Brent

I have made several stabs at writing this post this week, none of which really felt like they stuck the landing. It is very hard to cleanly capture a year that contained both my marriage and my mom's death. Some days I have felt better than I have in years, some days like I will never see sunlight again. Focusing on one or the other side of it feels like an incomplete picture, but writing an essay about how sad I am that's also about how happy I am doesn't really mesh tonally. So: it's been a hell of a

It's a beautiful day here in New York. Zohran Mamdani was elected on a message of hope and change (and significantly more concrete change than the last time something similar happened). This is also the final day of my 30 days of atproto project, which works out thematically quite well. I have a lot of hope for atproto, and while there's a lot of work in front of us (just as there is for the mayor-elect), I am thrilled at the prospect of building something that felt impossible a few years ago, a sea change for how we think about

A shorter post today - it's election day in New York, so I've got other stuff on my mind. This is the stuff in the ATmosphere I'm either mixed on or haven't dived deep enough into to have a strong opinion about.

Feeds
One big selling point of Bluesky is being able to "choose your own algorithm". This is pretty well-trod ground for others, and apps like graze.social purport to make it easier. Clearly people are using this feature and finding workflows that work for them. But my own dive into it was pretty frustrating.

The documentation needs

Though I'm overall optimistic about the direction of atproto, it's a young ecosystem and there are still jagged edges. As I mentioned yesterday, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about some of the stuff here, and am generally optimistic that it's being addressed, but I think these are worth noting as the big sticking points I ran into during my explorations.

DIDs

I was really excited to try hosting a did:web. Self-signing my own identity from a domain I control felt like the final step in decentralized social. Unfortunately in reality it just breaks stuff