Don’t call it a blueski meeting.
Over the weekend, the first in-person meeting was held in Seattle to focus on buildings with AT Protocol or ATProto (a technology that strengthens the growing social network of over 33 million users). The event was attended by developers, engineers, founders and even members of the Bluesky team, including CEO Jay Graber. Many of the communities met for the first time after they had only been notified online.
However, while Bluesky is the largest app built on Atproto at the moment, the social network itself was not the focus of atmospheric conferences. Here, Bluesky was another developer, but given Atproto’s stewardship, he was a well-known developer, given the social networking protocol that provides a framework for building distributed social networks.
Instead, the meeting was dedicated to the protocol itself and its many possibilities. This also provides people with a way to not only build other types of social apps, but also build communities, as well as signing in across apps and web services with open social identities, such as through authentication standard OAUTH.
The meeting was to give users control over their data, algorithms, and overall online experience.
In short, the 150+ people present are working to rebuild the web, effectively with others in the community who attended, by bringing the power back to the hands of people who are actually using it.
It also means to some extent robing the billionaire tech ogols of power from the billionaire tech ogols, as recently hinted at Mark Zuckerberg’s viral t-shirt. These tech CEOs control most of their search, social connections, communications, productivity, and beyond.
It is no surprise that self-proclaimed anarchists, mutual aid followers, and open source advocates can be found among Atproto Conference attendees.
But for some attendees, years of idealism has been tempered by the reality of what they already build and see, such as their previous efforts in public products such as Twitter and decentralized apps.
This time, we aim to learn from these mistakes.
As the event began, Blaine Cook, co-author of OAuth Standard and Protocol Webfinger and former lead developer of Twitter, spoke about his time on a social network now known as X. So he coined the word “tweet” and designed a reply before Twitter saw “rotting into a lack of capital and imagination.” However, he still considers Twitter to be “the most visceral expression of public human communication and ideas that everyone has ever created.”
Cook, who was kicked out of Twitter for trying to decentralize it, compared today’s decentralized social web, including Bluekey, to something similar to the jungle.
This is especially true in these early days when multiple protocols are used, including Proto as well as ActivityPub (which supports apps like Mastodon and Threads), Nostr, Farcaster, and more. Even Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is working on distributed technology designed to bring power back to users.
“For almost decades, I’ve known that a more free social system is possible and inevitable,” Cook told the audience.
Cook’s speech sets the tone of the event. They acknowledge past failures, but also retain hope for the future.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber then spoke about the promise the web once held and later became pessimistic as it turned into a tool of service and control instead of liberation and creation.
“We built a civilization of mind in cyberspace, but in the end we gave our lives on a large, centralized platform where we styled ourselves as the home-built monarch of the kingdom that we used our data and time to build for them,” Glover said.
“We can give them that power and get it back, so we need to remember where the power really is.”
At the conclusion of her speech, the audience exploded with applause and screams that lasted 30 minutes. This was more than just a developer meeting. This was a movement.
Other presenters showed off the project, detailed explanations of various aspects of Atproto technology and discussed what’s going forward. Some proposed solutions to the current problem.
Event speakers contributed to concrete expertise, such as running BlueSky on a Raspberry PI single board computer, finding a way to online communication, funding, and even experimenting with wild ideas.
Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser hit an emotional note on Saturday while talking about building a community using Atproto. Today, his project offers moderation and support to make social media a safer place for black users, including users who have migrated from the online community known as Black Twitter. Ultimately, Blacksky could run all of its own AtProto-based infrastructure and provide its own consumer clients.
However, meeting attendees reminded us that new technology alone is not the answer. There is a need for an entire ecosystem of support and funding for these efforts.
For example, Endra Rininsland, a technician and feed builder, spoke on Sunday about the struggles the trans community faces and continues to face even on open social platforms.
Part of the challenge is that people running moderation services like BlueSky Labellers (posts you don’t want to see or automatic Heide posts) are often personally and financially borne by their efforts. As Lininsland said, they can burn out and break.
But nonetheless, she still expresses optimism and points to projects like North Ski Social. It builds on ideas published by Blacksky to use Atproto to create a safer social media experience for the LGBTQIA+ community.
“They are ambitious goals, but we’re trying to,” Lininsland said. “Trans people will not be silent by this or any other administration. And if that means we have set up an entire parallel infrastructure, our damn social network, then you bet that your donkey will do it.”
Unlike the so-called “careless people” who built Facebook, the Atproto community aims to mitigate the harm that new technology can bring, and they are looking for experts who can help guide them as they build.
On Sunday, content and editing strategist Erin Kissan, who wrote a 40,000-word essay on how Facebook once contributed to Myanmar’s genocide, shared a deep understanding of how to build a safer online community remotely (under the weather, no less).
When many of the tech were rewinding its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to respond to Trump administration’s policies, Kissan’s advice went the other way. She advised builders to actively seek “an intelligent and informed perspective of the most vulnerable people in the group you’re building during rollouts and changes.”
“If we can keep the most vulnerable people safe, we can keep everyone safe,” Kissan said.
These are not radical ideas, but they have become politically charged issues.
As the event ended, some participants left to quickly begin hacking the project with connections formed over the weekend. A promise was made to continue to discuss and connect, and now there was an active discord chat filled with people they met in person.
“I go to many events [San Franscico]Tessa Brown, co-founder of secure chat app DERM Network, told TechCrunch. There are no lessons from the past. ”
In comparison, Brown said, “Everyone here is so compassionate about the way we reached this moment… I feel that it’s very different.”
TechCrunch was reported from an atmospheric conference held in Seattle.
Source link
