Bluesky + AT Protocol

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Silinski and Wes Bos.

Welcome to Syntax.

On this Monday, hasty treat, we're going to be talking about blue Skye and the AT protocol.

If these things sound like things you have never heard of, then you are probably not a Twitter user And probably have not been on Twitter in the last, I don't know, week or so as the Blue Sky Discord has been absolutely blowing up. And honestly, I haven't been on Twitter Either. I've been on Blue Sky. So, we're gonna be talking all about what the heck this stuff is and why it matters for you as a developer and What it kinda means in a a bigger picture of everything on the web. So my name is Scott Tolesky. I'm a developer from Denver, and with me as always is

Wes Bos. How's it going, my man? Hey. Pretty good. Pretty good. Excited to we're recording this on a Friday, because We have a bunch of invites to Blue Sky to give out.

We will put a couple in the show notes and a couple we'll tweet out at Oh, no. We're not going to tweet them out. We're gonna can we sky them out? Can you get to to blue sky if you don't have an account? Let me try. I don't think so. I don't think yeah. I'm not sure you can. Well, no. You can't. Okay. So we're not gonna sky him out because or scheme.

That's what we'll talk about the the verbiage around this in just a second. We will tweet them out at syntaxfm, and then we'll also put a couple in the show notes. And shout out to Matt Stipe, who hooked us up with 16 invites. These are things that are impossible to come by, and He just casually had 16 laying around. So

and, I, you know, I don't want this to turn into a coupon code thing where everybody's going nuts. So if you you You did the try the ones in the show notes, and they don't work. That's all we got for now, and we'll we'll keep sharing them on our Twitter as well as, in in all of the socials whenever we do get more, hopefully, we do. Maybe the new sky, hears this episode And wants to hook us up. Syntax FM on Blue Sky if you wanna give us more invites.

Cool. So let's get into it. Blue Sky is basically The new Twitter.

It's it's not necessarily confirmed to be the new Twitter or anything yet because there's been a lot of new Twitters lately. We had Mastodon.

Yeah. What what is Hello? What is the Remember, hello? I I really don't. I've, like, blocked all of them out of my mind because, so many of them popped up, and it was like, oh, this is gonna be the one, but, you know, nobody's doing it Or nobody has access to it. I know Substack has their own Twitter clone because Substack and Twitter are fighting even though they both have Same investors.

We have, a lot of different what was some of those other ones where it's like notes is one. Something called notes, but I have is apparently another one. There's Yeah. There there's lots of them out there.

We both downloaded the app, Damas, a while ago that's built on Nostr.

Yes. And that was, like, just a just in case That one ends up blowing up. We got in early so I could get the at Scott handle on it. But, yeah, the the blue sky is basically the the next in a long string of attempts at taking over Twitter.

And we've often talked about, like, What is the next Twitter? If Twitter happens to go the way of Myspace, what is their Facebook to their Myspace? And we talked about it probably not being just a Twitter clone.

However, if you log in to Blue Sky, aesthetically, Visually, functionally, it is very much a clone of Twitter, and that seems to be a positive for most people, including myself, actually. It's hilarious because, like, you cut back to

about 4 or 5 months ago, and I I very clearly remember saying, The thing that gets us off Twitter is not going to be a less good version of Twitter.

It's going to be something else.

And boy, was I wrong about that? So we're not saying that blue sky. I also said, like, What could could Elon possibly do to Twitter? You know, like, the guy's not an idiot. I think I said the guy's not an idiot. And, like, like, I understand He's a he's a evil villain. He's contentious.

Yeah. But I was like, come on. Like, there's no way.

I'm certainly not giving up on Twitter. I probably would like if, we all stayed on Twitter. I have such a large following there. Yeah. Very nice to to keep. But, obviously, there there's a lot going on.

The quality of Twitter maybe hasn't gone downhill, but the amount of irritants And Twitter has has definitely increased

over the years. So and honestly, Wes, I know sorry to to cut you off, but, like, I did not pay for the check mark.

And, honestly, you know, I'm not, like, about to get in fights over the check mark. I didn't pay for it. Don't wanna give that guy money, but, yeah, I have seen, like, no engagement since they introduced like, I feel like I'm effectively shadowbanned. I feel like that when I'm posting now on Twitter, I feel like I'm talking into the void even if I'm sharing useful things that would typically get People clicking on them or interested in them or just the fact that they're they're interesting things people typically would share. I'm getting nothing, and, I don't know. I I have no idea if that's because, I'm not interesting or if it's because blues or, the the whole blue check mark thing has essentially,

Diminished the output of It it has. Yeah. It has. So I paid for it, much to many people's Chagrin.

And I I basically so I had the I've had the blue check for, like, 8 years or something like that. I got it not because I'm anyone special, but because They were handing them out to anybody. I would just, like, I I, like, I remember submitting the form and saying, I have a blog. Like, I think that was my that was my That was early. Yeah. And they're like, sure. You have a blog? So they threw it to me.

And and then once once they took those away, I was like, alright. Well, there's actually some features on Twitter, Blue, that I wanted, Which was I want the longer video. I want 1080p video. So now I can upload in higher quality.

I can upload more than 2 minutes, which is really nice. I've done a couple of those. And then there's obviously the algorithmic benefits to it as well. And As somebody who makes his living, posting content to Twitter is a big part of that. So it sort of gets tangled up in the Being verified, which is obviously silly because now it's just whoever pays for it, it doesn't actually mean anything. And that's a little frustrating because they don't necessarily I don't say care about that.

Like, the web developers that follow me know who I am. I don't I don't need that. But I actually like the the features, and there's this feature called It's like a it basically takes all the links of the past 24 hours out of your Twitter feed and compiles them into thing. So I see everybody's blog post. It's kind kind of like a RSS feeder of anything that people have posted and find interesting, and then it ranks it based on How much engagement it's got. And I kind of like that as well. So it's kind of interesting, but I definitely noticed an uptick in engagement once I did pay for it. So Unfortunately, Twitter is pay to play, which sucks because you shouldn't have to do that. And I think that's a lot of why we're really excited about Blue Sky. Yeah. I think the the big problem there is that they

often say that if you're not like the if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Right? Yeah. But, like, Twitter's asking you to be both the product and to pay for it. Like, you will pay to be the product. And, like, to me that, like, what? It just really rubs me the wrong way. So let's let's get into, Blue Sky itself. Blue Sky, built on the at least the app portion of it built on React Native.

And from what I've heard, the staging Site, which is staging.bsky.app, is built on React Native for web, which, before we talk to Nathan on the show here a few episodes ago, I would have said that I don't I don't know how I feel about that.

But, React Native for web, I I've since learned is actually, like, a really cool project.

I I just called him Nathan, and his name is Nate, or at least he goes by Nate. So Yeah. Sorry, Nate, about giving you the long form.

So React Native Web Is also what Twitter.com is built on. And the idea is that you have like go back to the show with Nate. He's He has Tema GUI. It's kind of the same idea of React Native Web is that you just have like a text component. You don't have a paragraph tag, you have a text component.

You don't have a div tag, but you have whatever the equivalent is.

And then you can compile the like the view layer to native on Android and iOS and to divs, HTML and CSS, On on the web, and it's, it works pretty good. I don't know that I would do it myself, but it's also why if you view Source on Twitter. There's all these crazy class names that don't make any sense, and it's because it's almost entirely compiled from the output of But it works pretty well. People have been kind of grouchy at the performance and whatnot, but it's snappy. It's fast. There's obviously bugs, but it's very early days. The people that run Blue Sky themselves are surprised With the uptake that it has, it was just like a Sunday afternoon, and I opened my Twitter. And there was, like my whole feed was Blue Sky invite. I need a Blue Sky invite. I need a Blue Sky invite. And I was just like, oh, oh, boy.

I need a Blue Sky invite. You get that sort of FOMO, so I threw it on there.

Look. Somebody help me out. Every every minute that ticks by, you're like, someone's gonna take, Scott at blue. Of course, I had no chance of getting Scott at Blue Sky, but, Somebody's gonna take it, and so you gotta get on there. I I was I was resisting the urge to beg for invites, and then I my My resisting only lasted so long before I was on Twitter begging for invites.

So I I wanna talk really quickly just about, like, Like why social media is important, and why I think it's kind of interesting that developers, like all developers Our not all of them. Obviously, they're still invites, but it seems like literally everybody that can get an invite is actually there and actively posting. Like, I posted Something there 29 minutes ago, and it has 36 likes on it. Like, there's actually people just Kind of milling on it like they are on Twitter. And I think that's really important because in the very early days, I was around when Twitter started up, And it was just tech folk. It was a lot of developers talking about coding and that type of stuff. And it has The same sort of feeling that it did in the early days of Twitter, and developers are hacking on it and building little tools and things like that. And that's exactly why Twitter exploded is that they had an open API. Literally anybody could use the thing, and people were building all kinds of interesting stuff on top of The platforms as well as the the different protocols in the case of this. So I I don't know why this is the one that is Taking off. And I don't know. I would love to go back on, like, the Twitter. Like, who was it that, like, initially said I need a blue sky invite? Yeah.

But it it took off like wildfire, and pretty much everybody is there now. Yeah. It it's interesting for me to think of, like, the first people I saw on this, because I I would by all accounts, you and I got on even pretty early in in the the grand scheme of things, But it it has been one of those projects that I've had bookmarked for a long time, specifically, the things about the AT protocol, which we'll get into in this episode. But I I've been looking at it for a long time, and it's been on my radar as something that exists, but there was there's no User focused or facing app. There was no nobody on it, obviously. It was it was always being discussed as, Jack's New social network that is the exact same as Twitter, with some caveats of which we'll talk about that are mostly involved in the the technical side of things. Right? Yeah. But in in reality, I think he's just an investor on it or an early investor. And so I think that that definitely probably was part of what Propelled people into wanting to do this. Oh, this guy made Twitter. I bet he could, I bet he could make this other Twitter part too, even though it's not really, you know, his app necessarily.

Yeah. People also use that as, like, a negative. Like, this guy's gonna screw it up. And I was like, well, the guy kinda made The biggest social network in the world, and he's got he has his bag. Like, he's probably infinitely wealthy now. Like, maybe he would want to make a 2nd run. Like, I was like, maybe this is the Dino of Twitter.

Obviously, he I don't think he's involved as much As people think he is, though. Yeah. Totally. You ever have Game Genie? Oh, no. You don't really play video games growing up. Oh, yeah. I had it. My my, Neighbor had a Game Genie for Goldeneye.

Okay. Well, also if you're out there and you're you remember Game Genie, go go do some YouTube watching on how Game Genie works because, technically, it's like replacing RAM values. And so the codes that you typed in in a Game Genie were simply just actual values in the RAM that you were swapping. So that way, when the game loaded up and it went to access how many lives you had or something like that, it would access that in RAM and get the new value that you put in there instead of the default. That's how it works. Amazing. It's unreal. It's a,

edge function.

Yeah. It's so cool. Sits in the middle. It sits in between. Anyways, Let's talk about so Blue Sky is the platform itself, and it's built on top of this thing called the At protocol. I know you're calling it the AT protocol.

I'm assuming it's at protocol because of the whole at sign.

Well, I mean, you know, things can be multiple things, Wes. They can. Or things can be realized.

It's capitalized, a t. It's Yeah. Yeah. It's true. What does it stand for? It stands for, I actually do know what it stands for. Thank you very much. It stands for, I don't know. At at.

Yeah.

Anyways, the the app protocol itself, The whole idea behind Blue Sky is that Blue Sky is just an app slash client that is using this new protocol.

It's very much The authenticated transfer protocol. Oh, really? Okay. I I I stand corrected on that one. I certainly

The ATP. The ATP authenticated

transfer protocol. So the protocol itself is an Open standard, which will allow literally anybody to implement this protocol and to make their own or To to have different instances of it. So the the kind of idea behind that is that It is entirely distributed. It's not blockchain.

It's not Mastodon.

But it is the whole idea is that it is Distributed and that you can take up your records and move at any time. And probably the thing that I love most about it, and this is something That we said on the last potluck, somebody said, what do you think about this, like, blockchain thing that will prove who you are? And I said, Doesn't isn't that what your domain name does? Isn't your domain name proof of who you are? And then 3 days later, this thing comes around. And the way that you You can obviously you when you sign up, you can get a bsky.social, handle, but you can switch to using your own domain name as your handle. So I am at westboss.com, and I love that because it has you have to prove that you own the domain name via a text record in your DNS settings Before you can actually get that domain name. And now if anyone sees a piece of content posted by the whole encryption thing is Is behind this app protocol. If anyone sees a piece of content that is posted by atwestboss.com, they can go to westboss.com and see, Okay. This is actually the guy. Right? Like, I know that this is this is Wes's URL.

Yeah. And it it, inspired me to get a new URL and to get Buy a new domain. So I bought tolin.ski.

So good. Which I didn't know a dot ski existed. What I really wanted was s c o Or s c dot o t t, but OTT is owned by Dish Network, and they do not let anybody have them. So What about

sc0.tt.

Dottt? I don't think that does exist. It does. Not multiple.

As available.

Oh, yeah.

Fixed daylight savings for good.

Somebody who has an anti daylight savings website is using it.

Man, that would be sweet because Matt Mullen.

You're on my shit list, Scott Yates.

Matt Mullenweg has ma.tt, is funny because the whole idea behind the domain name is that you prove who you are, but everybody's going for these, like, Short vanity domain names because I also own West. Io and Boss.af, and I thought I should do those. But, like, West Boss is kind of my thing, so I had to go Go with that.

Yeah.

So what what else It's distributed and by. So, like, when you said distributed, you said you could move it. And a lot of people will say, like, decentralized too. Do does decentralized and distributed, do you Do those mean the same thing to you in in this sort of way? Yes, it does, because it's not.

Like Blue Sky Has my data. All of my skeets are okay.

A post in Blue Sky.

The creator of it jokingly put a thing out that said, posts on Blue Sky or Skeets.

And then yesterday she says, please don't make Skeets Catch on, but it's it it it's it's just what I wanna say. Like, it's obviously hilarious, but, like, let's take the word. Yeah.

Take back the word from Lil Jon.

Good luck.

Yeah. And and also too, like, in in that same regard of being decentralized. So right now, Well, you know, one thing about it being decentralized too is that you can have different instances like federated on Blue Sky. So, essentially, people could create essentially their own apps that are their own instances of this service.

The same way when you sign up for Mastodon, it asks you to pick your server. Or when you sign up for Discord, it asks you to pick your, pick your server on Discord. Right? In Discord, it makes a lot of sense because you you sign in to the syntax Discord, and then you're talking with a bunch of syntax fans.

On Twitter and Mastodon, in my opinion, it's one of the reasons why Mastodon has had a hard time Gaining traction. Right? People sign up for an instance, and they kinda feel did I pick the right instance? I got I I I created a Mastodon, account. But when the account creation process popped up for me, I got, like, instance, paralysis. I was like, I have no idea what server to pick. And because of that, I'm, like, delaying signing up for this thing because I don't wanna pick the wrong one. Oh, I wanna be in front end social, but front end social is not taking sign ups anymore.

What do I pick? I just pick the first one, I guess. I pick the first one. But with Blue Sky, it was like, here's the here's the Here's the path for Blue Sky. You sign in, whatever. They haven't launched any of the federation stuff yet, but that is part of the the whole protocol. And part of The future of this stuff is being able to have different instances and different servers on this protocol.

And I I think the important part of that is People do want a place to just sign up.

However, if you do want to go somewhere else, you can choose where you want to go for the algorithm is a big one in that The data is there, and algorithms can be great. TikTok has a great algorithm. It shows me stuff that I love seeing.

Algorithms can be Really frustrating to a lot of people as well, or they can be skewed in a certain way. Or if you don't like the way that a specific service is banning people or or doing whatever, then you go to a service that has different

Things in place. Right? So you can Yeah. I heard I heard of a blue sky algorithm that is only wholesome posts.

Give me only wholesome posts.

Yeah. I I guess that would work. Right? Like, the the way they describe it is that a data repository is like a git repo, And you commit your records to that Git repo.

And then the thing that consumes all of those records that are Across all the different repos, we'll be able to decide what you get shown and How it's displayed and then the applications itself, I guess. No, the applications itself is kind of how it's displayed, whether it's like, oh, yeah, I'm using the blue sky 1, I I don't know that. I should say I don't totally, a 100% understand how all of this stuff works. Also, I don't think they totally know how All of this stuff works. It is all very much a work in progress.

But what is very interesting to me is that they started With the protocol initially.

And they started with this idea of, I'll just Jump over to, like, the the lexicons really quickly. We'll come back to finishing up the app protocol.

Basically, Records can have different schemas. So obviously, a Twitter like piece a record and following people and unfollowing people and muting people, That is one implementation of this protocol. But as I see it, you could literally implement anything.

In the schema, it can be You can define custom schemas, and I think that is really interesting because the first time I looked at that, I'm like, oh, cool. Another open standard.

What happens when people want features that are not part of the standard? Right.

Then then what do you do? That's what happened with RSS. People move to Different algorithms.

That's why people go to something like Spotify, because.

And Twitter got rid of their RSS feeds, you know, like standards are great until somebody wants to do something custom On top of that, and they they say I can't move fast enough to keep up with these standards or I just want to do something on my own. So the idea is that this is a standard Where you can publish these immutable schemas that define the different types. So I would imagine you could also host A horse network, you know,

and it's horse time. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You could host an internal one In your company, something like that. So the protocol seems very broad and open With a heavy emphasis on proving who people are while being distributed.

Yeah. So, you know, it it isn't just a Twitter clone at that, that where the the protocol ends up being a big deal. And we're seeing kind of the future of social media in general move in this direction on all fronts.

The only thing is that nothing's really caught on in this space, in any sort of federated type of social media.

And, whether or not this ends up being, quote, unquote, the winner or not or something else Takes it takes into the space is definitely a a different conversation.

But I I do think that we are seeing a decentralized, social media as this kind of next evolution inside of social media.

That said, notice how this is not blockchain. And, like, that was everybody's like, for for things to be decentralized, it must or or decentralized and blockchain was, like, often hand in hand as the way people talked about a lot of this stuff. Right? So it's good and interesting to see that this is like, hey. This is decentralized, but it's there's none of this, like, web 3 spam about it. They're calling it Web5 or something ridiculous.

Yeah. Yeah.

They have a whole FAQ. Is ATP the app protocol blockchain. No, it is a federated protocol. It is not blockchain, nor does it use blockchain.

And they link to Wikipedia article saying a federated protocol is a Pputing or networking providers that agree upon standards of operating in a collective fashion, which is, I guess, like, that you know what is a very good example of that? Phones.

Our, I guess, like, IP addresses and HTTP and, other ones were oh, that's that's the other good example is that XMPP, That was the, like, open chat format.

Mhmm. And then that kinda died off because people wanted Even SMS is an open a federated protocol.

Is it? And SMS?

Yeah. Because you can text anybody to any phone number And anywhere in the world on any phone, an SMS will work. Right? But Apple comes around, says it's not good enough. I want to do group chat. I want to do reactions. I want it like the standard doesn't allow me to do Voice calls or sending payments inside of this type of thing. And then you say, okay, well, like, yeah, XMPP is great because it works everywhere. But At the end of the day, most people don't care. They want features that just work and they want cool stuff to sit on top of that. So Very curious to see how this will play out. Yeah. It's interesting because, like,

do people, like, people want that or do they act like, our r s c. Do you know or RCS? Do you know what RCS is? Rich communication services is a standard that Android phones use for rich Communications inside of messages. And now Apple is the one who, of course, is doing their own walled garden thing of using their own thing instead of the standard.

So do people really want the standard or they just want the functionality? And I, you know, I think with Twitter verse, Blue sky here. We'll see if people really want a standard.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm very curious to see if, like, right before this Who is it? Teigen? Some celebrity Teigen. I don't really know who celebrities are. Chrissy Teigen. Chrissy Teigen.

Do you not know Chrissy Teigen Is my wife from a fan of Sarah Teigen? It's not from Teigen and Sarah. Not Sarah and Teigen. That's not a thing. I don't know. Teigen is Sarah.

Chrissy Teigen is married to John Legend. She's a, she's a model. She's an author. She has a lot of, cookbooks, Wes, that actually, I gotta say, the My my favorite cookbooks in our household are Chrissy Teigen's cookbooks, cravings, I believe they're called. Yeah.

If if you don't got those and and you like cookbooks out there, Sick Pick is, her her cookbooks are fantastic. Happy to party mixes from them, and they're lovely. I'll check that out. So anyway, she just joined, like, 30 minutes ago,

and everyone's freaking out. And it's kind of interesting because With Twitter, it was devs in the early days, and it has this, like, magical feel where not everybody is mad at each other and talking about politics like it has that early days kind of excitement feel. And I was like, okay, Politics like it has that early days kind of excitement feel. And I was like, okay, but like when did the baseball players come? You know, like at what point did the, The the the Twitter thread boys start showing up and giving us tips and that stuff, that kind of thing, because also It's it's very early, and this thing could be gamed extremely easily.

I think there's only a handful of devs working on this thing right now, so it's It's almost like, oh, don't grow too quickly. Otherwise, it's become a come like a dumpster fire of of different things. But they also have a lot of good stuff In place already, which is the ability to report somebody for impersonation.

They have, they have a system in place already Where actual humans will review reports, and Tom from Myspace has already been marked as a fake account. So

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot a lot there. There's no blocking, unfortunately, yet, but you can mute people. So I've already started meeting some people, but I I haven't, you know, I I would love to have that blocking functionality in there. I Also write a, you know, a thread today that says, like, when you delete Escape now, it's, like, goes into the trash and isn't exactly Deleted from their system. So, like, that's still something. Oh, yeah.

The there's definitely, like, early days. There's no link shortener on it. So if you post a big old link, it's gonna take up a bunch of your Characters when you're trying to keep your characters under a limit. So you gotta go elsewhere for a link shortener.

There's no multimedia on here yet, so you can't do GIFs.

You can't do video, which is a big thing. You know? For for sports Twitter to move over to this thing, you're gonna have to have at least GIFs and embedded video because Sports Twitter is, like, almost all video. Right? You're showing highlights. You're showing clips. You're showing, you know, events that took place. The blocking thing is really interesting. So

Jay, who is the, I guess, the founder of this, says the team was just 4 people when we decided to implement mutes and not blocks. We did mute to not blocks because the Federation architecture was not finished, and blocking requires cooperation from all entities in the network. If I block someone on my server, okay, where does that information get stored? Just on my server or on other servers that, Didn't know how to respect it. Okay. And then what if the server doesn't listen to my blocks? Right? Like, what if there is Like this. What if your block list has to be public then? What if you don't want it to be public? So there's a lot to think about. And that's, I think why they are really focusing on making the protocol first before they get into that type of thing. And there's there's no DMs or anything like that. But No DM was like that as well in the early days. We did, I guess no. We didn't have DMs on Twitter on the 1st day. We didn't even have at,

You know? Like, it was just Oh, yeah. There's no hashtags. Hashtags. No hashtags. Community invented thing. Yeah. There's a lot here. You know? We didn't even get into some of the stuff like it uses XRPC, which is like their own general purpose, our PC that they created to use with the protocol.

It's generic, they say, so you can use it for other things. But, it's interesting where it, like, maps the calls Server to server calls. It maps them, like, directly to a a get request, which is like it's funny because the way it works It's like API .com.atproto.repo.listrecords.

Right? That's the XRPC call. Yeah. But that all that's doing is, like, translating that to a git request to XRPC forward slash com.atprotocol.repo.list.

So it's like almost like It matches directly with the API request. With that thing, it it it's just like a quick little swap of of how that request is actually taking place. So there's, like, really interesting stuff. And you even got to mess around with their API quite a bit,

already, which is, like, amazing. Yeah. I I dipped into it right away because I was like, this is Super interesting. So I wrote I wrote a couple of things. First, I wrote just a little CLI to pull in a list of Skeets and display them Just as like a that's what you do. Right? And it again, it reminds me of early days of Twitter where you can just make a call. There's no OAuth. There's no Tokens. Literally, they didn't even you just had to put your username and password in initially. Now they have a concept of app passwords where you can, like, make a one off password You can revoke at any time and it doesn't have full access to your account. So I built that. I built a something that posts.

I did. So I switched from my westbostonbeastguy.social to my own domain name, but I didn't want somebody to snatch up My old one. So luckily, somebody gave me a 2nd invite and I just squatted on that one, and I've turned that one into a reply bot. So anytime somebody Replies to it or anytime somebody follows me, I send them a a skeet back and says, hey, wrong account.

You're meant to mention this specific one. And that was that was kind of an interesting one as well, where I was I used a database to store who Which Skeets I had replied to, then I realized you can use the notifications feed and mark notifications as Red, which is something that Webex doesn't even do. So you could do it without a database, really, if you wanted to. Well, now even with the Twitter,

The, Twitter API will bankrupt you before you can do a single thing. So Exactly. Yeah. And I built a spider as well that

I basically got a list of my followers, and then I looped through all of my followers and got their followers. And basically, I just wrote a spider that the entire network.

And within 45 minutes, I had every single account in a JSON file. There was At the time, there was like 37,000 accounts on it.

And then I sorted them based on who had the most followers, who's following the most people. And it's funny.

The almost all the top accounts are clearly people who just wrote a bot to follow everybody on the network, and they're getting close Yeah. Which is What happened on Twitter in the early days? People would just follow everybody and then unfollow them, and then it would look like they had

a lot of followers, which is You could have it there clicking the follow button really quickly.

Yeah. Yeah.

That was actually back in Myspace days.

There were some people that had, like, like a 1000000 friends on MySpace and people would buy this thing called BatterAdder, And it would literally do that. It would just click and add friend. Next 1. Add friend. Next it was just I don't know how it was built. I'd be curious to talk to the person that built it. But, Well, hey, Wes. You should listen to the episode

61 of Darknet Diaries called Sammy.

I'll link to that in the show notes. Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Sammy was a great episode where they talked about one of the first worms that this person accidentally wrote on Myspace for adding friends. They basically Wanted to add more friends, so the worm added some friends, and then they went to sleep. And then they woke up and there was like it was they they wrote a a basic worm that was

adding friends, and it got out of hand. Yeah. Because you could put you just insert JavaScript into the page, and then it it just warmed out. Man, Matterhouse is a YouTube channel.

Oh, no way. Where it shows how to use it. Oh, man. I I never use this on MySpace because, like, you had to buy it. I didn't either.

But there was, like, guys in bands that would just run this thing 247 because it was such good promo for your band. So I imagine Now that people there's there seems to be no rate limiting in place. I asked them, do you have rate limits? They're like, we haven't decided on that yet. But, like, I accidentally I put, like, a 200 millisecond wait in between every request. I forgot. I took it out one time, and it made, like, 10,000 requests Oh, in, like, like, 50 seconds or something like that. And I was like, oh, I guess there's no rate limiting,

in place right now. I did see that there was, they were their servers were slowing down because people were, trying to brute force

account passwords, which I know we Do not know what's up there. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Definitely check it out.

I think, it might flop, But yeah. It could very well it could very well be disappeared this time next year. We have no clue. I feel like it is It's good enough. I feel like it has really good uptake in the dev community. And I think that like it's it's kind of on us to push people in that direction, To at least give it a good shot, you know? So if you're listening to this podcast,

try get an invite, try try jump on it and, like, Give this thing an honest shot as a at least the dev community place for chatting. Yeah. Totally. And I'm I'm personally going to at least commit 2. I re deleted the Twitter app off of my phone. 1, because it's compulsive enough for me anyway. So I'm the type of person who's gonna pop up in Twitter all the time when I shouldn't be.

So get getting rid of the Twitter app, good for me. And then I have the Blue Sky app on there, and I'm trying not to check it compulsively, but still at least Committing to when I'm away from my computer, not using Twitter, not as a means to exclude anybody who is not on Blue Sky yet, But as a means of of controlling my own personal browsing habits. So, yeah, if I can wean off some of my, dependency in emotionally on Twitter, then that's all. Pro for me, regardless. Later. Peace.

Head on over to syntax dotfm for a full archive of all of our shows.

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player or drop a review if you like this show.