Al Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am, of course your host ed zeitron. I remain punished and hated forever. Today I'm joined by Mike Masnik. He's the CEO and founder of tecta inventor of the Streisan defect, and now a board member of the social network Blue Sky. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.
Yeah, happy to be here.
So let's start with the streisand defect. Why don't you tell the story of how you coined that? That? Just walk us through that one, because now that I've heard about it, it's all I can think about.
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's sort of there's two elements to the founding story, one of which is, you know, what caused the term to be that and then me eventually naming it. The first was just the you know, I was amazed by this story of barber strike and suing this guy I always forget his name, Ken something,
who was doing this project. He was a you know, he had been a fairly successful tech guy, but he was very interested in conservation, and so he was like renting a helicopter every few months and flying along the west coast of the United States and taking a photograph every you know, every bit of the way, and his idea was to continue to do that every few years and track the erosion of the West coast of the United States. Okay, yeah, kind of an interesting project. You know.
This is pre Google Maps, pre satellite easy access to satellite imagery, all this kind of stuff. And he created this website and it's still online and it is incredibly old fashioned where you could go picture to picture. You couldn't you know, no map like modern mapping software where you could slide along. You could go picture to picture along the way, and it had this ability for people
to leave their own annotations. And somebody found Barbara Streisand's house in Malibu and commented on it that this is Barbara Streisan the Streisand estate, I believe was the phrase that was put on it. And somebody, a Streisand lawyer, found it and threatened him and then sued him for this. And the story that caught my attention at least was that what came out in the court documents was before
the lawsuit that image had been viewed. I believe it was eight times, two of which were from my p addresses associated with the law firm that was representing Barbara streisand so at most six people had seen the photo prior to this lawsuit, and in the immediate aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people saw the photo, and he eventually won the lawsuit. In fact, streisand had to pay for his legal fees. And I had written about at the
time and just thought this crazy story. But I kept seeing other examples of that kind of thing, where people would, you know, try and get something taken down offline and the end result would be way more attention paid to it. And so there was a story that actually happened. I think it was almost two years after the original streisand lawsuit and everything, in which there was a site which also might still be online and also might be very outdated, called urinal dot net to which.
Is where I get my posts.
Yes, yes, well you know this is the early Internet where anyone would pay anything online. Yeah, And they would post photos of urinals and they were very specific and very clear that urinals only, no people, no body parts, just urinals from around the world. And they had pages of different ones, and there was some hotel or something
or I can't remember. Somebody got very mad that a urinal from their property was shown and sent a legal threat letter, And so I wrote about that, and in doing so said, you know, there should be a term for this situation where someone, you know, where something is not getting attention, and then someone sends a takedown and suddenly that draws all this attention to the thing that they wanted gone. And then I just jokingly said, why don't we call it the Streisand effect and linked back
to my story about the streisand photo. And then somehow I have no idea how that caught on. I didn't do much. I mean, I may have mentioned it again a few times, but people picked up on it and it took on a life of its own, and most of which I had nothing to do with.
And I think it's I think it's ironic that despite the term's fame, it has not brought more attention to the actual providence of the term. Yeah, but now it has. Now we have the better offline, not even remotely exclusive. You probably told this story dinner parties for years.
I may have told it a few times.
Yes, it's a great story though talking about old websites tech der so it's come up on thirty years of running this site. Yeah, what has changed, because the design hasn't. I doesn't say that negatively. I actually love the fact that it loads properly. There's not like some insane iframe situation. Yeah my phone isn't seven hundred degrees because I'm looking at it.
Well, yes, the well, the site has changed a few times, but it has not changed in a long time. So this is this is probably the third generation of Tector. But but I think it it hasn't really changed much since probably two thousand and six, two thousand and seven. It's probably the last time we did a major overhaul of the look and feel of the site. Yeah, I mean, look, I wanted to write about the technology industry and what was going on, and I was very interested in it.
And I started when I was in business school. And just I originally started writing, I was old school. I was writing an email newsletter before email newsletters were crazy idea the rage, and then I thought, like, you know, newsletters, who reads newsletters? I got to turn this into a website. And so I.
Also, just to we clear, it was entirely email based.
Oh front yeah, oh when it started, baby, when it started in nineteen ninety seven, it was entirely an email thing, and then I turned into a website about six months after the email, and originally it was just hosting the copies of the email newsletter, and then I started to build it out. And then what caught my attention in early around sometime in nineteen ninety eight, I first saw slash dot, and this is before the word blog existed, and I was like, Oh, this, this format and this
setup is really cool. I wonder if I could do that and turn the website into that, and so I I got I used slash code zero point three. This was before they had released an official slash code, but they still offered it up.
Well do you mean a slash code for that?
Slash code was their software that they used to that was slash Dot. It was they they decided to release, you know, they uh god, what's his name? Rob Malda was the guy who created slash dot, and he, you know, released the code he had written written, you know, one of the first sort of blogging type software products. And it was very messy and it took me and less me, but more a friend of mine who was willing to get in and deal with the mess of code, which
was not easy. It took us two or three months to figure out how to actually get it just set up. And then suddenly like I could blog, and suddenly I could write easily every day, rather than what I was doing originally, which was like hand coding HTML files and FTPing them.
To This was before you could just spin up these blogs like on and.
Like none of that stuff existed. Again, the word blog didn't even exist.
Where did you host it?
So I'm I'm not going to say, actually I had found I had found a hosting company, and I still do some work with that hosting company, and we used to we used to advertise. I mean it is, it can be found if people are looking. But because we we occasionally and we're no longer Tector is no longer hosted with them, but we still host some other stuff with them because they've been amazing partners. And I just found them completely randomly through probably searching Yahoo and found
a random, little tiny hosting company. But because we sometimes receive very angry legal threats and sometimes those legal threats try and go upstream are our partner hosting company was receiving too many legal threats and said, hey, could you not mention that you host with could you could you Now that's not I mean it's not, but I mean and they're and they're like great, great guys, a very small company, a tiny, tiny company.
Not so you should work with like for the for the smaller ones. I used to work with a very small domain hosting company then got bought by a big one and then it shied almost immediately. I'm not going to name them as their remarkable too, and.
So yeah, but this was not you know this, they they were great in fact, like you know, as I said, like, we still use them for certain projects and I trust those guys to be absolutely amazing. But but yeah, so we just found a small hosting company and they were the original host of Tector for a very long time.
And so but yeah, and and and eventually the word blog came about afterwards, and I resisted calling Tector to blog for a really long time and then eventually kind of realized, like, you know it is, did you finish business school? I did finish business school. I have an m b A, and I so I because I started when I was in business school. I got my MBA, I moved out to California and I started working for Well. I interned at Intel and did my big tech at
the time company experience for a little bit. I went to an e commerce startup that was very big for about a week and a half and I joined like a week after that. And so it got to ride the the e commerce startup down a very big slope downward, constantly downward, for about it a year during the this was pre the burst of the dot com bubble. So what yeah is I was there from ninety eight to ninety nine.
Oh prime, the good years.
Yeah, except except for us, right, So, I mean part of the issue was we saw one of our competitors, you know, go public based on you know, I don't know, you know, nonsense and a power right yeah, yeah, this was pretty and and so you know, we decided that we had to go public too, and we had bankers, like we had bankers and consultants and all this nonsense, and and they looked at what we had and they said, you know, you can't go public, like that's how bad
are Our situation was everybody was going public with zero revenue and we couldn't. We had problems.
I might say that. So after that, did you go pro with with Tecta? Did Yeah?
So basically, so I quit. There was a couple of
reasons why. I don't need to go into all the history there, but I I eventually, you know, did a did a nice little quitting and and I sort of cast around and I sort of was thinking of doing another startup myself, and then like a whole bunch of people are like, but the whole time, even when I was at this company, you know, I was working on Tector on the side, and it was just sort of like, especially as everything was going terrible at that company, it
was kind of my release where I can write about all the shit that's going down.
It's quite literally what I did in the start of my newsletter was because I was depressed due to professional personal things. I was like, I need to do something else.
Yeah, yeah, totally, and so like that's what I was doing. And then and then I was like casting about for an idea. I was working with some friends and I was like, maybe we should do a startup, and we were talking about different ideas, and then a couple of people were like, dude, you seem to really like doing
this writing thing, and like Tector does you know? It seems good and like maybe you could turn that into a company and so, you know, so, yeah, so a few months later sort of said okay, I'm gonna I'm going to commit to this full time.
And was it just you for a while or how long?
Yeah? Well, I mean the history is like there was there was someone else there in the very early years who sort of was helping me out and we were trying to get it. He was not full time, and we're trying to get him to the point that it was full time, and that didn't that never worked out. And then but soon after that brought on basically, you know, basically a small group of people who were you know, we referred to as co founders now and and sort of helped me out, helping helping me sort of build
it out. And how many people if you go it now, we are very small. We are now for four.
People cool and one of those is called Boat as well.
Yeah yeah, yeah, body his lesson. Sorry, Car is going to kick my.
Tweets.
He is used to it. But yeah, so Carl, Carl has been writing for us for for a long time. I had him, I had him right for us at one point. I think he did me a favor. I mean, where I either it was I can't remember if either I got married or I had paternity leave and I needed someone to help write, and and he came in for a couple of weeks and then yeah, later on when when we were able to bring him on.
So, how are you feeling about the tech media, Because I say this with the reason I brought you on is to also publicly say you're fucking awesome and tech voks right, And I've been reading it for my entire career, and it feels like one of the only outlets that has not changed tonally. Yeah, like you've kept you've been consistently. I think you're one of the other people who gets called like acerbic like I do, which I always get pissed off with, which I guess doesn't help.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of weird, like I actually don't care too much what people think about me or saying so so like none of that has ever concerned me that much. But yeah, you know, I don't know. Caustic, I think is a term that's been used.
Yeah, but it doesn't feel like you're fighty. It feels like you just are pissed off that people aren't more consistent and honest and upfront with stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, it's just like, you know, I've I have opinions, and this is a chance to express that. I'm not going to hold back. And you know, it's like, I don't know, I feel like a lot of people, you know, I mean obviously, like if you're working for like a big media company, they're you know, there are limits put
on kind of what you can say. But also it feels like a lot of people who sort of get into writing also you know, they kind of do it to then like move into a role like they want to get hired by I don't know, CNN, NBC or something like that, And that was like never my goal. So like, right, I never had this concern that like, oh, you know, like well if I write this, nobody's ever going to hire me because I'm not trying to get hired that way. So so that was never, you know, never a concern of mine.
But it feels totally like you at least had a mission though. Yeah, I've always been trying to get high old of what that is in the best way.
Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I don't know, I mean I have at some point I need to dig up and find like and I know, I like sent this to Carl and other people brought on new writers. I had sort of like an editorial like here's our mission, right, here's what we're trying to do. But it's it's like twenty years old at this point, and I haven't looked at it, and I don't even know where I would
find it. But like, you know, my take on it was always like the key thing for me with Tector is I actually and this is where like potentially I don't know if I disagree with you or you might disagree with me, Whereas like I am weirdly optimistic about technology. I actually do think technology is like a generally good driving force, and like.
I actually fully agree, by the way, okay.
And like innovation has all this amazing opportunity that I would love to see realized, and so like my focus is on like anything that gets in the way of it, and and so like, and I want to be really careful here because like there's like the Mark Andresen view, like who says something that sounds kind of like what I'm saying here, right, But.
He's he's not an optimist, he mentions Nick Land. Yeah, that's not the dark and enlightenment guys are not optimists.
Right, And and so his whole thing is like, you know, this accelerationist approach to like technology and innovation, and and my take on it is more like I want to see all of these, like all the good stuff that technology enables to become reality. I would like to see it sooner because I only have so long to live, and the more of it that I can see, and the more of it that will be available to my kids and you know, everybody else I think would be good.
But that you know, there are ways to do that right, and there are ways to do it better and to take a long term view of how how do we actually make the world better with these kinds of innovations. And so I think, you know, poorly executed innovation is bad and leads to problems. And so where I get upset is sort of and you know what sets me off on various rants is like, you know, efforts that
get in the way of good innovation. Right, So it's not like like the Andresan viewpoint is like anything that gets in the way of any innovation is a problem.
And you know, and also I don't the things. I fully agree with you. I regularly get told a senek, I'm a pessimist. I don't like this stuff. I love the computer. Yeah, it's the only reason I'm a person. Like like I'm like the drill crying tweet, but about the internet, like my job, my friend, love ones, lovers crying and Internet and it's now get the fuck out of my office, which is the quote from the growth tweet. I'm not saying this to Mike, but it's like, I
agree with you. It's these things may seem like we're deeply interrogating them and attacking them, but it's like these things are in the way of cool stuff happening. Yes, Centralization, monopolization, shitty regulations that stop actual innovation happens are the things that will stop cool stuff happening. Yes, And I think too regularly people kind of conflate that with hating. But it's like you should hate the stuff that gets in the way of the cool stuff exactly.
Yeah, yeah, then yes, that is That is very much my view of these things. I mean, I would love to see more cool stuff than so stuff that gets in the way of that I find problematic.
So my many complainers and haters. They hate me so much. They they tell me I never like anything, But I want to talk about Blue Sky. Okay, you joined the board of yees. So how did that actually come abound?
Yeah? So, I mean, you know, I don't know how much you know about the history of Blue Sky itself.
I think it would be good to tell listeners.
Sure so, and I have some association with it, though it's sort of semi random. Which was that, you know, when this goes back to, like I think it was like I had looked this up fairly recently, so that don't hold me to the dates, but I think it
was around like twenty fourteen or so. It was when there was suddenly some controversies around the way that Twitter and Reddit were hand certain content moderation controversies, and there was you know, basically like really bad shitty content on both of those platforms, and there was a big debate over whether or not those companies should step in and take down that content, and whether or not that was
an attack on free speech or blah blah blah. You know, we've heard all the debates, but that was really the first one that really boiled through. Was around twenty fourteen and I among the other things that I believe in, you know, strongly, is like free speech is a very important concept to me. And again, like I always feel like, now I need to caveat that because lots of most people who say that they support free speech, don't.
They they support saying the N word. Yeah, that is the big goal.
Yeah, they it's yeah, it's it's very frustrating to me. I support actual free speech, yes, and that includes, you know, the right of private platforms to say we don't want to associate with you. That is a right of association, which is considered a one part of the right of free speech. But at the same time, I do appreciate again, like the power of the Internet itself to be this platform of enabling more good speech. Some bad speech, obviously, but also an awful lot of really really good speech.
And I am very very concerned about an overreaction where in an attempt to stop the bad speech, which again is very much there, that we throw out a whole bunch of really good and important speech.
Can you give an example, just because because this is a thorny topic, I think it's good.
Yeah, sure, I mean obviously, like you know me too, Black lives matter. You know, these kinds of things came about because of the Internet. The Arab Spring is another one where the you know, the Internet was incredibly powerful in having these voices be able to speak out and to you know, form groups and organize and talk to each other. That really was not particularly possible prior to the Internet being there and enabling that kind of speech.
And I worry when we talk about, you know, stopping certain kinds of speech, that that would enable people to stop these these other kinds of of good speech, and so that that was sort of like larger issue I'm sort of thinking about, like, how do we protect you know, the ability for people to speak out, to speak truth to power in certain cases where it is really important.
Also protect the right of private you know, uh services to say I don't want to associate with this content, not be forced to host you know, Nazi content for example, or or hateful content. How do we sort of balance
those things. And because I'm old and because I'm from you know, I existed on the Internet in the nineties and I was like, I felt like the Internet was kind of different back then, and so I just started thinking through these things and I said, well, you know, wait, how did we get to this world in which you know, I grew up pre World Wide Web on Usenet and I r C all of these.
You know, I was a polarist man. If you remember polarist, I don't don't think I ow. It was a great side client had colors and shit.
It was okay, I don't even remember what I RC client. I use it, but you know, and I used Gopher before the web existed, Like, I don't know if you remember Gopher.
I don't know Gopher. I'm looking it up now.
Okay. It was sort of like a text based uh you know, menu systems like my protocol Jesus, yes, yeah, so I would get the weather every morning by gophering to a server finding out what the weather was. So, you know, so I was like, we had all these things and they were all protocol based and then anyone could build, right, So you used a different IRC client than I did. Anyone could build on it because it
was all a protocol and anyone could build. And I was like, wait, you know, the world changed somewhere in the last twenty years, and now we have all these services that are wholly owned corporations, and they obviously have their own interests, and that doesn't seem like a great world.
So I wrote a blog post it just kind of suggested, like, hey, you know, why aren't these things built on protocols, why are they all wholly owned corporations, Because that's where it seems like a whole bunch of the problems come in.
And then I had these interoperable portals.
Yeah right, I mean it's like because like you know, once, you know, I was kind of thinking, I was thinking back to usenet honestly, where it's like, yeah, you know, you had bad, terrible people on unet. Yeah yeah, I mean you know, depending on where you go, it's kind of risky. But you also had like kill files, and you had different use net servers that would ban different groups different uh, I.
Mean some of the early gaming groups I was in, Yeah, like I was playing Uo.
Yeah, I mean there there was all all sorts of stuff, and but like you had methods of dealing with it.
But it was like community based. It wasn't like it wasn't like, you know, the president of usenet has to decide which which things are allowed in which or not, But like as a community we can sort of figure out or through individuals, like with kill files and stuff like you could say like I'm I don't look, I never want to hear from it again, right, so like I'm gonna make sure make sure that I'd never have to deal with him, and so, you know, and I was like that was that was like a better world.
Whereas now, like everything because like Reddit is fully in control of Reddit and Twitter is fully in control of Twitter. We're in this world where we are totally dependent on the decisions that they make, and you know, like, yes, there is like one decider and so like in some cases maybe that is useful, but you know, on the who whole, it feels like a less great world because the incentives that they have are also you know, not always aligned with the users and certainly not aligned with like,
you know, what might be best for different us. It's always going to be a single view and usually it's like what is going to be the biggest profit, you know,
for for us? And so so I wrote this piece sort of like theorizing like what would it look like if we had a more interoperable, you know, protocol based world for these kinds of services, And then I'd written a few more things about it, and at some point in like twenty eighteen, the Night Institute of Columbia asked if I would write a paper kind of outlining that idea, and that made me really sit down and sort of think through it more systematically, and I wrote this paper
called Protocols Not Platforms, which I was, you know, went back and forth with them on editing. There were two folks at the Night Institute who were really really good, like amazing editors, like really challenged everything I wrote, and it was just like, but how would this work? Like why would that? You know? And really made me, you know, work hard at getting that paper right and we published.
They published that in twenty nineteen, and it got a little bit of attention early on, and then it sort of died out. And then Jack Dorsey found the paper and I kind of think I know how he did it, I'm not entirely sure, and he reached out and he was just like, hey, I read your paper, and I think we want to do that with Twitter and so to take one step back, like my thought and writing that paper to create that world. So I was sort of arguing that this world is a better world where.
Every major platform would have a protocol that could be connected to the other.
Or yeah, I mean there are a few ways that it could be done. But basically I was like, what can we do to like take away the power of like a Mark Zuckerberg or you know, a Sergey Brin or whatever to like control a huge portion of the Internet was kind of the underlying thinking. But still have the benefits of these services, right, Like, like there are good things, but you know, the problem comes in when you know one,
you're sort of stuck there, right. You know, if if you you know, like the example and I use this in the paper and it comes up a lot is like the email example, where you know, compared to like Facebook, right, if I leave Facebook, then I mostly have But you know, when I leave Facebook, that means my family that uses Facebook, my cousins, my aunts and uncles that all stay in touch through Facebook, I no longer know what's going on with them because I don't. I don't want to deal
with Facebook anymore. But email, Like, if I don't like my email provider, I can find an new email provider and I don't lose touch with everyone that I email because I can just import my address book over. I said, you know, why why can't we make all of the Internet services that we like more like the email example and less like the Facebook example, where where if I leave, I can still stay in touch with people.
Where's the incentive for the platforms to do this?
So yeah, so if you read the Protocol's not Platforms paper, you see, like I, I try to come up with a bunch of incentives to effectively convince the companies to recognize that there are potential benefits. Yes, obviously they are losing control, but my main pitch to them, and this is the one that Jack seemed to buy, was you also don't get blamed for everything anymore. And so whether or not that is a good thing or not, it's just like cause I you know.
And then just so I'm clear, the downside is for them would be that they can no longer trap you there. But in return, you're not totally at faults.
Well basically, you know, it's like when you know. So this is not again not a perfect analogy, but it's like you think of email, email and spam, right, so everyone's sort of like trying to deal with spam, but at no point are they like calling the CEO of Email to testify before Congress because they're spam everywhere, Right, you sort of recognize that it is a collective action issue, and it's a collective problem that everyone has to try to work on in different ways, and you had early
on at least you had different people sort of creating different spam fighting tools, and the discussion was over that, like how do how do we better handle those things rather than you know, you, mister CEO of email, have to fix this.
I think we're I'm a little confused. Yeah, but forgive me for this is that how does this deal with like trolls and spam and all that if they have less responsibility than who does? So if there was a is this is this, I guess federated? Is this what you're suggesting like because or is this forget forget my ignorance?
No, no, no, it's it's not. It's it's a little bit complex to to wrap your head around. It's complex for me to wrap my head around it. And so it's fine, it's important. It's good to ask questions. No, So my thinking was that what happens is if it's and I didn't think of it as federated as in like mastodon, right, I mean, we can get into like specific debates about the actual like technical infrastructure and how
it's built. I don't think that's as important. The idea more was that if it is not wholly controlled by one company, those companies can still you know, have a responsibility in terms of keeping their part of it clean in order to keep users. Because now, the way I looked at it was, you know, if you know, so, imagine a world in which there are lots of Twitters, and this is kind of the way I was thinking that that could all interoperate and communicate across each other.
If Jack Dorsey, you know at that time, still running Twitter, does something really stupid or enables too many Nazis to be too Nazi full, then people will leave right right because there's now easy exit under this kind of system, and therefore he has incentives to actually keep things clean. Now, this is the part that some people get upset about, which is like, if it is a protocol, then you could still have you know, Nazi Twitter, which is kind of what we have now.
You can just say Twitter now.
Yeah or x right so, and you know, but in that world, I think they can be much more isolated. Now this is partly theoretical in my belief.
But also you would be building a site on top of a protocol. It would use the protocol. You would be visiting a site.
Right, so you you would still be using a site, and then but you would have one you would have more control yourself because you could bring in your own algorithms or other people's algorithms or so you know, other you know.
And use that to called and off the Nazis rather than.
To courting off the Nazis. But again, like you know, there are different layers here in terms of the stack, in terms of who's doing which part of it. But you could still have room for a company like a Twitter or now a blue Sky that has some moderation features, and if people really dislike the way that they're moderating, they could build their own from.
The same protocol with the same us as with the same accounts, right exactly. And that's what blue Sky is really doing. Like blue Sky is on top of a protocle or is it a protocol itself.
No, So blue Sky is on top of a protocol, the AT protocol or AT protocol. And so you know what happened was that Jack decided that Twitter would do this. He was somewhat convinced by my paper and decided that he would he would hire a small team of engineers, give them some money, and have them go and build a protocol, with the idea being that Twitter would adopt
that protocol eventually. And so that was the plan that he sort of set in motion in late twenty nineteen, and he, you know, he announced it on Twitter and he gave a shout out to my paper, but I had no official anything. I had spoken to him after he read the paper. I had a couple conversations with him, and I got an alert the night before he sent out that threat saying he was going to do it. He was going to announce it, but I had no
no role or any any association with it. And then then well COVID happened, which I think probably threw off timelines.
But Twitter folks got a bunch of people who were interested in decentralized social media together in an online sort of you know, chat space using Matrix, which is another decentralized protocol, and and you know, they basically talked about ideas for a really long time, and it took Twitter really very way too long, you know, basically another year and a half until they finally decided that they were going to hire somebody to lead the Blue Sky project,
and then that took a while and they eventually hired Jay Graber. But again, Jay very smartly said, this needs to be separate. It can't be a part of Twitter. It needs to be independent from Twitter, because otherwise someone could buy it and then destroy it. Yeah, we wouldn't want that to happen. Yeah. So, so pretty prescient on her partner.
And so, how did you end up on the bullet then?
Yeah?
So I was also in the thread and like one hundred people mentioned me. So, I mean I have no qualifications. I post a lot, I don't really know stuff. So I mean it's unfair, you got it?
Yeah, So I mean basically, I mean I had known Jay. I'd known Jane from before all of this. Actually I had met with her kind of around when the protocols and platforms.
This is Jay Graver Graver who's the CEO.
I had met with her kind of when the paper came out through a mutual friend. She had read the paper and liked it, and we had lunch and just very quickly, like I realized, like she she internalizes, she understood it better than I did, and she understood my paper better than I did and I wrote it and that was like, I was like, wow, this.
Is that that rocks as far as the CEO CEO of a website actually knowing how it works. I'm not even being sarcastic here, no, I mean it.
Was it was. It was really eye opening. And this is obviously before you know, blue Sky existed. And then so she you know, you know, once Twitter announced blue Sky, she she had made it clear to them that she really wanted to run it, and Jack and Twitter like really took a lot of time to actually realize that, like she should run it, and like they interviewed a lot of other people. They actually again I had no official association. I never got paid, I never you know,
had no contract or anything. But they actually had me interview people who might run the Blue Sky project at one point.
That's really cool.
Yeah, it was. I was just kind of they just asked me, and I said for sure, and then I gave them feedback and I recommended that they hired j though there were really good other people.
And actually there was a board of people setting up Blue Sky just so the people know the organization. So there was a board of people it.
Was yeah, it was mostly Twitter people. There were a few outsiders, but it was mostly like senior executives at Twitter, and they were still.
At Twitter at the time, and then they left or.
And no, oh oh. In terms of the people they interviewed, yeah, none of the people they interviewed were Twitter. Sorry. All the people that they interviewed, I'm sorry. The people who were doing like the interviewing were Twitter people and a couple outside people like me and a few others.
That's really cool though.
Yeah. And then and then they they and and there were it was actually some really impressive candidates and like I was, like, I was kind of blown away by like how many smart people were thinking through how do you actually build a decentralized social media protocol. And then eventually they hired Jay and she start and she set it up as an independent operation and then built out
the company. And the originally had so the board was herself, Jeremy Miller, who is still on the board and was has a lot of experience in decentralized protocols and standards. And then Jack was the third board member and in the midst of all of this as well, then Elon came along obviously, I think your listeners know what of him, Yeah.
And and everything zip To founder.
Yes, it's funny if you go way back in the tector at archives, I have a post about zip To where I called him Elton Musk at the time, which I've never corrected, and so uh uh so, yeah, Jack was on board. But somewhere around this time when Elon took over, Jack discovered Noster, which is this other decentralized social media protocol, and he became really really interested in it.
And this is actually about the last time I spoke with Jack where he was like, oh, you should check out Noster, like it is everything that your paper, you know that your paper described And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I was like, but what about blue Sky, Like aren't you you're on the board And he's like yeah, He's like they're they're too slow. Noster is going to move much faster.
Okay, buddy, Yeah, how's how's Noster doing?
Yeah, So, like I checked it out. I actually do think there are some really cool things about Noster, and like technically it's it's a really interesting setup that He's right that it does enable like a lot of like, really some really cool things can be done by a NOSTER.
And it is interesting because both the technological underpinnings of both Noster and the the AT protocol, which is what Blue Sky is based on, both really come out of this other decentralized protocol called Secure scuttle Butt, which we're not going to get into and what that is and
what happened to it. But so both of them take some of the technological thinkings from the same same core idea, and that's actually kind of interesting, and you know, if you get into the technical weeds, it's it's kind of neat how there are some similarities there. But he got really focused on it mainly because it was like so lightweight and so simple that people could build on it
very quickly, whereas Blue Sky was taking more time. But part of the reason why Blue Sky was taking more time, and part of the reason why I've always been really impressed by Jay is that her approach to all of this is like people, like, some people care about decentralization, most people don't, And if you're going to build a thing that works, like the fact that it is a decentralized protocol underneath, shouldn't it shouldn't matter to most users.
They need to build it just a good service upfront, like that's the most important thing. And so you know, Jay's very very conscientious of that and thoughtful of that. And so anyway, so that all happened, Jack was still on the board, and then at some point he was doing an interview and was sort of confronted about something and he was like, oh, I'm quitting the board, and so he quit the board, and suddenly there was an
empty seat on the on the Blue Sky board. And and then yes, lots of names were thrown out in
in big threads on Blue Sky of potential replacement. But I mean, I I have I had been in sort of regular contact with Jay, you know, ever since Blue Sky started, and there were different points where different things popped up, and she had reached out to me for thoughts and advice, and I'd had a few phone calls with her, you know, over the time, and so basically, like I think she had reached out because she wanted some advice on something. And again this is all totally informal.
I had no official relationship or anything. And we started talking and I tossed out the idea as like I know, Jack left. If you want me to help find you someone else, I am willing to like evaluate other people, but also like, if you're interested in potentially having me be that person, I'm also interested in that. And so
that's basically what I said. And we continue that conversation over the course of about two months, and I spoke to Jeremy who's the other board member, and some other folks as well, and then eventually, you know, they offered me that spot cool. That's the basis story.
To wrap us up, I will ask you the question I love to ask people, which is why should we have hope right now? Because there's so much there's so much depression. I'm not talking about politics. I'm just talking about within the tech industry. There's so much shit, there's so much grim shit. What gives you hope right now?
Yeah? I mean honestly, I mean stuff like Blue Sky, And I will broaden that to say, like all of the attempts at building new decentralized systems I find super exciting and encouraging because it's showing that we can build that world where it's like we can look at you know, the the success of social media as a concept is really interesting and it's cool, like it has allowed so many people to connect, and yes, there are all sorts of downsides, like again of course not denying what we
know are the downsides of social media, but like the number of important friendships and you know, business contacts and relationships that I've built through social media, and this concept of people being able to communicate with each other so easily is such a powerful thing that I think a
lot of people take for granted. And yes, what happened was that that all sort of got locked in these and shitified silos from these you know, giant companies run by often terrible people and you know, with very misguided incentives. The thing that I am really enthusiastic about with the centralized social media is that we have a chance to do it again, and we have a chance to hopefully
do it better. And this is something that I didn't I didn't really talk about when I in my thinking on the paper, and this is something that comes up
and I think it is worth addressing. Is that some people say, well, Blue Sky is a company, it is venture funded, you know, it's it's got to go down that same route of intiitification, and that is a fear, and I sort of view part of my role on the board as being like stopping the intification and sort of representing the best, you know, the best position of
the community. But you know, one of the things again, another thing that has impressed me about Blue Sky and Jay is that they have within their mission this idea that the future company is a potential adversary. Right, everybody knows what happened with Twitter, right, and so they are building the protocol to be resistant to that. That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it is being done in a way that is much more difficult for them to initify.
And again, like I go back to the email example, where where you know, most people have a Gmail account, Like, lots of people use Gmail, and some people can argue like Gmail's not great, but I don't think Gmail has been as in shitified as other systems because the excentive built because it's built on basic email protocols SMTP and whatnot.
And so if they make it really horrible, if they were really like there were concerns you know early on, oh Google's going to spy on all your email and do advertising off of it and all this kind of stuff.
They you know, they sometimes make experiments in that way and then they get you know, smacked down and stuff, because as soon as they go down this path of really making it horrible, it's so much, you know, it just opens up the opportunity for somebody to step in and say, well, it's easy, like you can switch, you don't lose contact with anyone. Right, It's hard to leave Facebook, it's easy. It's easier to leave Gmail. And so the incentive structure then is for Google not to fuck up Gmail.
That's not to say, you know, Gmail has its problems, but it's I think it's less less and shitified than other services, whereas and Blue Sky and the way they're designing Blue Sky and at protocol it is designed to make it, you know, really difficult for future Blue Sky to and shittify the service because if they do, all of the pieces are set up that somebody else can come in and create you know, new Blue Sky, green Sky, whatever whatever you want to call it, that everybody can
just shift to with the push of a button, and Blue Sky loses everything that they have as as a company. And so the real challenge now is like, can we build you know, a sustainable business and service on that without making it awful for the users and the community on that service. And but we've built in this sort of commitment mechanism which is if if you know, we try and do things that is exploiting our users, which
is like that's where the incentification curve starts. You know, you reach this point where instead of providing value, we now have to extract.
You've trapped them. Now they cannot be right.
And so you know, with Blue Sky, the whole point is like we're setting it up as you know, not me them, but you know, I'm I'm on the board and I'm watching they're setting it up in a way that they're setting a trap for themselves. That says, if if we try and start extracting value in a way that is awful to people, they can leave and they can destroy our business. And therefore we can't do that. We have to build a service that is good for the community and that you know, provides value for the
community rather than is extracting value from the community. And so that you know, who knows if it'll work. It is you know, this is a lot of this is theoretical, but you know, I think everything that they've done so far has been in that, right. You know, they make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes, but I think they're moving in the
right direction with it. And that has me really really optimistic, because wouldn't it be great if we could have like all of these benefits that we're talking about without you know, without the awfulness, and without you know, it all being dependent on some billionaire who's you know, trying to buy up an island in Hawaii or whatever.
Okay, so maybe I have one more question. Okay, what is the mechanism to stop blue sky and shit fying? Then?
Yeah, I mean it's basically the fact that anyone can can every every part of Blue Sky itself can be recreated elsewhere while still allowing you to communicate with people on Blue Sky. Right, So it is possible to entirely remove yourself from Blue Sky and still communicate with anyone else on Blue Sky.
Huh.
And so that's how it should be, yes, Right, And so you know, if Blue Sky in shitifies and does bad stuff, then somebody else is going to come along and say, like, I don't like this, right, you know, So just for example, right, you know, if they decide to you know, start inserting you know, terrible ads everywhere or whatever. Then it's like somebody comes along and says, well, I'm going to build the infrastructure that is blue Sky without the ads.
You know, and they would have access to all the posts or the users, and.
Blue Sky can't do anything to stop that.
That's really cool. That is a better future. But blue Sky can keep users by not being ship exactly exactly.
And so you know, there is the challenge of like, you know, it still is a company. It is a public benefit company, so we are allowed as a board like, uh, you know, the fiduciary duty is to a wider set of stakeholders, including the community, not just the investors. And we can do that legally because of the public benefit corporation. But like we have this technical infrastructure that says, you know, we basically shoot ourselves in the foot if we make
it shipped for for the community. And and you know, now the trick is like can can you build a real sustainable business on top of that by actually providing value? And that's you know, that's hopefully the next stage of what the company is working on.
Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you?
So well? Thanks for having me this is a This was a really fun conversation. I wasn't sure where it was going to go, but that was that was good. That's the Better of Line experience. And yeah, so I am obviously on blue Sky m masnik at It's at mmasnik dot b b sky dot social as my cout there. It's easy to find me on blue Sky, obviously at techtr and those those are the main things. So if you want to read my articles, read them on tector.
If you want to see me, you know, ranting about this or that at any point, find me on blue Sky.
Thanks so much, and you will now get the soon to be updated Better Offline links following this. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at Better offline dot com, or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast links and
of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot ad to visit the Discord and go to our slash Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
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