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Something has been eating away at me for a while even before this... the Germ button. Although it's cool, why has it taken until *now* to start showing additional services on your profile, and why is it still only Germ... a closed-source iOS-only app. Something has always felt off about that.

Graze was one of their first integrations. The “Happening Now” cards you may have seen for things like the Super Bowl were a direct integration with Graze feeds. I think Germ makes sense as an integration, too. Bluesky wanted E2EE for DMs, and Germ provides a good, if siloed, option for that.

It’s a difficult balancing act. There are /a lot/ of apps in the Atmosphere. How do you choose to support pckt, Leaflet, or Offprint without pissing the others off?

I understand the concerns, but I don't think Attie sherlocked Graze at all. While they both build feeds, they have very different target audiences and usecases.

I think Graze is well-positioned to build an Attie competitor if that's something they want to do: an agent-based feed builder with Graze's visual programming environment as the intermediate representation would be awesome.

In contrast, I don't think Attie is well-positioned to compete with Graze. Analytics, monetization, etc are features it doesn't have, and its simplified feed model means that even if it added them... Graze would be a better product for applications where you care about that stuff.

Thanks for writing this. I found it very helpful to understand the community members who had a more negative reaction to Attie. My initial thought was that while there was much overlap in terms of scope, variety helped the ecosystem overall. But the reframe of "eating your young" resonated.

I think you’re actually right! I sort of touch on that with the comment about Cartridge, but perhaps more concrete is the existence of Skyfeed, Graze, and all of the other feed generators. They’re all different, and that variety is beneficial for the ecosystem.

I guess what I'm seeing here is that the promise of atproto is supposed to be that you don't have to trust the company, your audience is your own, if they act against your interests you leave, etc. - but that it's not working like that for developers, despite the open protocol, you are still

Playing devil's advocate here, you could also make the case custom feed creation should have been part of the product at launch, being such a core system. But instead the community filled the gap in the meantime

mm. While reading this i am thinking about a piece that @mariaa.bsky.social linked yesterday to by @tarakiyee.bsky.social on the Audrey Lorde quote that "the masters tools will never dismantle the master's house", and it's original context. tarakiyee.com/on-the-enshi...

wondering if you have more thoughts you're willing to share? this seems like an important conversation (although microblogging might not be the space to have it in)

Yep! I mean succinctly, the whole point of the Lorde quote is the conceptual/intellectual tools. Like it's the patterns of thought and collaboration at issue. Part of living in a skeuomorphic space is that both old patterns and new patterns coexist.

I worked at silicon valley unicorns and, look, when they act like they're the heavyweight in the room, I'm really sorry to say this, but it's how they actually feel, it's not a ooopsie or an oversight. The money and the power has already done its damage, and you're just the rug they're stepping on.

None of what you're describing is new, and they're not special or different, they're cut of the exact same mold as everyone money-hungry startup before them. If anything, you're lucky that they're hapless enough to show their hand this early.

One of the challenges here is that "developer relations" in other open source or company contexts is around a single codebase, an inside & outside. So for me, this is "ecosystem relations" & networked orgs, which are subtly different. e.g. there are no third party atproto developers.

"there are no third party atproto developers." This is the other big takeaway for me: Bluesky is a business, Atproto is an open-source protocol, the sooner they operate independently the better. Atproto should have its own governance (beyond IETF work), its own devs, its own funding. ...

Once Atproto is independent, Bluesky can open PRs or issues against the protocol like everyone else. Protocol maintainers are free to prioritize what the entire community benefits from accordingly, and other teams are free to innovate on top of it however they want. This is the way.

I’m not sure I see the value of that distinction. Both are built for effectively communicating with a community, regardless of the integration points.