Bryan Cantrill

Probably is. But it's true. That is how I remember it. It's just easier to remember the firing date and then I get to her birthday in one hop. But Paul, I also love what you've done with the fire hose because when did Twitter turn off fire hose access? I want to say that was like in, when was that? 2013, 2014, maybe earlier. I don't know.

But the ability to sit on the fire hose is just, I think, amazing.

Well, and I, I mean, I got to believe, I don't want to editorialize too much, but based on what I know of Twitter at the time, if I think that there are the, the, the fire hose were kind of the crown jewels of Twitter. They did not want to let people on that. You had to pay a lot of money to get onto the fire hose.

And I don't think that that was a, I mean, I I'm sure folks will correct me if I'm wrong, but I question whether that was a technical limitation. I think that was a, a business decision. And I think as folks saying that.

I think it was an injection of ads decision. Yeah.

And I also think they had also made, I mean, and this is another thing that I think that, you know, as kind of reflecting Paul on the terrific work that you all have done, there is an advantage to you coming after having the world having figured out one, how to architect a Twitter that actually performs, which Twitter itself spent half a decade doing.

And then two, the systems are just better that you can go use, right? You don't have to deal with a Ruby VM, for example. I mean, you've got other things that you can go... I mean, even Ruby has improved. I know I'm going to hear it from the Ruby folks. But all of that software has really improved a lot. So you've just got...

And then that fire hose is so extraordinarily valuable to everyone, I feel. I mean, I think that I love what you had said in the, and I want to drop a link into the paper that you all recently published, which is terrific, by the way. I love this ACM paper that you all wrote on Blue Sky and the app protocol.

And just in terms of the value to researchers to be able to get this whole thing is extraordinary.

Okay, but I've got to say the level of growth, I mean, and maybe Elon called you up and like, look, I want to help Blue Sky out all I can. Please tell me the things that I should do to my own social network to drive people to you as quickly as possible. I mean, that actually a lot more makes sense, honestly, if I knew that. But I'm not saying for you to confirm or deny that.

I'm just saying it's like kind of consistent with what's happened. I mean, the level of scaling that you've seen, were you expecting that in your kind of wildest dreams? Oh, man. Yes, this is going exactly according to plan. This is what I expected.

Right. The crops have failed again, of course.

That's amazing. And so you all, because I mean, I originally, I mean, you launched your private beta in March, April of 2023. When was that? Somewhere in there. Yeah, it was around. Um, the, um, and which was great. We got, I got lucky enough. Fortunately, we've, um, I always felt Steve Klabnik is here.

I always felt I may have put Steve in an uncomfortable position when I was asking him for a blue sky invite. He's like, I mean, I'm like, I guess I'm technically your boss, but like, and I know, I know this sounds like, but you know, I mean, Steve is here either to defend himself or to, to bring up his attorney on stage. Yeah.

Right. Well, I really appreciate you sharing an invite with me. And invites were super precious. And then, Paul, somewhere along the line, the decision is made to like, really, okay, we need to like, we've got enough users on here to know what we need to go do. And we're going to more or less shut it off for a little bit. I mean, keep the site up, but we're not actually adding more invites.

Or was Steve lying to me this entire time when he said he was out of invites?

Steve is furiously DMing you.

October 2022, what was going on? Yeah, what happened then? What happened then?

So... Welcome to Oxide, friends. You don't have to dig too far to get to the Postgres era for anyone. So this is good. This is very on-brand.

So what I can say, I really admire the discipline of the team because when you, I mean, what would, At some level, and I know Blue Sky is interesting because you're a public benefit corporation. There's a bit of both sides to this in terms of you're seeking to make a profit and to be a financially viable company, but you're also seeking to serve the public good.