59: Building the Decentralized Social Web: From Collective Social to OpenSocial

Brittany shares her journey building Collective Social - a Goodreads-style app for all kinds of media built entirely on the AT Protocol - and how it led her to create OpenSocial, a service that lets any app on the decentralized web share group functionality like book clubs. The episode covers the challenges of representing groups when the protocol has no native concept of group identity, using conference talk deadlines as motivation to ship side projects, and rating real-world systems on how well they'd work in a decentralized context. Erika also shares her experience building an interpreter in Go.

Show links:

• Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.com
• Collective Social: https://collectivesocial.app
• OpenSocial: https://opensocial.community
• Collective Social on GitHub: https://github.com/collectivesocial
• "Representing groups in ATProto" blog post (Brittany's site)
• AtmosphereConf speaker profile: https://news.atmosphereconf.org/3mfpjx5luuc2m
• GitHub Blog - Build a Personal Organization Command Center with GitHub Copilot CLI: https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/github-copilot/build-a-personal-organization-command-center-with-github-copilot-cli/
• "The art of saying yes" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/say-yes-do-all-the-things/
• "Living in the inflection point" blog post: https://brittanyellich.com/living-in-the-inflection-point/
• Nick Gerakines episode (EP19 - AT Proto, MCP, and Open Source): https://overcommitted.dev/ep-19-at-proto-mcp-and-open-source-with-nick-gerakines
• PDX ATProto talk: https://youtu.be/xFdak3HbDmM?si=rZoPfyYYoP2awADJ&t=2302
• AtmosphereConf talk: https://youtu.be/GVOywon3X-Q?si=yzKLfFNF8bzNT9-e
• The ATProto Store: https://atstore.fyi
• pdsls.dev: https://pdsls.dev
• Atmosphere Community: https://atmosphere.community
• npmx.dev: https://npmx.dev
• Tangled: https://tangled.io
• This is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222376492-this-is-for-everyone

Topics: AT Protocol, Decentralized Social Media, Side Projects, Open Source, Software Engineering