John Backus

@john.bsky.social

One funny aspect of Mastodon's federation model is that the most confusing and user hostile part is front loaded: picking a server. Like once you're on it feels like Twitter but it's a weird big hurdle for normal people. Curious what the Blue Sky take is

I took a quick look at the networking under the hood of the app and it I'm impressed by how formalized everything is! Seems like everything goes through the spec'd out ATP XRPC? Was able to make a node.js API client and fetch my feed which is cool.

Today I spent the day learning more about neural nets (via Andrej Karpathy's amazing YouTube https://bit.ly/3Hw9qOF). Whenever I had questions I would talk to Anthropic's chatbot. Most futuristic experience I've had in a long time. AI tutoring is amazing.

Reddit famously bootstrapped their site by creating tons of fake users (all comments actually from founders) to make it look alive. BlueSky timing could be perfect for doing this but w GPT. Bonus points with Elon randomly kicking the good bots off twitter