They've been in business for over a decade, and they still don't know what they're doing. I guess a podcast seemed natural. Here's FounderQuest. Well, Josh, I did something this morning that I haven't done in over six years. Do you want to guess what that was? I have no guesses. What did you do? I updated my personal website. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I actually wrote a blog post.
And I updated some of the layout a little bit, some tweaks. I was going to ask, like, did you redesign it in the process? 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. whatever. And so I was like, well, this is even going to build. And so I built it. And yes, it did.
I was like, all right, that's fine. So let me, should I get a new template? And I was like, no, I 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 blue sky link and Mastodon. But yeah, it's. so as i was updating my uh site though i noticed like the copyright was like 2019 and the so it had been a while yeah the last blog post was 2018 so yeah it was it was time
Well, I appreciate your restraint in not doing the full theme overhaul. I don't know if I could have been quite as restrained. Yeah, yeah, that was a touch and go there for a minute. But I did have one snag. Netlify was a problem. So I used 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.
uh and so i had to like specify a ruby version that was actually you know within the last couple 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. 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. Yes, it was today for sure. yeah my sites actually i moved my site from netlify to a hetzner like a five dollar hetzner server a while back because i wanted to fiddle with like cgi stuff and like you know totally serious nerd stuff
I thought for a minute this morning that I might have to do that. When I saw NetFly's build failure, I was like, uh-oh, do I need to move to VPS? But I just checked out the build log. I'm like, oh, I can fix that. But I really felt motivated to update my site because Blue Sky'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 to 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. I mean, with all those new followers you're getting. Well, you know, thank you, Josh, for your starter pack that has made me at least the five gazillionth most popular person on Blue Sky. Yeah, so I've spent the last like year and a half.
just exclusively living on blue sky that's where i've been this whole time yeah 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 blue sky is a another decentralized social media like microposting 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 Macedon in some cases. And it just feels like the people there are like very early Twitter. Just the community that is 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.
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 thing.
button that they push because I love 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.
I want to see all the things that I'm not following. And then it just got worse and worse and worse. And then the ad situation got worse. And then they removed the de-emphasized links so that you can't even... I mean, 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 right 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 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 honey badger 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 yeah it's 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 Blue Sky feels like. So I've been doing Mastodon like you for a couple of years.
The thing about Mastodon was that while it 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. 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 with mastodon if i want to learn about some like c api of the ruby core or something probably going over there 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. 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 platform. Which is fine. Like, you know, they have their own culture and they don't want certain, you know. Yeah. And that's, 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 yeah yeah i i really love That again, I forgot how much I missed that. I didn't realize how much I missed that being in the Macedon space. Like this morning, the thing that was in my feed on Blue Sky was the perfect 90s 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. whatevs i just love it that's how blue sky 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 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 they 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 blue sky 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 uh social media and platforms
And yeah, they've done a really great job of executing on the whole 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 i think we've been adding like a million users a day yeah over the last week or something it's pretty wild um the team is like i think it's like 20 people i think it's like i was gonna 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 the system to 20 million users there's been a few hitches lately but like
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. No fail whales, but plenty of ALF pictures. Did you see the ALF fail whale that someone made? That was the best. Yeah, ALF is a kind of a celebrity. on blue sky i'm not gonna say why you can go like dig i might drop a link in the show notes
story about it. I haven't done that research, so I don't know the stories, but I'll have to go look it up. You've piqued my interest. 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 gonna tease it a little bit all right since you're the resident expert on uh blue sky among us then i want to ask you two questions one is a pronunciation question and one is a a terminology question so question
Number one on pronunciation, is it AT proto? Is it at proto? Is it at protocol? I'm confused. I don't know. I mean, it looks cool, but I don't know how to say it. I want to say it's AT protocol. I say at in my head. So I, I'm honestly, I'm not sure. I think at protocol kind of makes sense since everything's all about the ads, you know, but, uh, yeah. Uh, okay. So question number two is skeets. Really? Another part of blue sky lore.
I'm also not going to give the usual definition for skeet. In the defense, there is such a thing as skeet shooting. I used to shoot some clays as a kid. Probably still would. It's pretty fun. I have a friend that does competitive skeet shooting, so. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. So it's got multiple definitions. The story is that Jay, the CEO.
of blue sky. 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 so, you know, skeet. I forget how do 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 skates 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 of 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 blue sky 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 a legend or whatever. A fait accompli at that point. Yeah. Now AOC is backing.
Oh, wow. If AOC is backing skeets, then that's done, man. 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. I remember seeing Amy Hoy wade into the whole skeet debate and she's like, let's just co-op tweet because Twitter is giving 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.
i think yeah i 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 gonna convince
all these people at this point to call it the same thing. So I think it's fine to have different factions. Did we ever decide in the Mastodon universe whether something is a toot or not? It was toot originally, like officially. Right.
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 right 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 masked on users were unhappy.
with the change. I like the toots myself. I thought the whole thing made sense. Like if you're gonna, 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. A lot of people still call it toot. on Mastodon as well.
i remember you started using blue sky 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, Mastodon's fine. And like nobody was on Blue Sky. 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 Blue Sky, 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.
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 figured, well, people are going to be following me because of the starter pack thing. Then I guess I better, you know.
them something to follow so thank you for doing that it prompted me to really actually take a look at blues guy again and uh yeah so how did the starter pack thing come about 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.
Pick the people you want to follow, but you can also share them externally with people who aren't on blue sky 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 Blue Sky 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 follow backs. And then I add you to the starter pack and the cycle continues and you start to get more followers. So, right. That's been my strategy to get people off of X is just like. rebuild their audiences for them somewhere else yeah and it seems to be working i mean we're i'm consistently seeing people showing up who never made it to mastodon who are now showing up in blue sky 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. Yeah, it's brilliant. Yeah, I was really amused the other day. I was on Mastodon and this whole startup hack thing, I just think it's been fantastic. I mean, it got me.
suck 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 macadon the other day and someone was talking about they had brought up the topic of do we do starter packs
mastodon and like they were getting pushed back from other people in the mastodon 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 yeah we're cool i mean That's kind of on brand for Macedon. I mean, like they really, a lot of Macedon is built like to avoid engagement, to be honest. One of the big differences with Blue Sky, between Blue Sky and Macedon is that like Macedon has resisted any kind of algorithmic feeds.
And it's really just a linear feed of people in time. And Blue Sky 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 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 that'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 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 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. 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 blue sky. 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 one. The quiet posters one is like one of the best feeds on blue sky.
it's just a feed that like it surfaces people who don't post a lot i have that issue on mass 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
basically shows you the things that you might've missed in there. Yeah. So I think they've just done an 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 blue sky 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 i 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. I'm not saying it's going to happen with that protocol, but it feels like that. It feels like the same kind of promise. It's an open protocol that will never be. Like Blue Sky, 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.
blue sky 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 blue sky 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 blue sky but like in my experience like it it's not like maston 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 still take your followers with you of course but yeah blue sky just like it's completely whatever abstracted
from you like you don't have to think about it yeah yeah when i first signed up for mastodon i signed up on ruby.social our friend james runs that and it was cool great uh community yeah it is awesome love it
And then, but then when I really got into Macedon, I was like, you know what, this doesn't quite fit exactly the one I want to be in hacky derm. Like, cause I thought that would be a good, and I think that's based in the Pacific Northwest as well. So there's a hometown thing going on there. Yeah. So Chris Nova started that. Yeah. She ran it in her basement until 30,000 users. Right. Yeah. She was also on the board of Blue Sky before she passed.
and she named her servers yakko wacko and dot and i love animaniacs so i mean yeah so anyway so i did that move i did that move from ruby social to hacky derm and it was awkward right it's not really a move per se you actually like shutting 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 hacky derm. local instead yeah and uh fast forward a couple years now i'm blue sky 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 gonna
happen to all my six posts, all my five followers. And it was fine. It was like transparent. It was, it just worked. Right. And cause 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. Yeah. Everything.
references the idea under the hood, which is how, yeah, it's how you can change the, like just cosmetic things like your name or the domain you're using or whatever. Right. Yeah. Or the location of your data server. The one snag is that Blue Sky does not currently have an iPad app. And I do a lot of my reading on the iPad. So it has a great iPhone app and probably, I would say, even better web. I'd say the best.
Yeah, the best experience is 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. 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.
Does the web version not work as well on the iPad or are the things you're missing? Yeah, it's great. No, it's great. Except if 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...
TapBots 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. There's a bridge for... Yeah. Have you seen that? It lets you actually use like you can use any mastodon client with blue sky. So I saw it, but I didn't know I could do that. That's yeah. Cause I use ivory. I know people who use that and.
seem to like it so you could try that but i'm kind of surprised that tap bots hasn't announced work on a blue sky client yet i know they went all in on mastodon and it's their client is great like it would be awesome to have that for blue sky too 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 I'm regretting it because it sounds like it would be awesome to have that to use both Blue Sky and Massive.
on the same app? Well, Blue Sky has a number of third party clients that people seem to like already, which is nice. So there are multiple clients, but I would say
Another unique thing about Blue Skies, people really seem to like the default app they're building as well. Like I do. It is quite good. It's really good. They hired Dan Abramov. 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. It's like a feature request, which is also cool because they are accepting pull requests. from all of blue sky basically if it's a good feature you propose and build all 20 million users it's all open source yeah 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 Blue Sky is great. Like I have zero complaints about that. Just this morning, I saw deck.blue, which is a copy of, what was that? Oh, TweetDeck. which was awesome back in the day another casualty of the api wars so i haven't checked out deck blue yet but it looks i mean if it does what it says having tweet deck functionality that seems pretty cool 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 clear sky which lets you basically inspect the data because every like pretty much all data is public on blue sky 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 all 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. Yeah. 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 someone quote posts you or quote skeet, I don't even know what they call it.
Skeet, skeet, skeet. That's that's one that people say. I say, yeah, quote skeet or whatever or quote. So if someone quotes you and you're like annoyed by that, 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 is i think is genius yeah yeah it detached 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 oh 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 i've never been uh popular enough on any social platform for 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. I mean, like now that you have these tools, you got to start posting your hot takes, Ben. I think I have shareable hot takes about as often as I post on my blog. Nice. I don't think that, yeah, I don't know if that counts as a hot take. Yeah, all my spicy shares happen in Slack. I'm not typically public with those things. Yeah, that's probably a good.
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. concept of labelers so these are like different mild 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 or maybe other anime artwork or whatever or anime 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 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 labeler's 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.
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 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 Blue Sky, the company doesn't take, like they obviously are moderating.
and they're moderating really well in my experience. They have a trust and safety team, and they're removing illegal and harmful content from the platform. But 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. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked that. I hadn't thought about that at all, but that's a great point. That might be all my knowledge on blue sky. Probably not, but. 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 we'll label label you with your time zone and i just i i it's kind of hard to wrap my brain around that i'm like i don't i subscribe to your thing and then you like brought that up yeah i don't i didn't get that This is a fun way that they're being misused. This is actually, at least when they first launched them, this might have 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 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 blue sky the app i could be wrong about this but i don't think they have like pronouns like as a top level like 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 since you trust the labeler, just like you would trust a moderation service, like you trust that that's true. So that's kind of cool. I put Haya in mine. Oh, I should do Faker. You should. Yeah.
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 your choice of time zone in this case. And then if someone else follows that labeler, then they see that tag for you on your posts. Is that how it works? yeah that's cool 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 well i'm excited it feels
Like I said, like early Twitter, back when all the things were possible and people were like, oh, we could do this, we could do that. And I'm looking forward to it. I got a blog post I saw the other day about using the at protocol from Ruby. And I'm thinking, well, we can update for Honey Badger. We can update.
our status pages because we have announcements that we send out to Twitter. So we could add blue sky to that. Yeah. And 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. Honeybedger and FounderQuest are on there.
come find us but because we we've decided as a company not to post on x anymore including our company accounts and so blue sky is like our primary channel for i think social media and linkedin yeah i forgot like we also have beyond our own personal socials we have business related socials and they encourage that on blue sky like here put because you can set your domain as your handle so there is a
at honeybadger.io user on blue sky which represents the company versus me and you yeah we have a very cool domain for our founder quest handle it is founder.quest find us on blue sky if you search for founder.quest which is a domain we own you know we need to do now now that we have founder.quest we need to have a tv show yeah that would be we should do a
We should do like a whole media show for this. That would be cool. For sure. Yeah. But yeah, it's been kind of fun posting his honey badger on there too, because 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 than serious on our honey honey badger 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 Blue Sky 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.
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 blue skies, 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 honey badger account at one point because we were like one of the first companies on blue sky i think that we're at least posting we were doing like some joke some like jokey back and forth a 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, yeah, I guess my advice, if we're actually going to 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. It's a great time to get involved. And it's fun. It's just fun. 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 1230 AM as you do.
Dangerous. And I noticed that the domain josh.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 blue sky because of the blue. Sure. And it was cheap. Like it was the name sheet 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 joshuawood.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? So would you set it like a redirect from josh.blue to go to joshuawood.net? Like NDNS sort of thing? Yeah. Probably redirect. Yeah, I'd do it. Yeah, why not? Yeah. You can always change it back if you don't like it, right?
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 much more like, you know, I talk about some tech things on there, but it's also like just shitposting and having fun and politics and religion and some things that like.
not everyone wants to hear about so i have a separate honey badger account for just honey badger so this would be for my this would be for my fun account that everyone wants to follow your honey badger blue sky handle is josh.honeybadger.io right it's yeah it's joshuawood.honeybadger.io right now but yeah yeah i would do it yeah josh.blue sounds pretty cool i think i might have to do that yeah i've always wanted a cool like one just my name then you can post the hello fellow kids meme
Exactly. Yeah. Although the joke is that Blue Sky is basically exclusively millennials. Like it might have until recently, probably for whatever reason, like millennials or even the elder. or geriatric millennials, like myself, the ones that are like the early 80s, right? Like, really like blue sky for 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. We got to have something. No bias here. Cool. This has been awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Josh.
We talked about topics for the podcast. We joked about talking about blue sky 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. Yeah.
Yeah, hopefully we haven't rambled about a social media platform for too long. The too long didn't listen version is go check out Blue Sky. It's awesome. Yeah, find us there. Cool. Well, this has been Founder Quest, a unique edition of Founder Quest. Find us at founderquestpodcast.com and come follow us on Blue Sky at founder.quest. And check the show notes for all the Blue Sky lore that we didn't talk about. Right on. Catch you later.
Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of HoneyBadger. Zero instrumentation, 360-degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at HoneyBadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. where you can access our huge back catalog of episodes. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.