Paul Frazee

Thanks for having me.

Totally. Yeah, that's totally inbounds. Let's do it.

Yeah, I mean, so, like, everybody on the team has been at this for years. So, like, collectively, I think we have 20 to 25 years of, like, decentralization work, like, leading into the team. Skullbutt was my first one. That was back in 2012-ish. And that was a technology invented by Dominic Tarr. And...

it could fit into actually all of us came everybody on the blue sky team came from like the p2p world right which was kind of like hey could you take some of the techniques from bittorrent and then do some modifications and actually try to build sort of real time or or large scale or social applications depending on what you were up to using those kinds of p2p techniques and secure skull that was directly geared towards social networking so it was a peer-to-peer social network

And it had this very aggressive kind of local first mentality. It was called Secure Scuttlebutt because actually it was based on a Scuttlebutt gossip protocol where you're just like having each node kind of like rebroadcast logs to each other in a kind of best effort way.

And that meant that it had a very fluid topology of connecting together, like any time you were able to catch up from one node that you were able to connect to, you'd be able to, which makes it actually quite ideal for even extreme cases like a sneaker net if you were so inclined.

And then what was sort of interesting about it was that we merged together the gossip protocol and the social layer where it would use your follow graph to decide which account logs to synchronize.

So if I was following five people, the default kind of intuition there is whenever I would connect to a node on the system, I would ask those nodes like, okay, here are the five feeds that I'm following. Can you like catch me up on anything that you have for them? And since you're connecting sort of like to a forest of different nodes, you would...

presumably you know at some point catch up to everything in a kind of eventually consistent way and uh we actually would take it further where you would do friend of a friend expansion so you would actually ask for like the five people you're following plus like two hops out if i remember right Really sort of wild way to do it, but it was aggressively decentralized.

In fact, I would call it an anarchy, and not in like a pejorative sense, but like quite literally no authorities were encoded in the system. Interesting.

It was 2012. So I can say that that vibe at the time was correlated probably to two different things. For one, it was pretty clear by then that the major social players were sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. And so there was a collective of open source hackers who were feeling really excluded from what was exciting about social computing.

and wanting to be able to get in there so you have a general the through line throughout all these projects has always been like frustration with monopoly and feeling like you're not able to get in there and make meaningful change because we're talking about internet technology we're all programmers let's get in there like let's have that Linux philosophy or something like that being applied and so that bugged all of us and that was a big part of it and then you know you also had um

It's still, I think even then there was starting to be a little bit of initial disillusionment with the major social companies. Who knows if we were kind of like on the right target with that or not, but we, in general, were starting to, you know, this was like... Not that far after Occupy Wall Street, which was a big animating activist era.

And a lot of us were thinking a lot about where we expected... People still use the term new media in 2012, if anybody remembers saying that nonsense. So there was quite a bit of thought being put in at that point about what are the power structures that are going to be a part of the future of internet and social media. And how are we designing systems to be smart about that?

So we were thinking pretty heavily about that stuff right from the get-go.

We never got that far. It was janky at best. And I say that with all love. But we had a lot of challenges that we just did not get through. And if we're going to go through this history, one of the meta arcs I would follow throughout all of it was learning how to...

serious about delivering, you know, the level of quality that's necessary for something like this, because you're on the one hand, you're pressing really hard on like, okay, novel technology, novel way to do things, and throwing out a lot of assumptions.

And along the way, everybody, you know, by the time we get to blue sky, almost everybody at the team had been spending, like I said, years working on this stuff, and nothing was quite working.

And it wasn't until we got to this project, we all had a bunch of kind of collective, collective realizations as we came together about like, you know what, okay, if we keep these pieces, but then like throw in a lot of the kind of complexity and the novelty that what we're doing, we can keep what we think actually is important about the systems, but have this work actually be usable to end users.

Really both, to be honest. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know if I would give more emphasis to one or the other, because it would affect on both sides. Reliability, scale, and performance on the technology side, and usability on the product side. almost every project that the group of us worked on all use like client side signing keys up until blue sky, you know what I mean?