social graph that you create is owned by you and lives wherever you want to host it.

1:07:52So it's really a federation of millions and millions of these tiny little personal servers that that can all talk to each other and that works if your social product is focused on one on people um not on an entire server with with a community on it so slightly different shape and there's they interoperate too there's there's something called prigifed that connects these two worlds together so if you want to you've you've build products on this yourself so if you want to post or publish across all of it you can and the end user doesn't even have to know um and that's and that's the beauty of an open of an open protocol is you shouldn't have like consumers of this should never even hear about these protocols right it's like it's one of these things where you have to get the protocol right and has to be open but then people should just forget about it.

1:08:53It should just disappear. Like the examples we use are a lot is email and websites, right? If I'm on Outlook and you're on Gmail, we can just email each other. You never think about the fact that those are two completely separate systems. It just works. But on social media, it just doesn't work that way, right? If you're on Instagram and I'm on TikTok, we can't talk to each other. You have to do everything five different times in five different apps, and it's crazy making. So if we get this right at the protocol level, that just goes away. All this stuff just works, just like email does or just like websites do.

1:09:30Our job is to make all of that work under the hood, but nobody has to think about it. In the end, you just have, oh, one account, you log in anywhere, and it just works. and all your friends are there and all your data's there and you never have to be locked in again into somebody's system and you can't leave. This is very nice, but it's rare that two standards that nominally seek to achieve the same thing coexist forever, right? There's not two Bluetooths, there's not two Wi-Fis, there's not even two webs. People can argue with me about how many webs there are, but there's not even two webs, right?

1:10:04Do you expect ActivityPub and App Protocol to coexist? Do you expect, I don't know, Blue Sky to be able to show content from Aston servers and then slowly eat ActivityPub as a protocol? That's one very common pattern that kind of happens in these situations. Or do you expect long-term coexistence? I expect long-term coexistence because both of these protocols have enough users and use cases that want to continue on. And they can talk to each other when you want, but that's not the main use of it. And I don't, there's a lot of people who run activity pub instances who they don't even want to talk to other mastermind servers.

1:10:45They just want to run their own thing. And they don't want to talk to AppRota, but they can if you want. I don't know what's a good example from other, you know, from other platforms. But yeah, they're both going to be around for a long time and they don't, there's just slightly different tools. They're both in the social space, but they're different tools that you reach to for different types of use cases. I'll put it this way. In my mind, both can be wildly successful and it's not one or the other. AppRoto doesn't need to eat activity pub to be successful or vice versa. We've already seen that.

1:11:21I want to end by just talking about the consumer app a little bit more. We've talked a lot about the protocol, the atmosphere, the standards. We've gotten all the way to the Internet Engineering Task Force in this conversation. We've been in the weeds of how the technology works and how it's governed. And right next to that is, well, it's an election year here in the United States. And a lot of people truly believe that Blue Sky is the wild, progressive social media network. And it is a bubble of one kind. And X is a very different kind of bubble. It's the hard right network that has vastly more AI-generated anime porn on it.

1:11:59And there's not some thing that is actually the global town square, right? That thing has maybe gone away and all the social networks have fragmented. Do you want Blue Sky to have the reputation it has? Do you want it to get bigger? Do you think that the right answer is someone starts a mega Blue Sky and it interoperates the way that it needs to? This is the perception of the consumer product. Do you want that to change? And how would you change it? Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. I mean, it certainly wasn't designed to attract one specific group of people. It works for anyone.

1:12:35What we see is there is a lot of political discourse on Blue Sky on any of these open networks. People are really engaged. What we've seen in the lead up to the election so far, we've hosted a lot of live election feeds. And we see a lot of really good feedback from our users, a lot of engagement, a lot of like, oh, this is actual really interesting content about this topic. whereas on other platforms I think these election topics just get completely overwhelmed by slop and spam and it's just noise and chaos. And so what we're focusing on is just deliver a live experience. We do it around elections.

1:13:20We do it around sports as well very successfully where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. And once we have that, then hopefully, you know, we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases. We're not, yeah, we're an open network for anyone. And we don't want to serve just one type of user base. I've seen it already in the last few months, really trend in the right direction where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network. and it sort of balances out over time where you don't just have, you know, a few topics you're super deep on, topics you're super deep on, but it just gets more and more diverse.

1:14:09And we don't, in my opinion, yes, it's a public square, but we don't need everybody talking at the same time. It's okay if you, you know, if you're, again, politics is very loaded, but, you know, if you're super into sports, you're not going to be into all sports. You're going to be, you know, I'm super into the San Francisco Giants. So that's what I want to follow. I don't need to follow all of sports, and that's fine. And I think it can be like that with all topics. It just needs to be civil and positive, and we need to have the tools that if it goes off the rails, people can regulate it and can have a good experience instead of it just devolving into a shouting match.

1:14:48By people can regulate it, you mean people can moderate their own feeds, not regulators can moderate speech? A hundred percent, yes. Just checking. That's important. Build their own feeds, pick their own feeds. We have very good tools for people to mute and block. And we spend a lot of energy on making sure it stays positive. Because again, we're interested in social media that actually serves the common or the public good. And that's not going to work if it's just people yelling. You've talked a lot about the network. Even in this answer, I said Blue Sky, the app, has this reputation. And you started talking about the network.

1:15:25And it's true. The network can serve everybody, right? Anybody can start whatever kind of app on the atmosphere they want and they can go target the users they want. But I want to push you again on Blue Sky the app, the thing that has a brand that exists out in the world that is totally divorced from the technical specifications of the atmosphere. There is Blue Sky the app and it does have a reputation. Do you want more users from X to leave X and join Blue Sky and expand what that brand is for people?

1:15:58Yes. I mean, they can stay on X, too. You don't have to pick one or the other. Have you talked to Elon about federating X? I suspect he's not interested. No, same answers with threats. I mean, you know, it would be full circle, right? Blues got started inside Twitter, and then Twitter went away and became X. And then if X adopted NatProto, then the whole original idea of the project would actually come to fruition. Yeah. This is Jack Dorsey saying Twitter wants to be a protocol, not a product. And here we are. And that's Blue Sky in big ways. But it is a product. Like, it is also a product. People know what that logo means.

1:16:36Political pundits say the Blue Sky crowd. And that signifies whatever they want it to signify. And I'm just wondering if you want to break that branding in any meaningful way. Yeah, we want to expand it. Upbreaking is, I think, maybe the wrong word. But yes, we want to expand more and more so that blue sky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example. And again, I will point to sports as an example from the last year. We've made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports riders, and it's worked really well. There's a ton of sports conversation now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics.

1:17:17So it's possible to expand. In politics, it's probably our hardest challenge because we are, you know, we have one type of user base there that's very active. That's good, too. I mean, they are super active and they're very much at the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. but yeah I think we can we can just keep adding more more communities so that it balances out it feels like we're gonna have to have you back particularly as these private communities launch to talk about where things go from here but this has been great thank you so much for being on Decoder thank you very much for having me I'd like to thank Tony Schneider for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed it to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all drop us a line you can email us at decoder at theverge.com.

1:18:10We really do read every email or hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at decoder pod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Support for this show comes from Odoo.

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