iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The one thing that's already super annoying that we've already discussed is the fact that now we have multiple synchronization mechanisms for data that is possibly otherwise the same. Strengthens my theory that everything will just move to spaces, rip the firehose.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 14h

The more we've been discussing this and putting into production, the less you're going to want to hear our feedback. 😂 (Don't worry, it'll work, but a healthy dose of yagni would make it better, I think)

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Apple and Google have so much to answer for their continued support for in-app browsers like that. In 2009 it was barely defensible on performance grounds, when app switching took ages. Now, it's just 100% enshittified anti-user garbage. 😢

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I don't disagree and also... One of the things we see really clearly w/Roundabout is that a huge amount of our traffic ends up in Meta's embedded roach motel browser. Sadly, aggressively pushing an app is the only way out of that. We do email drips, etc, but those end up in other embedded browsers.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It weighs heavily on the soul

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Renewing my call for email portability.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The best part is that the number portability did:plc is (or, was) a spreadsheet that's "synchronized" via FTP. This is a more comprehensive wikipedia article as the FCC doesn't actually manage LNP across the +1 calling code, that's NANPA en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_n...

en.wikipedia.org

Local number portability - Wikipedia

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

(the problem with having separate buttons is that we generally want to discourage the use of direct replies, except when there's actually something to keep off community channels; it's a < 0.5% use case, so giving it a 50% UI affordance wasn't the right call for us)

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Given the local context, we can also conceivably have a database of all local public business contact information, and allowlist it.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

We're also operating at a local scale so it's relatively easy for stewards to intervene if there is something that slips through, and the blast radius is much smaller than with traditional open networks.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

We don't allow PII in public posts; the labelers block it, but offer the option of a direct reply. The biggest challenge is distinguishing between public data that looks like PII (business addresses/phone numbers) and personal private data. So far, the results are promising.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Thanks! No prior art that we're aware of, but would love to know if anyone finds others working on similar approaches!

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

In practice it behaves much more like a fancy "semantic regex match" than an opinion generator. We started trying to use frontier models to do the same, and the results were just okay. So far our experience with the zentropi models is vastly better.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The zentropi models return a mostly-deterministic boolean plus a confidence float for a given input, not a generative result. Most folks' experience with LLMs is as bullshit generators, whereas the model we're using is tuned (and re-tuned as necessary) to reliably give us a narrowly defined label.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Thanks! 💖 Currently it's off-protocol, but only because we didn't want to gate the feature on migrating all of our PDS repos to spaces-capable ones. We fully intend to migrate the feature to a spaces-based implementation once the infrastructure is in place.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

For coordination around posts like "I've got a free table!" this is perfect. Most importantly, once the interaction is done the thread can be closed off. That means no ongoing surface for abuse, and no new DM platform to worry about. Building things for people's actual needs feels great. 💖

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The approach we've used combines a privacy-preserving non-generative LLM labeler (zentropi.ai are awesome!) to identify when folks are about to share PII, and then gives them a way to share it just with the person they're replying to.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I love this new feature we built for Roundabout. Our community members needed a way to message each-other with personal information, but no-one needed a new way for someone to slide into their DMs, or a new inbox to check.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

That paper doesn't appear to consider chronotype. As a night owl, the chronotype predisposed to worse health outcomes overall, I take umbrage with their conclusions. 😂🦉

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Anyone who's worked in professional contexts will be familiar with the RACI matrix: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. Most "what can local governments do" summaries focus on the "Responsible" and "Accountable" aspects, but skip the roles they play in being consulted and informed.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The one responsibility / power you missed is relationships! I'm not alone in feeling frustrated when local government says "there's nothing we can do" when they hold the most direct and respected lines of communications to provincial, federal, and community/granting organizations.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Odeo was "just" podcasting from the start, and there wasn't a game/virtual world detour along the way, even though it would have made the story much more interesting!

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

You're probably remembering Flickr. 😊 Stewart & Caterina's Ludicorp started building Game Neverending and built photo sharing as part of it, which became Flickr. Stewart and Cal later did the same thing again and started to build GNE 2, but got side-tracked on the quest and built Slack, instead.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Nothing fancy, just atproto adoption in general. Number of records created would be a good start!

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If this was a purely product thing, I would create good photo/video sharing product(s) / ecosystem before extending into twitter-sized communities.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

If I felt like the Bluesky product teams were engaging in figuring out how to uplift non-Bluesky teams, I would be less worried. They absolutely mean well, and I appreciate the crew immensely, but doing the ecosystem thing takes a greater level of intentionality than "y'all can ride our coattails" ❤️

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The only reason we're on a private / off-atproto network is because the protocol didn't support our needs last year, and we couldn't afford to wait. We're well-funded compared to most, but not at the level of "have extra engineers work on protocols" and "build competitors to ecosystem startups."

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It is _not_ helpful for Bluesky to communicate "we're working hard on a solution for this, we'll share something in December!" given that the vast majority of the ecosystem comms are Bluesky-focused.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There are differently-sized players than "community apps" now, though. Blacksky is doing great work, just launched Acorn, and is growing, and we're about to launch atproto-based communities in Chicago in partnership with one of the largest NPR affiliates in the country.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

No-one gave Bluesky $100m to build a Twitter clone, not even a better Twitter. For investors, it's always been a network/ecosystem play, and I worry that optimizing for Bluesky-centric engagement metrics rather than PDS-centric ones risks souring the good-will of the wider community.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There's so much to dig in to here, but Netscape only built one website. Owning both the websites and the browser isn't Netscape, that's AOL or CompuServe.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

It's ok! Blacksky and us and others have already launched atproto communities! 😅

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is so exciting. I say that as someone building what would have historically been seen as a "competitive" product. Instead, we're building on shared foundations. Our shared goals are measured in terms of our communities' collective well-being. 💖

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm glad to see another pattern that maps pretty closely to how we're approaching things with roundabout! We have two systems that would fall into this category. 😁

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

fun fact: the random thing I built at the hack day that birthed twitter was called ketchup 😊🥫

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Not feeling locked in is one of the reasons I love my unifi gear! Compat with 3rd party cameras, being able to use 3rd party switches without huge loss, use 3rd party storage for video - I'm ok with this! I guess the wifi is the sticking point, but 🤷‍♀️

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I would totally join but the travel schedule this fall says No 😭

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

@jerthorp.bsky.social is an incredible human who LOVES birbs and knows everything about them. He also knows everything about data visualization, and is a great teacher. If you're over 35, I think this class is mandatory: www.jerthorp.me/learning

jerthorp.me

LEARNING | jerthorp

Online courses and wokshops about birds, data and creative coding. Binoculars to Binomials is for coders who are interested in cultivating an observational practice, and for birders who want to dive ...

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 18/09/2026

Being a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Probably no need to specify anything until there's a pattern to extract, mostly just wanted to make sure I hadn't missed something! Thanks! 😊

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

We're using standard.site in a few places in Roundabout and adding more, and mostly we need a way to give a hint to the indexers (beyond source DID) to indicate where in the site content should show up. Easy to add a new field, but wanted to check if there was anything in the wild for this!

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

@standard.site folks: how are we doing different types of publications? Is there any way of signaling "newsletter" vs "blog post" vs "technical documentation" or "poem"?

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

The problem is that I have three password managers which all think they might have the answer. 😂 I (usually) happen to know which one has the passkey, but otherwise there's no way to know which of the sequential popups to choose.

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Amy Zhang @axz.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

We were interested in studying the Bsky custom feed ecosystem, with a focus on feed creators, as arguably the first real instantiation of the vision of middleware providers for social media services like recommendation. The idea always seemed great in theory, but how sustainable is it really?

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I really like the email verification work that @sgo.to has been working on: github.com/WICG/email-v.... Ultimately, the gap that so many systems have is account recovery, so we all always fall back to email reset/magic links. @sgo.to's work admits that fact and makes that flow work seamlessly. 💖

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

(I have many feelings about passkeys, which I view as largely unnecessary compared to the "real" fix. Setting those aside though, In this case it's that I have several passkey providers on my device, all of which want part of the action, and there's nothing to help them coordinate.)

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I'm ecstatic that passkeys have solved authentication on the web. It really highlights the power of designing systems with robust multi-stakeholder protocols first, and then allowing a marketplace of different vendors to come up with such great UX based on those protocols.

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Blaine @blaine.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I love this new passkey feature where I have to cancel three separate requests from password managers (1p 🤢, Keychain, Google) and then select which passkey provider to use, and then unlock with my fingerprint. If I get any of them wrong, the auth fails and sends me to the fallback. It's so great.

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Eleanor Saitta @dymaxion.org · 11/09/2026

Repeat after me: all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first.

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