Paul Frazee

It's pretty hard to run one for the non-trivial use cases if you're trying to actually do what you might classically consider to be moderation. I think that part's been a little bit tough, and that is one of the things that we've been sort of sitting back to evaluate before we kind of push on recommending them more, is to see how this is affecting communities.

And I don't think I would give that one 10 out of 10 marks. we're hearing in some cases it's gone pretty well, but in some cases we're hearing that it's a pretty stressful position. There's a lot of responsibility that comes along with it. And, uh, and I don't know if they're empowered in all the ways they need to be to handle that responsibility or the expectations that come along with it.

So, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to, uh, walk in here and, and ignore that. You know what I'm saying? Like, I do want to cop to that. It's, it's not quite 100%, I think at the place that I'm, I would love for it to be, but I, And I'm glad that we're giving it a shot, you know what I mean? And I'm glad that we're learning off of it.

And I think you'll probably see more updates to it based on some of the challenges that we've had over the coming year.

Yeah, I would actually like for it to be more of it. There's still a couple of things that we've still got closed, like our main algorithm is still closed. We'd love to get that open at some point. We have some of our backend that's, you know, you can get the backend running, but it's not to the 100% ready-to-go place.

And so I'd love to get all that totally open and in a good package so that people can run it. But... a lot of it is open source. It was really fun to be able to share, you know, when we got to the, we got, we managed to hit, you know, number one in the app store, really proud moment. And that's awesome. I was able to share the source code and say, here it is. Here's the source code.

If you want to do it, you know, have one yourself. So that I'm really proud of that. You know what I mean? Like that we were able to take an open source application to this place. And I really liked that. We have stayed with that throughout.

I'm going to Steve Jobs it and say, yes, it's never happened before.

Yeah, I may only restrict this to the things that I'm proud of, to be honest. But one, I'll say the one that comes to mind that actually worked so much better than I ever expected was the domain names for usernames. I'm glad to bring that up. Yeah, we put that in there, honestly, for a very pragmatic reason. We just needed a namespace that was decentralized, right?

And which would work for the open network and which had the affordances that we needed. And so I was like, well, okay, domains, right? What else are you going to use?

I mean, there is something kind of cool about that. Believe it or not, I do really like... You could just sort of turn the host into a pill and then just have the username, and you could do maybe some nice things with the UX, but anyway...

I'm glad we made this choice where I was really shocked when it came to the domain names was the uptake of the custom domain names and how that has played out has been way beyond expectations. Cause when we did that, we would put together like little mock-ups with like the Washington post using that as their handle.

And it was kind of like the, again, it was one of those things that was like, yeah, right. You know, someday maybe, you know, who knows? And then they did like when ESPN came on, they used ESPN.com. Yeah, that is so cool. I can't believe that these organizations are going to the trouble of configuring DNS for us.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, again, that wasn't like the driving decider on that, right. It was really, Oh, well we need something, you know, but then I think, you know, it does, it has helped us a lot. I think we're probably going to need something more both because it is a little bit wonky there.

You know, I don't want to move too quickly on that, on that aspect of it, but there's definitely some folks that may not totally understand it, but then you also just have folks that don't have like high reputation and, domain names. A good example of that would be Flavor Flav came on a bit ago, and it was so enthusiastic, love it, and he doesn't have a website. He just doesn't.

You also start to run into the, okay, he could set one up. He could set up FlavorFlav.com, but then how do you know that that's the right one versus FlavorFlav.net or .io or whatever? There's going to probably need to be some layer in there at some point, but no matter what it is that we do, The well-known domain names are a really fantastic anchor for it.

And boy, is it great for the government stuff because they've all started to use like .senate.gov and .house.gov. Like Tim Walls just came on and became, I believe, governor.mn.gov. Just, you know... Totally, totally solving that problem for some of the more high stakes ones, which is political leaders. And those are under that tight governance, right?

Like the .gov domain name is the US government highly regimented. And it's so much better than anything that we as an organization could be doing. So definitely some wins in there.

Oh, I got good news. We fixed that. We just fixed that. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we haven't done clams on it yet, but we, um, are, uh, planning to, to work scrunch together those columns. But yeah, um, you now, if you have a piece of it, my friend, It's out.

Actually, ironically, somebody ran into it in the reverse because they were doing the squatting move that people have been doing as a patch. They're like, I can't register it. No, no, it's working right. What it does now is we just keep in our database of the BSky.social stuff. We just remember when somebody moves off what your original one was. You can go back to it.