Developers building a software business on our own terms.
Why does Bluesky love Alf so much?
Ben: Well, Josh, I did something this morning that I haven't done in over six years. Do you want to guess what that was?
Josh: Um, I have no guesses. What did you do?
Ben: I updated my personal website.
Josh: Wow.
Ben: Yep, yep. I actually wrote a blog post, and I updated the—some of the layout a little bit, did some tweaks.
Josh: I was going to ask, like, did you redesign it in the process?
Ben: Well, I was tempted. I certainly was. So, it’s running Jekyll and it hasn't been updated since like Ruby 2. 3 or whatever. And so I was like, well, is this even going to build? And so I built it and yes, it did. And I was like, all right, that's fine. So let me—should I get a new template?
And I was like, no, I'll waste way too much time finding a new template, new theme. I just went with it, but the primary motivation was I needed to replace my Twitter link with a Bluesky link and Mastodon, but yeah. It’s, uh—so as I was updating my site though, I noticed like the copyright was like 2019 and the—
Josh: So it had been a while.
Ben: Yeah, the last blog post was 2018. So yeah, it was—it was time.
Josh: Well, I appreciate your restraint in not doing the full, theme overhaul. I don't know if I could have been quite as restrained.
Ben: Yeah, that was a touch and go there for a minute, but I did have one snag. Netlify was a problem. So, I use Netlify to deploy my site and I did a Git push and everything was fine there, but Netlify couldn't build because the Ruby was too old.
Josh: Mhm.
Ben: And so I had to like specify a Ruby version that was actually, you know, within the last couple of years. Jekyll was great though. I was using Jekyll 3 previously and I just did a bundle update. I just got wild and I installed the latest Ruby, did a bundle update, got the latest everything and it just worked. So props—props to Jekyll for that.
Josh: I do have to say that about Jekyll is that it's incredibly stable and yeah, pretty much never changes. But that can be a good thing sometimes.
Ben: Yes, it was today for sure.
Josh: Yeah, my site's actually—I moved my site from Netlify to a Hetzner, like a 5 Hetzner server a while back, because I wanted to fiddle with like, CGI stuff, and like, you know—
Ben: Totally.
Josh: Serious nerd stuff.
Ben: I thought for a minute this morning that I might have to do that. When I saw Netlify's build failure, I was like, oh, do I need to move to VPS? But I just, I checked out the build log. I'm like, oh I can fix that.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: But I really felt motivated to update my site because Bluesky's awesomeness of allowing you to specify your domain name as a handle. And so I did that. I recently did that and changed it t bencurtis.com. And I was like, well, now I'm sending people to a website that hasn't been updated for six years. I should probably fix that. So that was the real motivation.
Josh: I mean, with all those new followers you're getting.
Ben: Well, you know, thank you, Josh, for your starter pack that has made me at least the five gazillionth most popular person on Bluesky.
Josh: So, I’ve spent the last, like, year and a half just exclusively living on Bluesky. That's where I've been this whole time. So I know what it is and you know what it is, but I know there's some people out there that are still unaware. So, Bluesky is another decentralized social media, like micro posting site, like Twitter.
It's decentralized unlike Twitter, but—it’s a little bit like Mastodon in that sense, except it actually, feels like a cohesive application that you can just use and you don't have to, like, jump through all the hoops that you do with Mastodon in some cases.
And it just feels like the people there are like very early Twitter, just the community that was formed, it's just fun. It's kind of weird being on a social media platform where people are actually just like posting about the things they like and having fun, and making jokes and all that. So that's what I've been appreciating about it.
Ben: Yeah, I’ve really been digging into that as well. I love the feeling of it's like Twitter—Twitter circa 2018 or something. It feels old school. It's like it used to be. I really got frustrated with Twitter when they dropped the API support.
Like, that was the thing that really, that was my button that they pushed because I loved, like, Tweetbot and Twitterific and all those other clients that, you know, they can remember your place from device to device and things like that. And I just, I like, I just like the timeline. And then all the algorithm stuff. I was like, I don't want to see all the things that I'm not following, and then it just got worse and worse and worse. And like, then the ad situation got worse.
Josh: And then they like removed the deemphasize links so that, like, you can't even—I mean like Twitter at its core was a, basically a link aggregator. Everyone who started out on the platform, like was basically using it to share links. And it's just ironic to me that, you know, it would end up in a place where like, it's actively suppressing links to keep people on the platform. It's just become Facebook, or whatever, you know?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Initially it was for what was your lunch today? But after five minutes, it was for, what did you find that was cool today, you know? And people were posting links all the time and a lot of discovery happening there. I remember like in the early days of Honeybadger, we got a lot of mileage out of just like sharing cool stuff that was happening in the Ruby community, you know, people would forward that on and retweet that.
And yeah, it was just a bummer to see that happen over time. And Twitter was really cool because it was just like the place where everybody hung out. And that's what Bluesky feels like. So I've been doing Mastodon like you for a couple of years. And the thing , about mastodon was that while that was cool and there was cool people there, it was—it really felt really tech heavy for me. Like, the Ruby community, there were a lot of people there and that was cool.
Josh: Yeah, I still like that about it, in some ways, like it’s—if I want some hard technical takes, like I'm still going into Mastodon. If I want to learn about something like C API of the Ruby core or something, probably going over there.
Ben: Yeah. But it just didn't have the broader, like everybody's there kind of vibe.It had a bunch of Ruby people and stuff.
Josh: Part of that is because a lot of the people—I won't say all the people in Mastodon, but many of the Mastodon users chased a lot of people away over the years, for various reasons, including, like, journalists, for example, journalists tried to do a mass migration at one point when Elon took over Twitter in 2022 and some of them stuck around, but for the most part, they got chased away by various factions. Just because Mastodon is much more balkanized than any other social media kind of platform, which is fine. Like, you know, they have their own culture and they don't want. And that's cool. But I think there's something to be said for just having such a broad spectrum of topics being discussed and intermingling together, like tech people talking to journalists, talking to politicians even, and, or whatever, artists.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. I really love that. Again, I forgot how much I missed that. I didn't realize how much I missed that—being in the Mastodon space. Like this morning, the thing that was in my feed on Bluesky was the perfect nineties album. And, you know, people are talking about Weezer and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
And it's just random stuff that I'm like, oh yeah! You know, memories. Because like, that's my decade for music, you know? Just having stuff like that happening, as well as hearing from people talking about Postgres and talking about, you know, whatever. I just love it.
Josh: That's how Bluesky has been. So a bit of history, it initially was a project at Twitter—or at least it was conceptualized at Twitter—as a way to, like, to decentralize the Twitter protocol, basically. If I'm remembering correctly, that was the idea.
But eventually, and I think—I can't remember if it was before or after Musk bought Twitter—but they've ended up starting it outside of Twitter. But, Jack Dorsey was on the board at that point and like semi—not like super involved, but a little bit involved.
And they were criticized for that by a lot of people. But as they, like, built out the protocol—and they did a really good job of it and they built a lot of cool things that were, like, intentionally designed to make Bluesky resilient to itself., like, take over by a central platform basically.
And then Jack left the board and some other people joined like Mike Masnick who wrote the “Protocols, not Platforms”, really, like, formative piece about social media platforms and yeah, they just—they’ve done a really great job of executing on the whole, like decentralized protocol idea. It's pretty impressive. I think we're going to hit like 20 million users, if we didn't already. It was like—we’ve been adding like a million users a day.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Last week or something.
Ben: Pretty wild.
Josh: The team is like—
Ben: I think it's like 20 people.
Josh: I think it's like—I was going to say, yeah, 10 or 20. I think it's, yeah, it's like definitely not more than 20 people scaling this. So far they've scaled this system to 20 million users. There's been a few hitches lately, but, like, it just recently is when I've experienced any kind of instability. And it's all like, you can tell it's like, decentralized protocol stuff. A like doesn't persist for a few seconds or something—definitely no fail whales over here.
Ben: No, no fail whales, but plenty of Alf pictures. Yeah.
Josh: Did you see the Alf fail whale that someone made? That was the best. Yeah. Alf is a kind of a celebrity on Bluesky. I'm not going to say why you can go like dig.
Ben: Do your own research.
Josh: I might drop a link in the show notes, story about it.
Ben: I haven't done that research, so I don't know the stories, but I'll start to go look it up. You’ve piqued my interest.
Josh: I'll put the link in the show notes and you can read, it's like one of the best stories on the internet, in my opinion. So I'm going to tease it a little bit.
Ben: All right, since you're the resident expert on a blue sky among us, then I want to ask you two questions, one is a pronunciation question and one is a terminology question. So question number one on pronunciation, is it A T proto? Is it at proto? Is it at protocol? I'm confused.
Josh: I don't know.
Ben: I mean, it looks cool, but I don't know how to say it.
Josh: I wanna say it's at protocol I say at in my head. So I, yeah, I'm honestly—I’m not sure.
Ben: I think at protocol kind of makes sense since everything's all about the ats, you know, but, uh, okay. So question number two is: skeets, really?
Josh: Another part of Bluesky lore. I'm not—I’m also not gonna give the definition, the usual definition for skeet. I just—in the defense, like, there is such a thing as skeet shooting. and I used to do some—I used to shoot some clays as a kid. Probably still would. it's pretty fun.
Ben: I have a friend that does competitive skeet shooting, so.
Josh: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So, it's got multiple definitions. The story is that Jay, the CEO of Bluesky—this was like last year—people were trying to figure out what to name things, like we were still trying to develop our own terminology and stuff. And, you know, Mastodon has toots and Twitter has tweets, or whatever the hell we're calling them now, posts?
But, uh, so, you know, skeet, I forget how did these things ever arise on the internet? Basically, like, posters on the internet, came up with the worst possible word to call something, and. Jay, the CEO, her mistake was asking people not to call it skeets. So there's a—I don't know, maybe if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll go dig that one up, but it gets passed around as a screenshot a lot of her, like saying, can we please call it like, I don't know what like scoots or other terms that could be used.
And of course, that just made everyone determined to call it skeets. The best part is that they bullied Jake Tapper into saying skeet on CNN on live news, because, I forget. It was like a Congress person or something, but he was interviewing someone who had posted—like a politician who had posted on Bluesky and had to say the word for what a post is. And so, yeah, he read it on the air. And after that, it was like, it was basically just legend or whatever.
Ben: A fait accompli at that point.
Josh: Yeah, now AOC is, backing it.
Ben: Oh, if AOC is backing skeets, then that's done, man.
Josh: People should know it's entirely a joke and it is completely optional. It is not called that in the UI. It is called post. So, it’s just a cultural thing.
Ben: I remember seeing, Amy Hoy weighed into the whole skeet debate and she's like, let's just co op tweet because Twitter has given it up and let's just use that. And, I'm down with that, but I'm not religious about it. I'm good with skeets.
Josh: I think, yeah, I agree with her to be like, I think it would be probably fine. And it's already like a dictionary word. And we've put so much into that word already. It seems a shame to just throw it in the trash. So, I could definitely get behind that. I mean, like, this is the thing, like no one's gonna—no one's going to convince all these people at this point to call it the same thing. So I think it's fine to have different factions.
Ben: Did we ever decide in the Mastodon universe whether something is a toot or not?
Josh: It was toot originally, like, officially, and it got changed—like the Mastodon team changed it to post, when Mastodon—it was going through one of its first big, like, hype cycles, I think, after the Musk acquisition and there was a huge exodus in fall of 2022.
And it started getting like a lot of media attention and stuff. I think it was around then that they renamed it. I can't remember exactly when, but it was a big, like all the original Mastodon users were unhappy with the change.
Ben: I like the toots myself. I thought the whole thing made sense. Like if you're going to, it just felt like it should be a kinder, friendlier place alternative and toot just kind of went in that whole philosophy, but, I can understand why people might—
Josh: A lot of people still call it toot on Mastodon as well.
Ben: I remember you started using Bluesky really early, like you said, and then I think you invited me. I think that's how I got signed up because I got an invite from you. Because before at the, in the early days, it was invite only. And I signed up really quick, because like, I always check out new things and that's cool, but it didn't really stick for me because I was like, uh, Mastodon is fine.
And like nobody was on Bluesky. And so I just kind of ignored it until you did this starter pack thing and all of a sudden I'm getting all these announcements from Bluesky, like notifications that I've got like 30 new followers, 60 new followers. I'm like, what's going on? So I logged in and I'm seeing all this activity and I'm starting to see names that I recognize from people from Twitter and Mastodon and I was like, oh man, I guess I actually better complete my profile.
Because I hadn't even put my name in there, much less an image or anything like that. And so, I think, well, people are going to be following me because of the starter pack thing, then I guess I better, you know, give them something to follow. So thank you for doing that. That prompted me to really actually take a look at Bluesky again. And yeah. So how did this starter pack thing come about?
Josh: The starter packs were a feature that they developed this year. They added them and it's basically just—it’s like a list, if you use lists on Twitter at all, but you can share them, and it has a follow all button so that you can follow everyone in the starter pack, or you can just go through one by one and pick the people you want to follow. But you can also share them externally with people who aren't on Bluesky yet.
And it shows a little preview of the people that are there and creates a little FOMO of, like, there's people you know on Bluesky that are here, you want to be here. And when you sign up through that starter pack, you automatically follow the people in the list and you immediately have basically your community, you have a feed. You're not faced with that problem of signing up for a new social platform and getting whatever the platform thinks the average person wants to see. Maybe that's like cat pictures or something on Threads or Alex Jones on X.
But either way, it's nice just to have the people that you know from all of your communities, just right there. And then of course, like they get notified that you followed them and they'll recognize you and you start getting followbacks. And then I add you to the starter pack and the cycle continues and you start to get more followers, so—
Ben: Right.
Josh: That's been my strategy to get people off of X, is just, like, rebuild their audiences for them somewhere else.
Ben: Yeah. And it seems to be working. I mean, we’re—I'm consistently seeing people showing up, who'd never made it to Mastodon, who are now showing up in Bluesky.
Josh: Hundreds of Rubyists, at this point, have joined through this. I've had a lot of people saying that, this is what brought them there. So the starter packs are just a genius idea.
Ben: Yeah. It's brilliant, yeah. I was really amused the other day—I was on Mastodon and this whole starter pack thing—I just think it's been fantastic. Like, I mean, it got me sucked me in. And like you said, you have this—you can easily follow a bunch of people that are already in your community that you already want to hang out with.
Right. So I love it. And I just think it's brilliant. and so I was on Mastodon the other day. And someone was talking about—they had brought up the topic of do we do starter packs for Macedon? And like, they were getting pushed back from other people in the Macedon community. I'm like, what the heck? Like, this is a obvious, really good way to get engagement. And you're like, nah, we don't want that.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: We're cool.
Josh: I mean, that's kind of on brand for Mastodon. I mean, like they really—a lot of Mastodon is built like to avoid engagement, to be honest. One of the big differences with Bluesky—between Bluesky and Mastodon is that like Mastodon has resisted any kind of algorithmic feeds.
And it's really just a linear feed of people in time. And Bluesky has a completely different approach. Like, they start with several algorithmic feeds that you can subscribe to kind of like Twitter. So you have a, like, they call it discover. It's kind of like the for you feed.
But again, not full of Nazis, or whatever else they're putting in there at any given moment. But the—so there's discover, and then there's a following one, which is like following on Twitter, just the people you're following, but then they have—anyone can create a feed and that you can create algorithmic feeds, like you make up your own algorithms—you can create feeds off of lists or like, there's a bunch of different ways to compose them.
So you could have like a feed for a specific community. Like, I have a feed for Ruby on Rails people, for example. I have a feed for, like, national security people that I follow, for like, news and stuff. There's one—it’s called the Gram, which is just like, it's just picture feed.
So you can get photos, or even maybe like narrow those down to a specific cat category. So there's like a caturday feed, which is cats on Saturday. There's just a whole bunch of content. And ways to view the content, like to choose from unlike Mastodon, which is kind of just, you get basically like one thing.
Ben: I think, sometimes people forget that. They say, I don't want an algorithm. Well, but actually, you know the reverse chronological feed that that's an algorithm, right? It's just, we decided that this is the way you're going to see this set of data. And it's okay to have algorithms if you get to choose what the algorithm looks like, right?
And I think that's the problem that I ran into with X was that—that for you thing was just shoved in my face and it had a bunch of junk that I didn't want to see. And I love the chronological feed. That's my default on Bluesky. That's my favorite, but yeah, there are times when I like to go and check out those other feeds. I think I have a news feed and I have a quiet posters feed. I like that.
Josh: The quiet posters one is, like, one of the best feeds on Bluesky. It's just a feed that like it surfaces people who don't post a lot. I have that issue on Mastodon and I miss so much because I don't check it all the time and I'm not going to go and read through the history of 500 posts since I checked it last and the quiet posters one is like an answer. You know, it basically shows you the things that you might've missed in there.
Ben: Yeah. So I think they've just done a awesome job with the whole, like making, having these customized feeds that you can share. And I did use a Twitter list a little bit, but I ended up just looking at the following feed more often than not. But, it just feels like on Bluesky that there's this—around the at protocol, there's this just awesome, just amount of activity and just playing and we're doing fun things.
It just—it feels like Twitter back in, you know, the original Twitter days when everyone thought, oh, this is going to be like the communication bus of the internet, right. We can send notifications through Twitter and blah, blah, blah. And all of that didn't happen. Not saying it's going to happen with at protocol, but it feels like that, it feels like that same kind of promise.
Josh: It's an open protocol that, will never be—like Bluesky, the platform could shut its—could lock itself down in various ways, but it will never lock down the protocol. There will never not be a fire hose, like Twitter locked down its fire hose and shut down its API.
Bluesky, the platform, maybe they could go off protocol or something and, and really mess things up, but people could just move. The other nice thing about a Bluesky that's different from Mastodon is that the data is separate from the actual, like, the service that you use.
So it’s—so when you can migrate your data to a different—you can host it yourself if you want to, like, that's part of the decentralized protocol, but you don't, you can take that with you when you move to a different quote unquote instance of Bluesky. But like in my experience, like it—it’s not like Mastodon where there's a thousand different instances or servers that you have to choose from.
It's really just like, who do you want owning the location where your data is stored? And you can, from there you can migrate your whole account, just transparently. No one knows the difference. You can change your handle. Like everything is done, like, transparently. Mentions update automatically, all that stuff.
Versus Mastodon, you can move to a different server, but you have to leave your data behind at the old server and you can’t still take your followers with you, of course. But yeah, Bluesky, just like it's completely whatever abstracted from you. Like you don't have to think about it.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. When I first signed up for Mastodon, I signed up on a Ruby dot social our friend James runs that and it was cool.
Josh: Great community.
Ben: Yeah, it is awesome. Love it. And then, but then when I really got into Mastodon, I was like, you know what? This doesn't quite fit exactly. The one I want to be in is Hachyderm, like, because I thought that would be a good—and I think that's based in the Pacific Northwest as well. So there's that hometown thing going on.
Josh: Yeah. So Kris Nova started that and she was in her—she ran it in her basement until 30,000 users.
Ben: Right. Yeah.
Josh: She was also on the board of Bluesky, before she passed.
Ben: And she named her servers Yakko, Wacko, and Dot. And I love Animaniacs. So, I mean, so anyway, so I did that move. I did that move from Ruby social to Hachyderm and it was awkward, right? It's not really a move per se. You actually like, shut down your old account and that redirects to your new account and you might lose some followers on the way and stuff, but the biggest drawback to me was like, I really enjoyed hanging out on watching the local feed of Ruby social.
And now I didn't have that option in my client because I'm on the Hachyderm local instead. And fast forward a couple of years now I'm Bluesky. I signed up and I use whatever generic handle Ben Curtis dot B sky. And then I was like, no, wait, I want my domain to be my handle. And so I changed it and I was nervous because I was like, well, what's going to happen to all my six posts and all my five followers, and it was fine.
It was like transparent. It was. It was just worked right. And because they use a CID that actually references you as opposed to your handle. It's just an alias and everything was just worked. It's awesome.
Josh: Yeah. Everything references the ID under the hood, which is how, yeah, it's how you can change the, like, just cosmetic things like your name or your—the domain you're using or whatever.
Ben: Right.
Josh: Yeah. Or the location of your data server.
Ben: The one snag is that Bluesky does not currently have an iPad app. And I do a lot of my reading on the iPad. And so it has a great iPhone app and probably I would say even better web. I'd say the best, yeah, the best experiences on a desktop actually, because like when you're seeing who follows you, you can hover over their avatar and you can follow from right there, right?
You can see a little summary pop up, which I think is fantastic, which you don't get on a mobile device because you have to tap instead. I just wish there was a nice iPad app.
Josh: Does the web version not work as well on the iPad or other—
Ben: Oh, it's fine.
Josh: —things you're missing, or.
Ben: Yeah, it's great. No, it's great.Actually, you don't get the hover, but yeah, I just like having a dedicated app and I'm sure that at some point one of the tap bots crew or somebody is going to come up with a client that actually remembers where you were in the timeline and syncs that across devices, and then I'll probably switch to that then. But for now I'm fine with just, missing some stuff.
Josh: There's a bridge, for, yeah—have you seen that? It lets you actually use like you can use any Mastodon client with Bluesky, so.
Ben: I saw it, but I didn't know I could do that. And so that’s—
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Because I use Ivory.
Josh: I know people who use that and seem to like it. So you could try that. But I'm kind of surprised that a tap bots hasn't announced work on a Bluesky client yet. I know they went all in on Macedon and it’s—their client is great. like it would be awesome to have that for blue sky too.
Ben: Icon factory has Tapestry, which is not quite out yet. And I missed the window to get in on the Kickstarter or whatever. I can't remember if they use Kickstarter or something else, but they had a thing where you could back them and then you can get early access. And I missed that window and now regretting it. Because it sounds like it would be awesome to have that, to use both Bluesky and Mastodon on the same app.
Josh: Well, Bluesky has a number of third party clients that people seem to like already, which is nice. So there—there are multiple clients, but I would say another unique thing about Bluesky is people really seem to like the default app they're building as well. Like I do.
Ben: It is quite good.
Josh: It's really good. They—like they hired Dan Abramov. I think he's worked on—been really a big person in React. and the app is a React native app. So they have a team, just a team dedicated to working on that. And it's a very good app in my experience. And they're extremely responsive to feedback. Like he’s—I've talked to him about bugs and things and other people have. And he's like, yeah, you know, or he might even say like, PR is welcome if it's like a feature request, which is also cool because they are accepting pull requests from all of Bluesky, basically, if it's a good feature you propose and build.
Ben: All 20 million users.
Josh: It's all open source. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, the web app is fantastic. And I don't usually enjoy using React apps a lot. Because they, you know, they break the back button and stuff like that, but Bluesky is great. Like I have zero complaints about that. Just this morning, I saw deck dot blue, which is a copy of what was that? Oh, tweet deck, which was awesome back in the day. Another casualty of the API war. So I haven't checked out deck blue yet, but it looks—I mean, if it does, what it says is having tweet deck functionality. And that seems pretty cool.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. The open protocol and APIs have like, really, there's been so much cool development that has happened. There's so many different tools, both clients and other things like that. But also just like, there's this app, Clearsky, which lets you basically inspect the data. Because every, like pretty much all data is public on Bluesky.
So it lets you inspect the data, you can see what lists you're on and you can—it’s like a tool set basically for looking at your data without having to go wherever I assume it's stored and try to like, parse the Json, or whatever it is, and I guess we haven't even talked about the moderation tools they have, but the moderation tools are just fantastic.
Ben: I'm not too familiar with them. So I'm interested to hear your take on it, but I do know about the blocking, which is really cool. I thought the implementation was pretty slick. So if you're, if someone like quote—quote post you or quote skeet. I don't even know what they call it.
Josh: Skeet, skeet.
Ben: Skeet.
Josh: Yeah, quote skeet or whatever or quote.
Ben: So if someone quotes you and you're like annoyed by that and you don't want to see them in your timeline, you block them and it yanks it, basically, from their thing, from their skeet, right. Which I think is genius.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, detach the quote from, yeah, it basically eliminates dunking—like people can dunk on you, but if you don't want them to, you can detach a single post or you can block them in it. It behaves like it should and removes you from that interaction entirely.
Yeah, they call it the nuclear block, but also like when you block someone, like if they're in your mentions or something, it will remove that person from your mentions for everyone that’s, like, looking at your post, so you don't end up with a bunch of conversations still happening around this troll or whatever.
So yeah, the moderation tools are really nice. And they help prevent some of the bad behaviors. I think that people got used to on Twitter, even before Musk of calling people out and constantly being outraged by things and having to tell you about it.
Ben: I've never been popular enough on any social platform for me to have to really worry about that. I've never had anyone, I don't think, dunk on me or try to co opt my posts for their own agendas. So I haven't had to deal with a lot of the junk that a lot of people have had to that, have prompted these kinds of things but I still—I can appreciate the thought that they put into it and how I can see how the tools they provide you can help a lot in those situations.
Josh: I mean, like, now that you have these tools, you got to start posting your hot takes, Ben.
Ben: I think, I think I have a shareable hot takes about as often as I post on my blog. Yeah. All my spicy shares happen in Slack. I don’t—I'm not typically public with those things
Josh: Agood, that's a good, policy I'd say. The moderation—they call it composable moderation, but the block is one feature, but they also have concepts of labelers. So these are like different mile moderation services that can—that users can subscribe to and customize, like how you want them to work.
But—so there, there might be like, a specific labeler for, you know, maybe like content that doesn't necessarily violate the terms of service, in terms of like what people can legally post on the platform, but you might just not want to see it. You might not want to see some trolling for example, or other.
Ben: Anime artwork or whatever.
Josh: Yeah. anime. And so you could subscribe to a service that is run by other users who, of course, you would want to vet, make sure you're trusting the right—the people—that you trust the people. but then it actually works like a moderation service, a little bit like Twitter, or any other platform does where they can—they can add labels to accounts, like this account is impersonating someone or this account is a troll, and you can then choose to hide those accounts, or block them preemptively.
So they have, like, block lists where you can—if there’s—if you don't want any trolls in your mentions subscribe to a label or this block list for that category. And anytime someone reports one of those, it gets blocked for everyone. So you don't have to curate your own bespoke block lists anymore, of the thousands of accounts that get created just to mess with people basically.
Ben: This, this reminds me of spam assassin rules that were saved, right? You would share, like, someone would detect—and like Spam House was one of the services—I guess it's still around—you can draw on other people's insights onto what is spam or in this case, trolls or undesirables, whatever.
Josh: Yeah. Really makes sense. Like, why would you—why would everyone have to manage this themselves when you can combine your efforts and, and it's a great—I think it's a really great answer to moderation too, because everyone is not the same in terms of what they want to see and what they don't want to see, what they can tolerate and what they don't want to tolerate.
That's a personal decision and that's fine. Like Bluesky, the company, doesn't take—like they obviously are moderating and they're moderating really well in my experience, like they have a trust and safety team and, and they're like removing illegal and harmful content from the platform.
But if you want, if you have your own personal preferences about things you don't want to see, I don't think it's appropriate all the time for that to be applied to everyone necessarily. But, this basically gives the users that ability to decide for themselves.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I really liked that. I hadn't thought about that at all, but that's a great point.
Josh: That might be all my knowledge on Bluesky. Probably not, but.
Ben: Well, I saw a bit of the labelers, I haven't used it for any filtering. I tend to have a pretty small follow list, so, I'm not out there seeing a bunch of content I don't want to see already, but I did see a labeler and they're talking about, well, they will label you with your time zone. And I just, it was kind of hard to wrap my brain around that. I'm like, I don't, I subscribe to your thing and then you—
Josh: Glad you brought that up.
Ben: I don't, I didn't get that.
Josh: This is a fun way they’re being misused. One of the—and I should—I like—this is actually at least when they first launched them, this might've been more—they might've been used more for this than for actual moderation or something, but they can—because you can label accounts, people have used them for all sorts of things.
So it started out as you could get labeled with like your D&D class, for example, or—or like it would use a classifier of some kind, either like an LLM based one or other classifiers to like, look at your profile when you subscribe to it and it'll give you a label. So it's a little bit, there was a Harry Potter one that was like the sorting hat basically. So just like fun—there were like some partisan like wars between the people that would get labeled one thing versus another, like fun, fun things, mock wars.
And there were like a bunch of these things. But then they started being used for actual, like informational things. I don't think Bluesky, the app—I could be wrong about this, but I don't think they have, like, pronouns, like as a top level bio thing, I can't remember. They might, but people use labelers to basically like—someone created a labeler that has all the pronouns that anyone would ever want to, like, list in their bio. And you just like, you can choose yours and it applies that label, and anyone else who subscribes to the label or to the labeler sees that for everyone.
But people who don't subscribe to it, don't see it. So it's like an opt in thing. So time zones are another one that, I guess that kind of is helpful. If you're talking to a lot of people across time zones, you don't have to go figure out, like, go look at their profile to figure out what their time zone is.
What was the other one? Oh, there's one that someone made, a GitHub one that will, put a—you can have it label you with a GitHub repo that you're a contributor to, but it checks to verify that you're actually a contributor to that repo. So , if you're a Rails core developer, you could have like Rails slash Rails, the GitHub repo, like, in your profile so that people can see like what projects you're working on or like what you're affiliated with.
And you, since you trust the labeler, just like you would trust a moderation service, like you trust that that is, that's true. So that's kind of cool. I put Haya in mine.
Ben: Oh, I should do Faker. You should, uh, put a link in the show notes because I haven't seen that labeler yet. So I follow the labeler. I think there was something about pinning you pin what your choice of time zone in this case that I looked at. And then if someone else follows that labeler, then they see that tag for you on your posts. Is that how it works? That's cool.
Josh: Yeah. It's pretty cool, and there's, it's been used for a lot of fun, fun things like that. In addition to useful and then, like moderation safety things. So, yeah.
Ben: Well, I'm excited. It feels like I said, again, like early Twitter back when all the things were possible and people were like, oh, we could do this, we can do that. And I'm looking forward to it. I got some kind of blog posts I saw the other day about using the at protocol too, from Ruby. And I'm thinking, well, we can update for Honeybadger. We can update our status pages because we have announcements that we send out to Twitter. So we could add a Bluesky to that.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: I'm sure there's much, much more fun things we could do than just, you know, posting status page updates, but that's a good way to play with it. I think.
Josh: Honeybadger and FounderQuest are on there—come find us—but because we—we decided as a company not to post on X anymore, including our company accounts, and so Bluesky is like our primary channel, I think, social media and LinkedIn.
Ben: Yeah, I forgot. Like we also have—beyond our own personal socials—we have business related socials and they encourage that on Bluesky, like here, put—because you can set your domain as your handle. So there is a @honeybadger.io user on Bluesky, which represents the company versus me and you, yeah.
Josh: We have a very cool domain for our FounderQuest handle. It is founder dot quest. You can find us on Bluesky if you search for founder dot quest, which is a domain we own.
Ben: You know what we need to do now, now that we have FounderQuest, we need to have a TV show.
Josh: Yeah, that would be, we should do a—we should do like a whole media show for this. That would be cool.
Ben: For sure.
Josh: Yeah. But yeah, it's been kind of fun posting as Honeybadger on there too, because—since it's a little bit more—it’s like a more fun, it's not a corporate environment, even though companies are welcomed. I've been kind of posting, doing funny—more funny stuff than like non serious stuff and serious on our Honeybadger account. I've done some like meme templates and, and other things.
So when Kelsey Hightower of Google and serverless and so many DevOps fame, major celebrity in the tech world moved to Bluesky and deleted his X account, that was one of the first like big waves of the tech community coming over. So like, the tech, like the broad tech world, it seems is really, like really deciding on this right now, as well as like journalism and a bunch of other important communities. So I think, you know, the people that are skeptical still about X that on X or whatever, like, you know, there's a lot of things you hear about Bluesky. It's like, you know, that people just don't want to move.
Like, I think it's happening., but Kelsey, like, it ended up like quote-posting our Honeybadger account at one point. Because we were like one of the first companies on Bluesky, I think, that were at least posting. We were doing like some joke, some like jokey back and forth, the stupid brand engagement, nonsense.
But it was fun and, and it got—it actually—it’s some of the best engagement I've had on social media with a corporate company account, so I, yeah, I guess my advice, if we're actually going to like talk about something practical here, my advice would be like, if you're in a—if you're in tech or a dev tool or anything like that, or, you're like selling something to a tech audience, like don't sleep on blue sky. Because right now there's a lot of people there and their attention is like available, so it's kind of cool.
Ben: A great time to get involved and it's fun, fun. Okay.
Josh: So I have one more question for you. I'm deliberating on something. I was, I happened to be domain shopping last night at like 12:30 AM as you do.
Ben: That's dangerous.
Josh: And I noticed that the domain Josh dot blue had come available. It had—there’s never a Josh. You know, just a Josh. TLD, the dot blue TLD is a popular one for handles on Bluesky because of the blue, and it was cheap, like it was the name sheep wasn't asking like 2,000 and then like 29 a month or whatever. So I grabbed it. So my question is, should I switch to the cool hip short handle, with just my first name, or should I keep my OG, like Joshua wood dot net domain that I've had since the—I mean, I'm going to keep it obviously, but this is just for my handle. What's your opinion?
Ben: So would—would you set it like a redirect from josh.blue to go to joshuawood.net? Like a DNS sort of—
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Uh, yeah. I'd do it. Yeah. Why not.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: You can always change it back if you don't like it, right?
Josh: This is also, this is like for my personal—so my personal account is much different than any account I had on, well, any account I had on X that, anyone who listens to this show knew about. it's a much more like, you know, I talk about some tech things on there, but it's also like, just , shit posting and having fun and politics and religion and some things that like, Not everyone wants to hear about. So I have a separate Honeybadger account for just Honeybadger, so this would be for my, this would be for my fun account that everyone wants to follow.
Ben: Your Honeybadger Bluesky handle is josh.honeybadger.io, right?
Josh: It's yeah, it's joshuawood.honeybadger.io right now. But yeah.
Ben: Yeah. I would do it. Yeah. Josh.blue. Sounds pretty cool.
Josh: I might have to do that. I've always wanted a cool, like one, just my name.
Ben: Then you can post the hello fellow kids meme.
Josh: Exactly. Yeah. Although the joke is that Bluesky is basically exclusively millennials. Like it might've, until recently, probably for whatever reason, like millennials or even the elder or geriatric millennials like myself, the ones that are like the early eighties, really like Bluesky, for some reason. And so like in like pretty much all of last year, it was like talking about stuff from the eighties and nineties and like, you remember drinking surge and yeah.
Ben: That's funny. Well, you got to give those geriatric millennials something because they’re just weren’t—they weren't cool enough to be the tail end of the generation X, which is obviously the best generation out there.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. We got to have something.
Ben: No bias here. Cool. This has been awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Josh. I, you know, we talked about topics for the podcast and we joked about talking about Bluesky and like, well, we're going to have like five minutes of stuff to talk about. It's like, no, this is actually, it's been great. It's been fun. I've learned some things. So hopefully people listening have as well.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we haven't rambled about a social media platform for too long.
Ben: The too long, didn't listen version is go check out Bluesky. It’s fun.
Josh: Yeah. Find us there. Cool. Well, this has been a FounderQuest, a unique edition of FounderQuest find us at founderquestpodcast.com and come follow us on Bluesky@founder.quest and check the show notes for all the Bluesky lore that we didn't talk about.
Ben: Catch you later.