Paul Frazee

you know make a i i believe defensively pragmatic choice was with dms we knew that not having dms was killing us and the protocol is not ready for dms it's really geared towards public posting at the moment so we're like all right we're going to give ourselves a cheat on the dms we'll go back and clean that up later but for all of the summer yeah that was like a

we're going to make incremental progress. We're going to do a little stuff on the protocol, but we really got to get this product shipped up because if it's not working, then again, that like, then the protocol may not get its chance. Right. And I think we're in a better place. Yeah. I think we're in a better place now.

I was going to do it on Blue Sky because I'm not sure our DMs are bot-free.

Yeah, yeah. It is an interesting area of the product that actually we're going to be investing even more in the future. I'm really excited to get into it more. Yeah, so like feeds, gosh, the basic idea with feeds was just how could we, I'll tell you the real mentality to it.

We knew going in that we liked some of the ideas about like improving how there's back pressure to the organization beyond just at the really kind of systemic level. Because the entire protocol that we've created, it makes it possible to make alternative applications and have alternative hosting, but those aren't super tangible in the day-to-day to people's lives.

So we sat down early on and asked, okay, well, what could we do with this that would allow people to more tangibly experience an open network and decentralize what is meaningful to the average person? And so then the two answers that came up were, could we decentralize moderation in some way, and could we decentralize algorithms in some way?

And so the feeds came out of that and the feeds, I think that they can, there are ways that I think we can improve on them and make them even kind of more central to the experience and really get the most juice out of them. But I will say that from a kind of like validating the concept perspective, man, they totally struck gold right from the get-go.

yeah and i'm really pleased about that it's actually it's really fun how they work they are hosted on other people's servers they do not run on our systems um but they feel integrated into the app and with that we kind of invented this whole principle that we call third party is first party with this idea of being able to integrate in systems

posted outside of the application, but make them feel native. And so the way they work is the simple answer is that you contact the feed server and then it just sends back a list of URLs. And then those list of URLs get hydrated into the feed.

the way they have those urls is they tap into that firehose and they use whatever kind of algorithm that they want to use to decide uh which posts to select uh to make the feed and that ends up being a really nice compositional uh boundary for uh that thing they can use any kind of logic they want from social graph you know queries to computing ranking off of likes and reposts and

other kinds of signals, you can get, you know, text queries running in there, which a lot of them are a lot of them are kind of operating off of like a smart hashtag in a way where they're just looking for particular topics that are being discussed. Honestly, you can get really far with just social graph limitations plus text query, right?

Like the basic object being these are these are people that are experts in this topic. And here's the topic and let's get a feed going.

I got, I got, I got a timeout and give like a, you know, I'm glad Mastodon is there pursuing the same mission. I'm just going to say that. And then we could move on.

Yeah, I mean, I have to agree. I mean, there are also times where I'm just kind of like, you know, today I'm in the mood for a more quiet thing, you know, and that's, I've got feeds for that, you know, or today I'm actually like voraciously consuming the stuff. I read all my fees and now I'm going over to the one that shows me more of the fire hosey kind of experience.

Like just whatever you're vibing on that you can, you can get there. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say it was like, aha, you know, like we're in a way. I will say from a technical point of view, it felt really good. Actually, this is we're kind of talking about like the experience of like the engineering side, the product side. I'll just actually tell the whole story. Like we initially did not do custom feeds. Initially, we did something called scenes.

Scenes were like a hybrid between a community and a custom feed because we knew what we were aiming for, but we didn't quite have it right. And the way that a scene worked was that the members of a scene, when some number of them liked a post, it would trend automatically within the scene.

So you can kind of see there's some approximate thinking there and you would actually get like a notification whenever your post trended within a scene. And we obviously didn't think this through very well because people would create scenes of like three people. And so then suddenly you're getting like your post is trending, like the same two people would like a

post and then he would trend in five different scenes that they're all in with just three people in it. So that wasn't brilliant. But the other thing that also jammed that up completely was nobody understood this idea. It was like weirdly like both a community and not a community. And people were like, how do I post into it? You don't, no, you don't do that.

It just shows things that you're liking. So like we did that first. And I are probably the very many people seeing the product. We pulled it out. We just like, this is quite terrible. We pulled it out and we brought in the custom feeds thing as an alternative. I think in many ways it was kind of taking a bigger swing.