84: Building for the Open Social Web: Agentic AI Development with Jim Ray

Brittany Ellich (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host this week, Brittany,

This week I’m joined by Bethany. As Erika was out, the three of us met while working on a team at GitHub and quickly realized we were all obsessed with getting better at what we do. We started this podcast to share what we’re learning, and we talk about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect.

This week we have an excellent podcast set up to chat with Jim Ray, who is one of the Blue Sky DevRels. He’s one of my colleagues. Wonderful to chat with. but before we get into it, I just wanted to have a quick intro to say hi. Thank you all for listening. one quick little ask before we get into everything. if you

Could please share this podcast, rate and review, do whatever it is that you need to do on whatever podcast app that you use. that helps get the word out about the podcast and helps share it. Maybe one day we will actually have somebody who does want to advertise on it. Who knows?

Another quick thing, if you are interested in joining the Discord community, check out overcommitted.dev and click on the join the discord link and come join us. We have a lovely community there where we chat every day about everything that’s happening right now in the world of software development. so if you are at all interested, we would love to see you there. With that, let’s get into the episode. Thank you so much.

Brittany Ellich (01:30) Today on Overcommitted, we are joined by Jim Ray, who works in developer relations at Blue Sky and is one of my colleagues. He helps developers build on at protocol, hosts the Off-Protocol Blue Sky DevRail podcast, podcast.

About the OS open social web. He was at Slack in 2016 before Blue Sky and went on to lead the developer advocacy team. And before that, he worked in newsrooms as a journalist, getting his journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. He writes about AtProto and the atmosphere on his blog, Applied Meteorology. Welcome, Jim.

Jim ray (02:07) Thank you so much. I that was such a lovely introduction. I I really appreciate it. And it’s it’s nice to you know, we’re in the same slack but and we get to see each other whenever we all come together. But it’s it’s really nice just to have an opportunity to chat.

Brittany Ellich (02:21) Yeah, yeah, this is gonna be great. I I l always love when I have an opportunity to bug you and Alex also on the DevRel side with my ideas or things that I see. So cool. to kick us off, what is one thing you are currently building or obsessed with learning right now?

Jim ray (02:36) Ooh. There are so many things happening in this thing that we call the atmosphere, which is kind of our fun little colloquialism. Tony, our CEO, was actually just asking where that came from and

Contribution from the community from our developer ecosystem. Somebody suggested, the, the the folks over there in activity poveland, they have the the Fediverse. Why don’t we have the atmosphere? And immediately everyone was just like, that’s brilliant. And so we call it the atmosphere. So the thing that is like within the atmosphere that’s happening that I’m super excited about is this thing that we call spaces.

And it is basically it’s the biggest change, extension, addition to the protocol since the whole thing launched. And it’s a way to add what we call permissioned data. but basically a way to kind of like create your own

mini app protos or communities or spaces if we want to use the lingo that have kind of permissions around them. So not everything has to be completely public, which is kind of the case with the the the public app proto protocol. And so this is gonna open up and unlock all kinds of really exciting new opportunities. You’ll be able to create your own little groups and communities and things like that. And

It’s it’s something that people wanted for a long time and people are very excited about. People are starting to build stuff already. It’s currently kind of in an alpha beta phase right now, but we’re we’re looking to get that launched in the next month or so.

Brittany Ellich (04:07) So exciting. Yeah, I’m very excited for spaces. I feel like that’s the number one complaint I hear about people who want to build on at protos. It’s like, yeah, I would love to use it, but it’s all public. And

Jim ray (04:18) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (04:19) there’s a lot of things you can do with completely public data, but there’s also a lot of limitations to that as well. so yeah, this is cool.

Jim ray (04:25) Yeah, yeah. And

we’ve we’ve seen people get around those limitations. Even the Blue Sky app itself. There’s there are are features, things like your bookmarks, for example, or obviously your private messages between two people. Those of course don’t live on the public protocol. And so there are there have been kind of ways around it, but what we’ve always wanted to do is enable people to to build on top of the

you keep things on the protocol but also essentially fins out your your own little area there. I’m trying really hard not to use the word space and and so it’s but yeah, it’s it’s the the lingo of course is always the hardest part, right?

Brittany Ellich (05:00) That is definitely what I have found. I think most of my time since joining Blue Sky now building is so fast, and I feel like we spend the most time talking about okay, but what do we name it? Like, okay. This

Jim ray (05:09) Yeah, right.

Brittany Ellich (05:11) is so eternal struggle.

Bethany (05:12) Now, as an at Proto

Newbie, I’m curious how you still encourage people to contribute to the public side of things, over trying to make things private because I’m sure like Blue Sky’s so cool because it is public. So I’m curious what the thought is though, just as like to pull those curiosity strings.

Jim ray (05:31) That’s something I’m pretty interested to see how this is gonna shake out in the end, because I think our theory is that the the different use cases will be I think

At about 80%, they’ll be pretty obvious which one you’ll want to do. If you’re making kind of like a next big world social network or something like that, then obviously you’ll want to kind of like reach for the public protocol. And and the and we suspect and hope and think that there are going to be a lot of really interesting use cases for those private ones. You’re like the thing that you are into, whatever your niche is.

And so and we’re hoping that those will be kind of obvious as well. I think what is gonna be really interesting, and we’re we’re kind of figuring out how this is gonna shake out, is how you move from one of these to the other, because the protocols they remain obviously they’re very compatible, but there’s still some pretty big fundamental differences about how

one of them works versus the other. And so, and we have our public lives and we have our private lives. And I think a lot of us have seen a lot of benefits from being on kind of like, especially in the maybe the first decade of social media. And and so I I’m really hopeful and optimistic that there are some there are gonna be some interesting and exciting things that we can showcase about how that give and take is going to work.

Brittany Ellich (06:54) Yeah, I think there’s a lot to a lot to figure out still. And it adds another layer to designing applications. but it also adds so much more flexibility too. So I’m excited to see how people can reuse that data. I think that’s one of my favorite parts is seeing how people remix existing public data and turn it into something new, into like a new experience. And I think this will just add even more opportunities for that.

Yeah. Cool. Well, yeah, welcome. How did you end up? it sounds like you started in journalism, which I think we have a lot of folks that we talk to that come from a very different background. But how did you end up from journalism to Slack and then how did you find the atmosphere?

Jim ray (07:31) I know. I was do I was trying to do a little bit of prep before I came. And I was telling you earlier, Brittany, I was like, I am probably the least engineering person that you have had on the show yet. And so my background is a little squirrely. And I think that’s not uncommon in DevRel land. people do tend to kind of come at this from a few different directions. And so you’re right, I studied journalism at University of North Carolina, go Tar Heels.

And this was like late 90s, early 2000s. And this was when the internet was still kind of like in its 1.0 era, and there was a lot of thinking and talking and discussing, all in in many different worlds, but certainly in media and journalism, about how do we do different kinds of storytelling. And I thought that was really interesting and cool. I had kind of a hard time figuring out when I wanted to be when I grew up, when I was a a lowly undergrad.

Some might say I still have a problem with that. But

Brittany Ellich (08:22) Same.

Jim ray (08:23) and so I I bounced around a lot and I I really liked I took a whole bunch of computer science classes, but at the time computer science was in the math department at UNC. And I was like, that’s that’s more math than I think I want to take. And the joke in the journalism school was like you only have to take one math class and then you’re done. And so I sp I started spending a lot of time in the J school and within Carolina’s program, there’s this

This visual journalism component, and that’s where you go if you want to be like a photographer or if you want to be you know designer or graphic illustrator, those kinds of things. But then there was this like new multimedia storytelling program, which man, that just sounds like so 1998, I feel like, but

So I I went in that direction a little bit. And that’s where I started my career. I I worked at Chicago Tribune for a few years. I worked at MSNBC and then NBC News. over on kind of the webs the website of things, which was based up in Seattle. So I lived in Seattle for a long time. and then kind of wanted to shift a little bit more into tech things. And so this was like, you know, the mobile internet is exploding. And and I was just I

I’d I’d done a decade of media and journalism at that point. So moved down to San Francisco, started working for a design agency where we were we really specialized in helping every kind of big nonprofit that needed to shift from like, we have a WordPress site that doesn’t work on mobile. Can you help? And like that was kind of our bread and butter for there for a little while. went back more into a media space, kind of worked at a startup for a bit, and then

saw what they were doing at Slack and I thought that was a pretty cool thing. Ended up going over there and that’s where I discovered the wonderful world of developer relations. And it really felt like this kind of

dovetailing of all of the various aspects of my career. You know, having to explain arcane technical topics to a an interested audience of developers is not that much different than having to explain like, you know, how do the Olympics work or who should you vote for and those kinds of things, which is, you know, obviously much more of kind of like my media background. And so yeah, I ended up spending almost a decade at Slack, which was a pretty wild ride. it was

I like to think of Slack during that time as basically four different companies while I was there from twenty sixteen until last year. And you know, when I started, we were like in high growth startup mode, and then we kind of pivoted over into like, we’re an enterprise company now, and it’s just like, we’re a public company now, we’re an acquired company now. And so all of those are kind of like very different things. And so that it it kept it pretty interesting for sure.

Brittany Ellich (10:52) Nice. Yeah, that’s a lot of growth for Slack, just thinking from twenty sixteen to now. It’s it’s gone through a lot.

Jim ray (10:56) Yeah, it was wild.

Brittany Ellich (10:59) and now it’s just the go-to, I feel like, for any sort of like especially tech company communication. but I’m sure there’s even more outside of outside of the tech world that also uses it. So nice. how did you end up finding about finding out about at Proto and getting involved there?

Jim ray (11:14) Yeah, so I think

I was pretty early to Twitter and Twitter was kind of an important part of my life if for a good time there. It’s where I met my wife. It’s where like all of my grown-up friendships and half of my jobs for a good at least five probably longer years kind of started there. I it it’s it sounds so weird to say, but like I feel like people that are listening to this show get it. It’s just like, yeah, I remember those days. And

And so like I the format just like works. You know, I know there’s like Instagram people and TikTok people, and for whatever reason, I’m just like

That that short form posting just it’s like I’m I’m too lazy for a sub stack and not pretty enough for Instagram. And so it’s just short form is I stole that from Katie Netopoulos.

it just it really kind of hit and I was like, yeah, I’m I’m I’m kinda into this. And it’s you know, there was like especially those early days of Twitter, there was just like the kind of the kind of people that I think were attracted to like

making very condensed jokes mostly about what we were having for lunch or increasingly what was the dystopic headline of the day we’re all gonna throw this together right and then obviously things kind of took a turn and and I think a lot of us kind of always realized that like yeah this thing is cool but there’s like

Something going on here, right? it’s like there’s a company and it has all of our stuff in a database. And there was like in the early days, there was this kind of like Twitter versus Facebook thing. And if you were on team Twitter, then like you were one of the good guys, but it turns out, like, same dynamics, same problems. And all of that, of course, came to a head a few years ago. And so, like a lot of folks, I was just like casting about. It’s like where I I can’t post. Like it might as well not exist. And so,

Activity Pub and Mastodon had of course had been around for a while. And then obviously there was some incentive for the founding Blue Sky team to to make that work. And so I was pretty early there. And and so initially I like I didn’t really understand actually what Blue Sky was all about or what Approto was all about. I was like, cool, I guess this is kind of like Activity Pub. It’s like yeah, it’s like this Twitter-like thing and it’s built on an open thing. I like all of that,

I was like, it just means that there can be third-party clients. That’s cool, right? And I I honestly had not just taken a lot of time to figure out what that was all meant. And then I get an email from Paul Frazy, CTO of Blue Sky. And you know, essentially, like, hey, we’re looking to start up a dev rail team. Would you be interested in chatting? I was like, I don’t know, I’m kind of into my job here, and it seems like a lot of work. But I was like, let me like actually figure out what this approaching is actually about. And I started looking

Looking into it and first thing I realized there were actually some some pretty fundamental differences between like what App Proto does versus what ActivityBub does. And I obviously have an opinion about those things, but I like I I don’t think that they’re incompatible, and I don’t think that one is necessarily better than the other. I think you know they’ve got some like

Strong opinions and different use cases, and I’m I’m team open protocols. And so pretty excited about like the fact that both of those exist. I think in terms of the kinds of applications that I would want to work on that I think can and should exist out in the world, I think App Proto.

Is makes a a pretty strong case. And so I I started getting kind of excited about it. And then I went from like, I don’t know, I haven’t interviewed Winnie Place in a while. I’ll just like go through the motions with these like app proto people to like, actually, I’m very excited about this. I hope it works out. And and sure enough it did. And this Saturday will actually be my one-year anniversary. So I’ve been at this for about a year. I started on Halloween of last year for the most American.

of all possible reasons, which was healthcare continuity. I had I left my job at Slack

Brittany Ellich (15:03) Nice.

Jim ray (15:04) the first part of October, and I was like, if I want to make sure that my kids still have healthcare next month, then let’s get started on what were the last day of the month.

Brittany Ellich (15:14) Nice. It makes an easy memory too of what day it was too. So that’s kinda nice.

Jim ray (15:18) It it

was so hilarious. It’s it was literally a Friday. It was Halloween. And I was like, you know, filling out my first day paperwork and trying to figure it out. And then I think I was like, can I kind of knock off a little bit early? Because I got into kids trick-or-treating. And then like

Brittany Ellich (15:31) Yeah.

Jim ray (15:33) and then on Sunday I got on a plane and flew to Seattle and met the folks there and spent a week

Brittany Ellich (15:38) Nice.

Jim ray (15:39) really diving into all this at Proto stuff. And it’s it’s been foot on the gas ever since.

Brittany Ellich (15:44) feel that. I feel that I’ve been at Blue Sky now for almost six months, which is feels kinda crazy because every

Jim ray (15:48) Yeah. It’s

Brittany Ellich (15:51) month this year feels like it’s been a year itself, in some

Jim ray (15:54) Totally.

Brittany Ellich (15:54) ways. And then also it’s gone by really fast. So

Jim ray (15:58) You you talk to people who work in startups, whether they’re growing super fast or the product’s changing a lot or whatever it is, and everybody mentions this kind of like time dilation effect, where it somehow simultaneously feels like a year was forever ago, and also you can’t believe it’s only been a year or a month or six months or whatever the period of time is.

Brittany Ellich (16:18) Yeah. Nice. so I know that there are likely most of where we post is on Blue Sky and we talk to a lot of developers. So very likely there’s a lot of folks that are aware of at Proto already listening. but I’m curious, like what is your pitch for why you think at Proto is cool for anybody who’s not you know, already at Proto Pilled, so to speak.

Jim ray (16:39) Yeah, so I I obviously spend a lot of time talking to developers and so the the pitch that I’ve kind of honed to developers is that like

We we need to we need to build out the internet using different assumptions and with a new set of primitives because if we don’t do that then the the negative incentive feedback loop is just going to keep happening. And and I think with developers in particular, that that that is a not necessarily the kind of starting point, but so you know, particularly folks who

to think about this stuff more and more about the why than the hows. so there’s there’s that part of it. For folks that are like more interested in kind of like a practical introduction, one thing that’s great about App Proto, and I’m stealing this from Devin Ivey, who is my boss. He leads the atmosphere team here at Blue Sky. And he said something that just like it really, this was early days when and I was still figuring all this stuff out, but he he said something that like really

helped me understand

One of value propositions, which is that if you think of your traditional web stack, you’ve got your database, you need to authenticate in some way, you need to add features like search. We took a lot of what we’ve learned from building web applications for 20 years. We tried to remove all of the pieces that create these bad incentives, and then we kind of exploded that stack into a few different component parts. And then developers can take those.

And reassemble them around the kind of applications that they want to build. And that’s that’s what App Proto enables. And so, like, even if you don’t care about this like protocols over platforms kind of idea, like we we actually provide a lot of like really fundamental building blocks for helping to get started really easily.

And one thing that we’ve discovered over the past year is that our coding robot friends and agents are very good at figuring these things out. And there’s something about, obviously, this wasn’t necessarily part of the design, but there is just something about the self-documenting nature of things like lexicons. And lexicons are how you kind of define your data objects on the protocol.

that agents just eat up and crok really, really well. They’re all built on JSON. you can just kind of like point your agent at like, here’s a lexicon, help me build an application around this. And and agents are really, really good at doing that. And we’re also seeing that people are building

networks for specifically for agents and I think that’s pretty new and different and interesting. And so and that’s something that we’re kind of uniquely situated to help people with is the you know if if you want to do agent to agent communication or agent to people to agent or you know whatever the combination of A and agent and person ac ends up looking like then Approad is actually really, really great for that. And I think Spaces is going to help accelerate that too.

Brittany Ellich (19:36) Yeah, I agree with that as somebody who is very interested in agents in spaces and at proto.

Jim ray (19:40) What’s your s what’s your agent stack

look like this week, Brittany? I know that you managed to change it up.

Brittany Ellich (19:44) It changes literally

every week. but yeah, I’ll have some exciting things to share. Yeah.

Jim ray (19:47) I cannot keep up. It’s crazy.

Brittany Ellich (19:50) We we will have some more things to share. one thing that we’ve been working on on the exploration team

how can we use AI in the atmosphere? so yeah, very, very interested.

Jim ray (19:57) Absolutely. Cool.

Brittany Ellich (20:00) yeah.

Agree. I think one of the things that drew me to at Proto initially, even before I really like learned about the whole like philosophy behind it all, was I always got stuck on side projects in the past because I would, you know, have this really cool idea for a project and then start building

Jim ray (20:16) Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (20:17) it and then be like, my god, I gotta do users and auth and like that’s my

Jim ray (20:20) Uh-huh.

Brittany Ellich (20:20) least favorite thing. and like they would just die right there.

So having that solved and having the a lot of the user data pieces solved already was like, my gosh, that is very freeing as a developer to just get to focus on the application.

Jim ray (20:34) And and even if you use something like

Firebase or Authy or something like that, you’re still getting back into that scenario where it’s just like, okay, but now Google owns my data, or you know, like some third party. And so there’s always this kind of compromise that developers run into. It’s just like, I want to go fast, I want to build this thing, or it’s a side project, or whatever it is, I’ll just go sign up for this service. Okay, well, that’s gonna that’s gonna immediately take you down a road. And

one thing one thing I’ve I’ve actually really always admired once I started getting into this approto stuff is the balance between practicality and that the ethos of the atmosphere. And you know, credit especially to the founding team for like really, really leaning hard into that balance because that is not an easy thing to do. And there are so many of these like open decentralized protocols. I mean, at proto was not the first, or activity.

Pub was not the first to just you know what we should do is figure out a way to build these things so that one corporation can’t control it all. And there’ve been a ton of attempts to do that, but they kind of get mired in

and it’s it it’s not really anybody’s fault, but it’s really hard to keep that balance between the practicality and actually sticking to the ethos. And you know, huge props to Jay and Paul and Danny and Brian and Divey and every you know, everybody who was like really fundamental at like trying to figure out we gotta stick with what it is that we’re building

here but then also making something that people can use

Bethany (22:07) Yeah.

Jim ray (22:07) and actually build stuff on.

Bethany (22:10) Yeah, I’m actually really curious about this as an outsider from Blue Sky. So working on you work at Blue Sky but you’re like really a dev and dev advocate for like the atmosphere as a whole and building on top of that. And I’m really

Jim ray (22:23) Yeah.

Bethany (22:23) curious like how that dichotomy works and how if there’s things in place at Blue Sky that w are designed to stop like maybe w the path that Twitter went down where it becomes

Jim ray (22:32) Mm-hmm.

Bethany (22:33) all owned by by one.

thing. is there anything in place that y’all are considering there?

Jim ray (22:40) That’s a great question. And it’s it has to be a mix of both the like the technical stuff, but then also essentially what comes comes down to like governance kinds of questions. And so I think first and foremost, like the people that really set out to do this, they took very seriously this idea that there’s going to come a point where

the the biggest enemy that stands in the way of reaching the goals of this decentralized protocol is going to be ourselves. And it may not be us specifically, but i there is a future scenario. And I think just

Know we can always gain this out in in terms of the theory of it, but having seen what had what kept happening over and over again, lots of idealism, acquisition, and then need to meet some demand, and it’s the idealism that kind of starts starts its inevitable downward slide almost immediately. And so so like there’s a there’s a few different ways that we try to handle this. One of them is this notion of

The protocol being locked open.

And so which is like a fun kind of neologism. But the idea that we the protocol itself needs to kind of like help reinforce some these ideas. And so, you know, right now the way that the protocol works is that all of the data is is out there in public and is on what we call this fire hose. And the fire hose is just a collection of all of the the global relay system that takes everybody’s posts and likes.

And profile updates and blog posts and those things. And it all exists in a single fire hose that anybody can dip into, that anybody can replicate. And we’ve built out some tooling to help this. And so, but there are multiple copies of the entire atmosphere that exists in multiple places, some of which are not controlled by us. And so, you know, that is one way that that we stick to this. there is

Maybe a scenario where Blue Sky gets acquired by evil genius billionaire and they immediately want to make it impossible for you to migrate. Well, so we we set up an organization called the PLC, it was which originally stood for placeholder, and that’s it’s gotten a backronym, but the PLC

it acts like as DNS for the atmosphere. So, you know, when I’m gonna resolve my name jimray.bsky.team, that resolves to a a long string of characters that is my immutable identity on the network. And so that resolution happens with this with the PLC server. And so, but

That server is and and all of the technology that goes into powering it, that server is now set up to exist as a third party organization outside of the control of Blue Sky. And so if somebody comes along and says, okay, you know, we’ve acquired Blue Sky and now we’re going to make it impossible for you to migrate your account. Well, they they don’t actually have the authority to do that anymore because there’s this other organization that manages that. And so and so as soon as evil billionaire comes along and says, like, this is what

We’re

gonna do. Well, now there’s enough folks in the ecosystem that are gonna say, okay, we’ll set up the life raft over here. We’ll we’ll create the situation so that you can actually migrate those pieces over. I feel like the PLC is the best example of both the technical implementation, but then also the governance piece of it as well. And you gotta have both. You can’t just, you know, this is one of those things again that we have like it’s a lesson that we keep learning, this kind of quasi-libertarian idea where it’s just like, the code will just take care of it.

And it turns out not so much.

Brittany Ellich (26:19) Yeah, I agree. It’s it’s it makes sense to have both pieces and the it’s been fun to watch everyone who originally started working on At Proto cook over the last few months because they’re very, very smart. they’re really good at it. And so yeah. one of the things that’s happened over the last year in the atmosphere community space is the standard dot site.

lexicons. I remember

Jim ray (26:40) Uh-huh.

Brittany Ellich (26:41) seeing a lot of posts about standard.site summer. and I was wondering if you could describe sort of what the significance of that was and like why it’s important for everybody who’s outside of that space.

Jim ray (26:52) I I love standard site. I love the team behind it. I love the ethos and really everything that it it it helps to kind of reveal about the way that the protocol works. So quick quick primer on standard site. So

When you write a post on Blue Sky, then you are using one of the lexicons that Blue Sky created that defines what the shape of your post is. And so a lexicon is just a way to describe the data in in the same way that you would come up with like a database schema that says, like, okay, here’s your name and it’s gonna be a string, and here’s your birth date, it’s gonna be an ISO date, and all of these kinds of things.

Lexicons allow you to define data schemas on the protocol. And so Blue Sky obviously defined a whole bunch of those at the beginning. And every piece of data that you create, every time you create a post, every time you like a post, every time you

you know re repost something. Those are those are all examples of records that get written onto the network and then those records are defined by these data schemas that we call lexicons. And so anybody can create their own lexicons. In fact that’s a big part of what goes into creating your own app on the protocol. It’s it’s one of the first things that you do actually is you say like in the same way that like when you sit down to create like a Django app and if you’re building kind of like a

you know, more traditional database-based app web application, then you’re just like, okay, here’s my data schema for all the information I’m gonna save in like my Postgres database or whatever it is. And but part of the interoperability of the network is that anybody can create these lexicons, and then you build your app on the lexicon. And

What happened was about a year ago, there were a few blogging apps that were just kind of popping up independently. They looked at what was going on with Blue Sky and they were like, hey, instead of just microblogging, what if we let people do macro blogging on the protocol? And and so there were three of these products that that popped up kind of around the same time. one of them is called Leaflet, one of them is called Off-Print, and one of them

Is

called Pocket. It’s PCKT.blog. And so these three applications came up and they all each individually defined their own lexicon for writing long form content, essentially blog posts on the protocol. Well, they decided to get together, and even though they’re in competition with each other, they said, hey, it you know, it’s not super great that if somebody wants to create a blog post, they have to pick which like lexicon that they want to use.

Let’s collaborate on this. And they did it in a really, really smart way. Cause what they did is they said the standard site lexicon is going to define kind of the metadata around a document, but then that will give us individually as the blogging provider a lot of leeway into how we define the actual content of each post. And this is something that the lexicon spec allows for, is that you can say, you know.

this might be a string, this might be a number, and then this field just might be an arbitrary another kind of lexicon that you actually import into this one. And so

Leaflet and pocket and off-print. They all came up with their own kind of content piece, but then they st they stuck to a standardization for the metadata around it. Super smart. It allowed them to build out their own features that they want for each of their platforms. But then now anybody can start writing standard site documents. And I it is it’s been such a success to see it happen. I in no small part because they decided to collaborate on this. Again, even though they’re kind of competing with each other.

Other there it’s so funny. I love working with this team. and because like they’ll kind of poke and prod at each other, but it’s also clear that they also really love working together on this stuff, and I just it’s part of really why I love working in this ecosystem so much. And so so now other organizations have also picked up the standard side lexicon, and so there’s a WordPress plugin. So our CEO Tony came over to Blue Sky from he had been at WordPress previously, and so he has

A WordPress blog that he himself has operated for quite a number of years now. And so he added this WordPress plugin to his blog. And so even though he’s not using any of these three blogging platforms, he’s now writing standard site documents into the atmosphere. Last month, there was Cloudflare introduced a blogging platform that they call MDash. They they sort of they think of it as like

If you were to sit down and create WordPress from scratch today, how might you do that? Is is maybe one way of thinking about it. And and so the MDH project is really cool. It’s got standard site built into it as well. So you can log in with your your Blue Sky handle, or you know, if you have another atmosphere credential, and and then you can start publishing standard site records. And so because those standard site records are all on the atmosphere, they’re all on the public protocol that anybody can read, now what that’s allowed people to do.

Is create reader style applications. Everybody who remembers and laments the loss of Google Reader. Well, people have now been building these Google Reader style applications that are reading all of the standard side documents. And so you can build search engines on top of them. My favorite is one called Sky Reader. it they actually just introduced a feature that will sync with Net Newswire, which is like my RSS reader of choice for going on.

At least twenty years now, right? And and so

so this interoperability is is really critical to this to the success of the atmosphere. And like I said, I love the team that are behind it. I think the ethos is just really, really great. It’s also just made my job a lot easier because this launched in January. And and this was around the time internally we were thinking it was like, you know what, we gotta think about like what would it look like to do publishing or longer form content. And then it just kind of appeared and I was like, man, this is awesome.

And so it’s and it’s great to see the the uptick and the success of that too.

Bethany (32:53) Man, that’s so cool to hear the com community rally around something and it it the the pieces enable something bigger than itself. So I think that goes to your your previous discussion around the community really being the the atmosphere and not even if something takes blue sky away, like you still have the community at the end of the day. That’s really awesome.

Jim ray (33:14) Yeah, it’s great. I’ve been feeling a lot of feelings lately because I am hitting that one year mark. And we were just we were just talking on the team today and you know, this is like favorite job ever ‘cause and it it’s in no small part. In fact it owes entirely to this this really great ecosystem and and of course the amazing people I get to work with too.

Brittany Ellich (33:33) Yeah, I I agree. I think that being especially being a a woman in development, I think one of the things that stood out to me getting into the atmosphere is how incredibly like open and friendly it was. Going to AtmosphereConf this last year, I’ve I’ve gone to a ton of different conferences. But this wasn’t just like a tech conference where it’s just a bunch of like tech bros going and like heads down on whatever they’re working. No, it was

super interdisciplinary and super welcoming to everybody. Like it was there was a science track and a mm journalism and publishing track and like all of

Jim ray (34:05) Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (34:06) these different things where you can really see like, okay, this is a very interdisciplinary group and a lot of people that are like working working towards the same thing, which is I don’t know. I’ve I’ve tried to join a lot of open

Jim ray (34:16) Ha

Brittany Ellich (34:17) source online places that are not that. So

Jim ray (34:19) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (34:20) yeah, that’s obviously why I’m still still sticking around here.

So yeah.

Jim ray (34:23) It it

is such the the interdisciplinary nature of it, Brittany, you you nailed it, is so critical to making all of this work because you gotta have the tech folks who are doing the implementation. Still important today. We can’t just like the agents are great once we’ve figured out the hard parts, but they they don’t know what to work on. And so we have to do that that work as well. And but you’re you’re absolutely right. Like having science people there, having journalism people there, having people d who just

understand that it doesn’t like we don’t have to live like this. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can like we can have some agency over our lives on the internet. And you know, everybody’s like all culture begins at the internet the these days. And so we can’t just let like four corporations, you know, pick which box

that’s gonna live in. And so it’s I I I can’t speak more highly about this the ecosystem of folks. They’re they’re awesome.

Brittany Ellich (35:21) Sure. yeah. Speaking of, the AtmosphereConf is has been announced for 2027.

Jim ray (35:28) It has, yeah.

Brittany Ellich (35:29) there is a CFP that is open right now, definitely open to first time speakers. I think last year, like a third of the people who attended also spoke. There was just so many opportunities to like get up and talk about your thing. And it was not all at proto by any means. It was very

Jim ray (35:43) Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (35:43) interdisciplinary, like you said, some people were talking about.

Governance online. Some people were talking about art.

it’s all over the place. lots

Jim ray (35:50) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (35:50) of opportunities to connect and find your people. So highly recommend. yeah, any details on it that you wanted to share?

Jim ray (35:56) So head to atmosphereconf.org to get more information. It’s gonna be happening the last week of April this year in beautiful Amsterdam in the Netherlands, one of my all-time favorite places on Earth. So very excited that I’m gonna get to hang there with all of these amazing people. And yeah, it’s it’s gonna be last year was over twice as big as the year before, and I think we’re experiencing some similar growth projections for this coming year, but

The CFP is up, and so if you have some things that you want to talk about, we on the blue sky side, we’re starting to to do some like not quite planning, but some of the pre-planning and just thinking about like what are the things we actually want to talk about. Obviously, spaces are gonna be a big part of that, and so we wanna and you know we’ll have some opportunities to host workshops and and really get hands-on with some of these things, but

If you have ideas about things that you want to talk about, what and whether you’ve built an atmosphere app or not, if you if you are on the internet, I would highly encourage you to go check out the conference website. If there’s something you want to talk about, there’s also a remote track, so if you can’t make it over to Amsterdam, then the team does a really, really good job of trying to make it feel as inclusive as possible, even if you are working remotely. So I’m right there with you. I came out of that conference and it was

is just because I’m used to big like stuffy corporate enterprise where there’s like 30,000 people and you know and like this was so much more intimate in all the the best ways.

Brittany Ellich (37:23) Mm-hmm. Agreed.

Jim ray (37:25) Mm.

Brittany Ellich (37:26) cool. So with that, we are running short on time after this. So we are going to move on to our fun segment of the of the day. and I’m really excited about this one because I also required you to help me come up with some fun segment

Jim ray (37:38) Ha.

Brittany Ellich (37:39) ideas. so our fun segment is going to be predictions about events in the atmosphere, about what’s coming next.

These are predictions. They do not have to be correct, obviously. Although I will definitely link back in the future if they are. because obviously I was right.

Jim ray (37:55) Yeah, of course.

Brittany Ellich (37:57) but yeah, there are a few that we a few that we talked about. the first one, we’ve mentioned it a little bit, spaces. So spaces being available for everybody in the atmosphere is the first one. Kind of a softball because it’s like already very much in progress. but what is your prediction for when spaces will be done, released?

Available.

Jim ray (38:15) So we’re tracking pretty well to have the protocol level implementation done let’s let’s call it ahead of Thanksgiving, certainly by the end of the year. And so that will that will basically mean that all of the big pieces are locked.

We don’t anticipate any breaking changes. And you will be able to start building your own applications on top of that. And Bethany, you were asking about kind of like working on the atmosphere team side versus working in Blue Skyland. And one of the fun tensions is that this is we’re constantly building the protocol itself and then building the

I guess you could think of Blue Sky in many ways as the reference implementation of App Proto in some ways. And so that’s very true for spaces as well. And so we’re gonna be building spaces support into the Blue Sky app. And we want to give people an opportunity to kind of like build out their own communities inside of the app. And I where this starts to get really exciting is where this intersects with your world, Brittany, where

there’s a vision here where you open up your app and you’ve found your people and

Whatever the niche that you’re all interested in, you collect each other together and then you figure out new and exciting ways to build on top of that. And this is where things like Addy, which is the part of the app that you work on, Brittany, as part of the exploration team, is where I think it gets very exciting because then you can actually start to customize your group and your space in ways that are completely unique to you. And like one of the things that

we’re trying really hard to avoid is everybody’s space just kind of like looking the same. starting off is like, I’ve kind of collected everybody into my group and we’re all in like the mobile app here and like, you know, that’s very constrained. But then it’s just like, you know what? Like

It would be great to be able to plan things with a calendar application, or it would be if we could add a marketplace, or if, you know, I’m I’m a podcaster or a blogger, whatever it is, and I want to drop some monetization in there so that people can help support me. Like all of those different component pieces allow you to create this composable community space. And that I think is going to be a huge differentiator. And then you go to Addy and you say, Hey Addy, like I have this whole this crazy idea for this new thing that I want to build. And

And Addy helps you build it right there and then and then you’ve created this really unique space. And then the internet starts to feel fun and weird and new and different again. And it’s we’re not just all locked into the same like four Discords and everything looks like a subreddit.

Brittany Ellich (40:39) I want I want to feel like I’m on Neopets again. I feel like that’s my like shining star.

Jim ray (40:43) Yeah, right.

Brittany Ellich (40:44) Like this is the experience, the peak experience of the internet.

Jim ray (40:47) Uh-huh. Totally.

Brittany Ellich (40:49) yeah. Bethany, do you have a prediction? I mean

Bethany (40:53) I I feel like there’s some insider betting on this one, honestly.

Jim ray (40:56) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (40:58) Fair, fair,

yeah.

Jim ray (41:00) Sli slightly unfair advantage.

Bethany (41:03) Maybe the others look like maybe I can maybe have a a shot, but I I’d honestly lean on on Jim’s take on the timeline.

Brittany Ellich (41:11) Nice. I’m gonna say January 1st just to hedge a little bit. I’m not on the team that’s directly working on spaces, but I am building on spaces and very, very excited for it to be out.

Yeah, looking forward to that one. So the next one, let’s go with yeah. When do you think there is going to be an app bigger than Blue Sky on the atmosphere?

Jim ray (41:30) man, this is this is such a tricky one. And this is why like I’m I am terrible at predictions and I I’m like the most boring investor in the world. You know, it’s just like all my money is in like some index funds, and I don’t ever look at it because

Brittany Ellich (41:43) Same, yeah.

Jim ray (41:44) anytime I’ve tried to play that game, I’m I I just like lose money in my own sanity. But

Blue Sky is obviously this like outsize planet in and everything else is kind of like, you know, various moons that sort of orbit around it. And, you know, like the most popular record on the network right now is the blue sky like, right? You know, there’s an order of probably several orders of magnitude, more likes than just about anything else on the network. And so what will it take to kind of eclipse that? And

I’m my my very vague thinking about this is I do think that something is going to come along that is going to take some of these primitives and really run with it. I suspect that that thing might have an agent attached to it.

And I’m hoping that it’s not because the agent has gone rogue, but because we’re we’re actually adding some usefulness to this. But we’re already kind of seeing, so there’s a project called Delv Town, D-E-L-V dot town, that is doing some exploration around this, where it’s basically like a it’s like blue sky, butt for your agents, is I think is the shorthand that they have they’ve used around this. And and so I suspect.

Suspect that there will be something like that. And that’s as much of a prediction as I think I’m able to make.

Brittany Ellich (43:01) Nice. Yeah, I Bethany works at GitHub. I previously worked at GitHub. We’ve all seen the hockey stick graph of when agents took off on at GitHub

Jim ray (43:09) Yeah, yeah, of course.

Brittany Ellich (43:11) and like the changes that it made. so yeah, I I would not be surprised if something related occurred. It is a very good like a communication and data storage layer for

Jim ray (43:23) Mm-hmm.

Brittany Ellich (43:23) agents. as we’ve already said, you know, all of the it’s all just JSON in the end, so

Jim ray (43:28) Talks just Jason.

Brittany Ellich (43:29) Turns out they like to talk using that. So

Jim ray (43:29) All the way down. Yep.

Brittany Ellich (43:32) yeah, I will say as an actual number prediction, I will say by the end of twenty twenty seven. I have no idea whether or not that’s actually gonna happen, but I’m gonna put a date just just for kicks. Yeah.

Jim ray (43:41) Nice. See, I

I we were talking earlier and it’s an apocryphal Bill Gates quote about we overestimate what we can accomplish in one year and underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years. So a year from now is the end of twenty twenty seven and I that feels a little ambitious, but like

One of the parts that’s been so disorientating about this past year is, you know, I I was saying I started this job a year ago. Well, very weird time to start a new job in kind of like a whole new thing because what else happened a year ago? Agents got good, right? There’s like Simon Willison talks about this like November 25 inflection point. And that’s just as I was starting to get going. And then all of a sudden we have this like brand new capability. And I think a lot of folks started paying attention at that point. It was just it was it like Claude Code, I forget which.

model it was for something. And then but I think what what ended up having

Brittany Ellich (44:28) Mm. Opus four six.

Jim ray (44:29) is a lot of people took their Christmas break and

Wrote a prompt, went to bed, woke up the next day and was like, wow, that worked. And so I, you know, I would not have predicted that even as it was happening. I think update your priors has been the mantra of 2026. And and in in so many aspects of the world that we live in. And so that’s something I’m having to constantly re-evaluate.

Bethany (44:53) yeah, this is an interesting question. also GitHub Universes like started off today and literally they showed that hockey stick graph. It was it was very funny.

Jim ray (45:01) huh.

Bethany (45:02) but I think

It could go like with the age I I was looking at it from a perspective of, well, agents are really good now. you asked me this last year, I would be like, probably ten years minimum, like

Jim ray (45:13) Uh-huh, right.

Bethany (45:14) at that. but I feel like there’s two ways it could go. I mean probably more, but I’m gonna be dramatic about it. but like one everybody can code now and everybody has access to the atmosphere, so

does anything even take over because there’s just so much and so it

Jim ray (45:30) Right.

Bethany (45:31) anybody can build whatever they want to their liking and like have a customized experience in in whichever way they want. So that’s like one way I can see it where nothing really does blow up past blue sky because it’s just like you can kind of make whatever you want. But then another

Jim ray (45:46) Yeah.

Bethany (45:46) is like because it is so easy and you have agents, maybe one thing does like latch on to

People who might not be already in the blue sky ecosystem and the atmosphere or into that and blows up past that. So I can totally see that happening too, but it’s it’s definitely a exciting time and I think either way it’s gonna be a lot of people are gonna be building on it and and leveraging it. So really exciting time it seems like.

Jim ray (46:10) Yeah, completely agree.

I’ve noticed the same thing, right? Where it’s it I remember a few years ago, this was even this was at the very beginning of kind of like the Chat GPT era. I remember there were like there was a lot of VC chatter of like, you know, we’re eighteen months away from seeing the first solo founder unicorn. You know, we’re the f the first billion dollar startup that’s, you know, only got a single person behind it because they can just use Chat GPT to

They can outsource all of of all of the parts of running their business. And I think kind of what’s happened is maybe the opposite of that, where it’s like maybe we never see another unicorn. Maybe it’s like the hyperscalers are the last thing. And because code has gotten cheap and because

literally anybody can kind of create one of these things, this this whole idea of what goes into what we think of as like a tech product. Maybe that’s going away.

Brittany Ellich (47:02) Mm. Yeah, more applications, more places people spend their time and it’s they’re just smaller, more intimate, maybe.

Jim ray (47:08) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (47:08) I don’t feel like that would be a bad a bad outcome, personally.

Jim ray (47:11) No, I

I I don’t I don’t think so either. and as long as people are building it on that proto, then I think it’ll be okay.

Brittany Ellich (47:16) Yeah.

Awesome. well this has been awesome, Jim. love ta chatting with you. both on and off, you know, a podcast. But where can folks find you if they want to find you online?

Jim ray (47:29) Sure thing. So I’m

Probably most prolific on my work blue sky account these days. You mentioned that I I I I started this blog when I first started this gig and and I I I need to get back into doing more long form writing because it’s just better for my brain to sort of stretch in those directions. But I’m Jimrae dot BSKY dot team. and then and then as you mentioned, I host my own podcast called Off Protocol. I’m very happy with that very clever name.

And and that’s where we talk to folks, not just like people that are building App Reto apps, of course happy to talk and promote those as well. But part of what I really want to get at is some of the kind of headier stuff that we were even talking about here and some of the why of why we’re getting at this. And you know, that’s something that I get excited about it. Those are the kind of things that that get me excited to get up in the mornings too. And so I try to talk to people who are doing like cool art things.

things or interesting pol politics things or stuff that is that the protocol will kind of help expand and and make real.

Brittany Ellich (48:31) that. Yeah, the most important part of starting a podcast is having a really clever name. So I’m glad

Jim ray (48:36) Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (48:38) that you got that part locked down.

Jim ray (48:40) I was I was so

proud of myself, I was like, you know what?

Brittany Ellich (48:44) That’s good. That’s a good one. Awesome. Yes, definitely go check out Jim online and check out Off Protocol. It’s a it’s a wonderful, wonderful podcast.

Jim ray (48:52) The soon to be second highest ranking at proto based podcast.

Brittany Ellich (48:58) Yes, I’m I’m on a mission to make overcommitted a Nat Proto Based podcast because that’s just that’s all the people I know now. So

Jim ray (49:03) I love that. I just the more more at proto based Podcasts, please.

Brittany Ellich (49:07) Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you do on the podcast app of your choice. check us out on Blue Sky and share with your friends. Until next week. Goodbye.

Jim ray (49:20) Thanks, y’all.