Graze Grant interview

When did you join Bluesky and why?

I joined on April 20, 2023 via an invite from @deepfates.com. I came in behind a number of others who I knew/followed; at the time it felt like more of a speculative social movement vs a technical one. Bluesky didn't stick in my social graph, and I moved back to Twitter accordingly.

I returned to Bluesky last fall, perhaps a few months after @gracekind.net left X/Twitter; hers + JDP's posts & discussions strongly boosted my odds of remembering to open the app in those (relatively) early days.

Something I find interesting about my experience is that I didn't use Twitter actively until mid-2022; something that I like about my pocket of Bluesky is that in some ways / on certain days, it feels to me like what I imagine certain pockets of Twitter might have felt like for some people, at some point(s) in the past.

How do you explain Bluesky to other people?

I wouldn't consider myself anywhere near an expert in this respect, but I appreciate the ethos of the platform, and the spirit of projects that I've seen & catalogued so far feels.. correct. I try to transmit that to anyone who's interested.

When asked, I'll typically open with something to the effect of "it's like Twitter, but open," possibly touching on how Twitter (the social landscape and the developer experience) has changed post-Elon acquisition.

Bluesky's users and bots have equal access to the protocol (there's not even a distinction), whereas on Twitter there are different rules for human/machine actors, as well as the fact that ~any sort of developer access costs money on Twitter, sometimes a lot of it (and even after paying for that access, you're left with a much more limited set of capabilities vs. atproto).

Your Graze grant project is an awesome blend of on and offline experiences — tell us about how this project came about and what inspired it?

The concept for what ultimately became receipt sky came to mind about a week after presenting receipt loom at qr show this past March in NYC.

The receipt loom was heavily inspired by work by Omar Rizwan & Andrés Cuervo @ https://folk.computer, along with the venerable Dynamicland, which I actually discovered via Folk sometime in 2023.

As for the direct lead-up to the project, I had spent a sizeable chunk of the last year working on the [receipt] loom and thinking about:

• the interactions (digital + physical) that form the experience of using it
• the different forms the interface might have taken / may take in the future
• its potential implications (the interactions it may inspire, what it may point to more generally)

What I've found is that on a certain axis, any of the possible variations of the scanner[+ joycon] + printer (+ paper) stack is really pleasant to operate, as opposed to a traditional computing interface.

Reflecting on some of this one evening, I realized that the physical components of the receipt loom would be just as well-suited for use with Bluesky (which can arguably be considered a loom in its own right).

The Graze Grants announcement showed up on my feed soon after, and the idea seemed well worth a prototype!

What do you think is the future of social media?

While I'm not especially confident in making broad claims, I'll start with a couple of observations regarding at least my own relationship with social media at present:

• I'm increasingly interested in and drawn towards social interfaces and experiences that afford cross-connecting my own thoughts/notes with others' (tweets, posts/writings).
• I maintain a personal Discord server (along with an assortment of public + private Are.na channels) for capturing and loosely organizing thoughts and media into threads-in-channels with minimal overhead; this has compounded over time in a way that feels organic, and has changed ~everything about how I interact with social media (including messaging) since my earliest days using these platforms in this way.

Those in mind, looking ahead:

• I plan to make heavy use of LLMs to work with the data I've assembled over time in some ways that are currently not especially well-explored.
• I hope to embody the best of what I've learned and gained from these experiences in my work on and off ATProto.

I think existing and future platforms facilitating these types of interactions have a lot of untapped potential.