Daniel: "Hello everyone, welcome to the Grand Prix Eurovision de la podcast, also known as Waiting for Review. Our entry from New Zealand today is David Gary Wood. Big hand of applause for Dave here."

Dave: "Hey, Kia Ora!"

<Both laugh>

Daniel: "I just noticed like 10 seconds ago that today is the semi-finals for the Eurovision. And by the time this podcast comes out, it's just about Eurovision time, and I'm a huge fan actually."


Dave: "Yes. Last year we watched the final. Well, my wife and our boys were watching it and then I caught a bit of it and I was hooked."


Daniel: "Oh, you need, you need, in this case you need, I mean you don't need to, but you know, I very much recommend watching the film Eurovision."

Dave: "Oh, I've seen that."

Daniel: "You've seen that? Okay, okay, very good, very good. If anyone of our listeners haven't, haven't seen that movie, it is a Will Ferrell comedy that is incredible, because it turns out Will Ferrell is married to a, I want to say, Icelander? And so he knows, he knows Eurovision, even though he's American. And he has, this movie has the ability to really like show how incredibly weird and gay and fun that whole show is. So if you don't know what Eurovision is, it's basically all the European countries, but also a few non-European countries like Israel and Australia come together and they battle who can like play the weirdest, perform the weirdest song on stage."

Dave: "It's a battle of the bands that somehow is competitive but also sort of uniting. It's kind of sweet."

Daniel: "It's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic."

Dave: "I, um, with regards to the movie, if anybody has watched it, um, my, my favourite part is 'thank you elves"... which I'm just not going to explain on the show. You can look it up or watch the film."

Daniel: "No, no, no, like just watch the movie if you're interested."

Dave: "It's good fun. Pretty well. Pretty well."

Daniel: "How are you doing?"

Dave: "I think about, um, since we last spoke, Topiary was released, it's in the store, it's been doing okay. And version 1.1 has shipped, which actually brings a bit of a rejig of the UI and a bunch of other features. So that's, that's been quite cool. Like I shipped it and I refactored a bunch of stuff and added a load of new features. And that's sort of ongoing, that's, that's been quite sweet. So yeah, all about, all about that. And then also in the last week, I've started exploring something for GoVJ again, which I think is pretty, going to be pretty cool when it's done."

Daniel: "I think I saw something on social media about that."

Dave: "Yeah. So.... okay, GoVJ is a video mixer app and it is based around live video mixing. So in the scene it's known as VJing because you're playing with video like a DJ plays with audio. And one of the things that the app hasn't been able to do so far is connect to MIDI controllers and MIDI controllers they use, it's a musical standard for transmitting control signals. You get a controller with a bunch of knobs, dials and sliders or whatever, and plug it in and get to control software like mine."

Dave: "Pretty, pretty typical, pretty cool when it all works. You've got a keyboard or a thing, like I say, with a load of sliders and switches, and then you can control the, the mixing of the app with it. And I've wanted GoVJ to have that support since I built it. When I first shipped GoVJ it was 2015, so we're talking a long aspiration to go on and doing this."

Daniel: "Yeah, I imagine like those, those VJs would have like one of those pads with the four by four buttons or something on it where you can just tap or stuff like that.

Dave: "Yes, yeah, very much."

Daniel: "Are those midi? I assume those are midi, right?"

Dave: "They usually are, yeah, it's an industry standard for that sort of thing and it's plug and play these days for a lot of a lot of the major software. So for iOS and iPad software, right, that's, yeah, and the OS's support it, there's CoreMIDI, there's even MIDI over Bluetooth where you can connect to devices that are, that are outputting a Bluetooth low energy signal effectively."

Dave: "So this is all to say I'm now doing this, and the way I've decided to approach it is rather than importing a MIDI library or whatever into my app and then wiring it all together with the way the app's controls work, I took a step back and I was like, well, if I do that, it's very tightly coupled to the app and the video engine's pretty involved and I wasn't particularly keen to sort of start jamming stuff like this in the middle. Because it's a stack of cards, right, and then you're adding a whole load of other stuff in the middle. So I took a step back and I thought, well, what do I really want it to do? I want to be able to associate one of these control signals with a block of code, basically, you know, flick the switch, receive the value of the switch, which is a double ranging from zero to one, right, so it's a scale parameter and then go do something, do some work off the back of that, set a effect parameter or, you know, control the crossfade or whatever it is."

Daniel: "Right."

Dave: "And so what I'm making is I'm making a Swift package. I've called it Trigger Kit for now, yes, yes, seems to be. I found a couple of good libraries, there's a library called MIDI Kit, which is beautiful because it sits on top of all of the core MIDI API stuff that Apple have and does a whole load of work to just sort of manage that and then feed me the events in a nice clean way. So standing on the shoulders of giants there, but what I've built and what I've got now is a mechanism where you can associate actions for your app with events. So an event being a movement of a slider across a knob or the pressing of a note or whatever"

Daniel: "But with MIDI events specifically."

Dave: "on a keyboard, exactly for now, specifically with the MIDI events. But there's a level, I've abstracted some of that, and so the events that I've got are codable. The app actions that you feed are represented by an enum to the bus that is running. So I've made like a boss object, if you like, that handles all these signals."

Daniel: "But with MIDI events specifically."

Dave: "And the quick version of this, it means that I can create like a admin screen, a setting screen in the app with all the actions with them, you know, probably ready to rock and roll with some presets. And then if people's controllers are different, they can go in and they can actually update that and connect different events to the app's actions."

Daniel: "So, how much do you get from MIDI kit and how much do you have to do yourself?"

Dave: "The mapping is all of mine. So the mapping of event to action, and then the ability to add and remove these mapped activities, if you like these blocks of code, that's mine. The codable side of it is mine as well, and the reason I'm leaning into codable is so that you can persist user settings."

Daniel: "Oh, yeah. That makes total sense."

Dave: But the short version is perhaps in, you know, by the time people are listening to this or maybe a little while afterwards, Trigger Kit will be available. If it is, I'll link it in the show notes, because I'm going to open source it. There's no reason not to."

Daniel: "That makes total sense."

Dave: "So that is what I've been doing in the last week. I've been pulling this thing together. Very similar to TestDK, I've got a demo app that imports the framework locally, and you can just go and play with that, have a look at how that works. But the next step for me after shipping that is going to be wiring it up into GoVJ and then shipping that."

Daniel: "Fantastic. And you could also include it in Topiary. And then you could unfollow people with your tiny MIDI keyboard or whatever."

Dave: "So yeah, you really could. And that's the other thing, right, is that this then becomes a thing I can drop into almost anything where it makes sense to do so and wire stuff up. And that felt kind of powerful going that route is like, OK, then I get I get something more than just plugging it into the VJ app. So yeah, watch this space like any any future app where it makes sense to do so I'll be able to drop MIDI triggers in without without thinking about it too much, you know, yeah."

Daniel: "Cool, I like that."

Dave: "That's the other thing is, sorry, go on."

Daniel: "How did you, like, what gave you the impulse to do this now?"

Dave: "It's been eight years, why now? So the easy answer to that is somebody asked me."

Daniel: "Because like, I feel like, oh yeah, that's a good impulse. Lots of motivation."

Dave: "Yeah, so I had I had a message from somebody shout out to their handle is, Sir Shannon over on the Fediverse. I think they're probably unlikely to listen to the show, but that's a that's fine. Yeah, but I essentially heard from someone who said that his son would probably get a lot out of being able to control it with a MIDI controller. And so it's not just like I'm getting asked by this guy, could we have this?"

Dave: "But it's also the ability to maybe brighten a kid's day by doing it."

Daniel: "Aw, that's amazing."

Dave: "So yeah, yeah, that's a powerful motivator. And then it's like, I wanted to do it for years anyway, so those things have combined. like, oh, I've wanted to do this for a long time."

Daniel: "Yeah, I get that. Sometimes with TelemetryDeck it's the same, like, some feature request comes in and I'm like, oh, I've wanted to do this for a long time. Well, now I can start it right now because someone actually asked for it."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a human face, if you like, to doing this as a human side to say that this thing goes out and somebody can play with it, get something out of it and -"

Daniel: "Yeah, and also, like, if you just build it for yourself, like, no one might actually use it, but if someone requested it, at least one person will very likely use your code and that makes you think differently about what you build. So that's pretty cool."

Dave: "Yeah, for sure. And like I say, the other side of it is it's fun, it's cool. I've got this this demo app now that I can control at the moment. It's just got these, you know, slider components on the screen that are then being controlled by literal sliders on my MIDI controller. And just that there's sort of like disembodied control of the iPhone or the iPad with the controller, it's just it's it's silly fun."

Daniel: "Oh yeah, totally, I can imagine."

Dave: "Like, I'm wondering whether I could do something with this where I can set it up to control events on my Mac, maybe route something through. I don't know. At one point I would have said to trigger stuff via AppleScript, I'd probably go the Shortcuts way now if that's possible. But you know, that vibe is there. It's like I've got my MIDI controller to the side of my desk, and then when I'm on calls for other things, that idea of like, oh, that'd be very cool if I could press that and it just muted my mic or unmuted my mic, you know."

Daniel: "Yeah, especially if you have the MIDI devices, like, for me, it would be about the same usage as a, what's it called, the Elgato device that gives you, like, the buttons, anyway, Stream Deck, that's the name."

Dave: "Yes, yeah, that's it."

Daniel: "And because I don't have any MIDI devices, I think, I mean, I don't know, are microphones MIDI devices?"

Dave: "No, no, not at all. It's all about control signals."

Daniel: "I have a microphone, but probably not, right?"

Dave: "No."

Daniel: "So yeah, no MIDI devices in the vicinity."

Dave: "But then, you know, like the controller I've got, I think, retails for like it's a hundred dollars NZ, so what it would be like 50 pounds, 50, 60 euros."

Daniel: "Oh wait, hang on, we have a huge electric piano in the other room that actually does have MIDI. Like, it's not a keyboard, like, it's like a piano, but it also has, like, you can also add, like, headphones and stuff, and that does have MIDI, I know. So I just need to put that next to my computer."

Dave: "Well, you don't even need to put it next to computer. So one of the things I got into last weekend is I hooked up a Raspberry Pi with, again, I'll link this in the show notes because it's very cool. There's a blog post that a guy put together that shows you, you just follow all these steps that are there and then the Pi operates as a dedicated hub.

Daniel: "Oh, that's cool."

Dave: "And so, yeah, so I've got all my wired controllers plugged into it. And then the really cool part is that the Pi then presents this as a Bluetooth interface to the iPhone or the iPad for MIDI."

Daniel: "That is pretty cool."

Dave: "Yeah, so I'm saying you could plug a Raspberry Pi in the other room into that electric PNA and then just Bluetooth your computer and your partner could totally mess with your setup if you've got it controlling things. Yeah, yeah."

Daniel: "And then I also have this, do you know Peee-Moroni or Pi Moroni?"

Dave: "I think it's Pimoroni, but yeah."

Daniel: "I have one of their displays, I have one of their matrix displays here, because at some point I want to make a live TelemetryDeck counter. I wanted to do it for the 1.5 billion signals, so I have to be quick for the 2 billion signals, but we've just passed them without much fanfare, I mean, horrible problem to have."

<< Intermission, Intro music plays >>

Dave: "Blue Sky?"

Daniel: "Blue Sky, yeah.! Some kind Soul actually did send me an invite to Blue Sky, so I went there and wanted to try it out." Because on Mastodon, people are saying, oh yeah, Blue Sky is a horrible app because all the horrible people are there, and on Blue Sky they're apparently saying, oh yeah, Mastodon is the boring app where all the people who love rules are going and whatever. And so I was like, OK, let me just try this out. A friend of a friend actually sent me an invite code, made an account, it is called Break the System, because that's just my old nickname, and I've decided to just keep with it. And it's weird in a mostly fun way"

Dave: "Okay."

Daniel "And it's very different from Mastodon. You have a timeline and then just posters scrolling by, so that's very similar, but just the whole vibe is very, very different."

Daniel: "So from the onboarding, you go there, you open the app, and then it says, choose your server. Oh wait, you can't choose your server, you just pick the first one, because it's on the only list of one. And then it's like, OK, what's your username? Give us your invitation code. And then you tap that, and you're immediately looking at a timeline. And you don't follow anyone in that timeline, it's just like the, I think it's just the most rated or the hottest, whatever the algorithm decides, tweets, or toots, or posts, and skeets, I think.

Dave: "Yeah, I can't call them that. I can't call them skeets."

Daniel: "No? What does it mean? What does it mean, like maybe there's a language barrier there, but I've seen people talking about that, about skeets."

Dave: "It just sounds kind of rude to me. Yeah, no, posts."

Daniel: "So OK, so what I've liked about this is just you are immediately looking at posts that are generally actionable, or interesting, because some algorithm has decided that, yeah, this is getting a lot of interactions, so it should be in that list. And then you can just scroll through there, and there's no prompt for you to do something."

Dave: "Let's let's just call them posts, please. Yes."

Daniel: "You can just stay there if you like, but next to each post is a tiny little follow button. So you like gently nudge towards, oh yeah, if I actually like this person, or this post, or even recognize this person from somewhere else, like for example, our mutual friend Shantini, well, mutual friend, is on there."

Dave: "OK. Right."

Daniel: "And I saw her and was like, oh yeah, I'm going to follow her. And so that was a really pleasant interaction. And then after a while, you kind of realise, oh, there's tabs at the top of this screen where I can switch from the hot topics, or whatever, to just showing the people I'm following, like a non-algorithmic timeline. And so that onboarding process was incredibly frictionless."

Dave: "Yep. Yep."

Daniel: "I mean, there was a bit of a friction because the password field didn't support the auto password fill, which I used to create the password in one password, but that's a nerd thing. So I'm ignoring that. And so that is a really nice thing that they apparently worked hard and thought about how to reduce friction for first-time users a lot. And I think Mastodon could learn from that. But I also acknowledge that Mastodon, especially the official app, are taking great steps to reduce that complexity. And that's pretty cool too. And the other thing that I really noticed is the vibes. Especially on this trending page, I forgot the actual, hang on, I'm going to look at the actual name of the thing. The page is called What's Hot. And it stays in that tab, or available in that tab all the time. So even now, I've used the app for a few days, and it will always show you the follow button apparently, buttons. So that's kind of cool."

Dave: "OK."

Daniel: "And so the typical Mastodon post is usually a bit more serious than the typical BlueSky post. Like, BlueSky feels kind of like Tumblr in the 2020, 2012, or 2012 era. 

Dave: "In it's heyday."

Daniel: "Yeah, here, there's like, oh, do you remember Darth from Twitter? Darth is, of course, on there. Here's Scott Hanselman is posting, the rebranding of mayonnaise to Aioli was really sneaky and unhinged. There are, just in this timeline that I'm looking at right now, there is a reference to, oh, what's the name of that, Lemon Party, Lemon Party. That is not something you should Google."

Dave: "So it's all over the place."

Daniel: "And there is, it's all over the place, but it is slightly lewd, I want to say. It is incredibly weird in a good way. And I'm feeling that whenever I open the app, I read 10 or so of the posts, and then I'm like, oh, this was nice, but I'm going to close this app now. And like, whenever, like, it feels kind of nice, but very interesting."

Dave: "That's cool."

Daniel: "I'm very, very sure that this app will not feel like this if it gets significant user growth. Because with more users will come more, like, moderation challenges and just different kinds of people who are not just irreverent, oh, yeah, we're just partying in this new space that hasn't been, that hasn't, like, hasn't found its identity yet. And so it's awesome, though. I'm enjoying it."

Dave: "So I've got I've got some that's cool. That's cool. I've got some thoughts and some feelings of somebody who's been sort of quite attached to and involved in Mastodon."

Daniel: "Let me just make my final sentence that I really want to bring in, because before someone is like, oh, you're leaving Mastodon or whatever."

Dave: "Go for it. Go, go, go."

Daniel: "I'm enjoying it, but I find myself returning to Mastodon more than I do with Blue Sky. All right. Sorry. Go on."

Dave: "No, no, no. That's cool. And that's interesting. So I think I think a lot of things actually about this. So when I saw Blue Sky come on, start to come on the scene and people going, hey, we're jumping over to there. My initial reaction was like, you're really going to be getting involved with a platform that's Jack Dorsey involved after Twitter?!"

Daniel: "Yeah, that's also something."

Dave: "Have you learned nothing?! You know, I'm slightly incredulous, I guess. But I understand there's nuance to that. He's he's not directly involved in this or that. And it's his money rather than anything else. And blah, blah, blah. I don't care. Right. It's got his name on it. There is that. But for me, if I take a step back, like politics to one side or whatever, it's good that there's a place that people are finding fun. And I think a lot of people have lost that. I think a lot of people have lost that. A mastodon has lost that. I had a bit of that. I had a bit of mastodon being quite a fun place in that sense."

Daniel: "Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely."

Dave: "Yeah yeah yeah, it's it's lost the vibes in that sense."

Daniel: "Years ago, like it was right."

Dave: "And part of this, I think, is existential to the Fediverse at the moment in a sense of it's further along. Right. We're figuring out how communities interoperate, how de-federation works, how we block assholes out of our feeds and all of that. Right. It's further along. And Blue Sky is not. For the moment, it's a federated instance of one. So it's, it's centralized. And that that that that is actually part of why that was frictionless for you to sign up. You didn't have to choose anywhere. The way Blue Sky is probably going to handle this is that nobody chooses anywhere to begin with and that everybody kind of flows into their main thing and then goes and finds their forever home or whatever after that on some other instance, because you can migrate. Right. So you can have a community of people who are in the same place with you, which Mastodon does not. And if they get all of that right, this sort of nomadic social identity, if you like, then that's really powerful. That's actually something that the Fediverse and Mastodon have needed for a long time. So it's a different beast in that sense. There's I've got, like I say, personal political issues with how they're sort of wrangling the algorithmic side."

Daniel: "Yeah, I get that."

Dave: "I think there's bits there's bits within this where it is definitely has the potential to be turned on its head in a sense of. Again, there's still that potential for things to try and do that in the Fediverse with Mastodon, it's just that because of the nature of where it's come from, people reject that quite quickly."

Daniel: "Yeah, yeah."

Dave: "But what I see with it, the potential I see with all of this, if I want to sort of lay out Dave's grand social media plan, if you like, is that I think as users, there's a potential for us not to have to care about any of this stuff in the longer run. Right. You've got an account on BlueSky or you've got an account on Mastodon. Doesn't matter. Right. I can add you from either side and, you know, the servers figure it out or."

Daniel: "That would be really cool, yeah."

Dave: "Yeah. And I think that there is actually that potential if people stay open minded about this. And if the politics don't override it too much, but like I don't particularly care if somebody I like is posting on BlueSky. What I care about is that I've got my client here, I'm using Ivory or whatever for Mastodon and the instance that I've got. And I just want to be able to add you and then we can interact and I can see you in my chosen space and feed. Right?"

Daniel: "Yeah, that's like the ideal vision of the future in this distributed world. Let's see if that happens. I'm skeptical."

Dave: "I think it's possible and I think there is a possibility to bridge some of this via clients as well in the course of time. So, you know, maybe I've got two accounts and the client sensibly adapts to either one when I'm replying. And I just again, I don't have to think about it too much. That that's a possibility. It will get weird for sort of like, you know, like understanding that some people can't see everything you post if you're in one side or the other. But there's a potential to bridge the gap in client apps as well. And so I guess what I'm saying is, is that for all of how I sort of held my nose at the Jack Dorsey links and all of that. On the other side, I just don't actually care so much if that's where people want to be. And great. You know, and hopefully this this this what is happening with BlueSky with their protocol that they're using the AT protocol. What I really want to see is I want to see more than an instance of one. Right. Some plurality."

Daniel: "Right. What does AT stand for? Is it activity tub?"

Dave: "I have no idea. It could be the Activity Tub rather than pub."

Dave: "But again, like I say, I kind of want to not have to care, you know, and I think a lot of people want to not have to care."

Daniel: "Right, right."

Dave: "But the the biggie here for me is is perhaps over the next year or two, we're going to see this sort of the ability to have a unified social feed."

Daniel: "Right, right."

Dave: "Yep. So you're posting photos to a pixel fed server. That's fine. I add you. I follow you."

Daniel: "Right, right."

Dave: "I can see your photos. I can interact. Great. Your shit-posting over on BlueSky. That's great. I can see. But I'm actually replying from my my Mastodon account over a bridge or whatever. Fine. I don't have to care."

Dave: "Some of this is a very I'm able to have this position because my experience of Mastodon is not typical. Yeah. So I guess to expand on that a little bit more, I've got my own instance. I have my own users on that. So it's just me and account for my cat and account for where I specifically post photos to. "

Daniel: "Right. What is the account name for your cat? I want to double-check. You can follow your cat, but I need to double-check that."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's @meow@social.davidgarywood.com. And then there's photos @ the same. But so my experience is not typical. Right? People talk about Mastodon having this sort of like very serious and whole whole monetary sort of vibe where people tell you off if you're not sort of adhering to the social rules and norms. And I'm on an instance of one effectively administrated by me. So I don't get that. Right. If somebody if somebody doesn't like the way I'm posting or whatever, follow me. I don't care. Yeah."

Daniel: "Right. I do want to say, though, that this is one of the shortcomings of Mastodon. Like, it feels like, of course, not everyone, but it feels like on Mastodon, people are getting very defensive when we talk about the shortcomings of our favorite social network, which is bad because then we can't really constructively address them. And it is a fact that many black people or people of color are saying Mastodon doesn't feel safe for us."

Dave: "Mm hmm. Yep. Yes."

Daniel: "And I don't know the solution to that"

Dave: "Yes. I don't know."

Daniel: "but it's really something that should make everyone, especially the people who make Mastodon, just try to constructively find improvements. It is also a fact that because of technical ways that replies work, like pile-ons and mansplaining is subtly encouraged, not by intention, but just because you don't see all the replies to people. So you're like, oh, no one made this very excellent point that I want to make. And then the recipient is like, oh, yeah, you're the 14,000th person who explained this to me. Like, I've had this happen to me. It's incredibly frustrating because you want to say to people, like, read the room, but they literally cannot read the room."

Dave: "Same. Yeah, no, I hit that last week and I said to somebody like, oh, see the other replies on this post and they're like, I can't."

Daniel: "Right. And a few other problems like that. And I feel like they are, like, the Mastodon GGMBH, like, the people who make Mastodon, Gargron basically, are recognizing these problems and are working on solutions to them. It's just that sometimes the community is feeling a bit, I want to say acerbic, because I haven't used that word in a year."

Dave: "Mm hmm. Yes, yes. It's the perfect word. And I've got to say as well, I have been in that camp when blue sky was sort of starting to be pushed a few weeks ago. What I could see and I still believe this to some extent, but I could see this pattern of the invites were going to all of the the great and the good in the tech scene, who've got big followings. Right? And so there was a definite vibe for me of looking quite cynically and sort of going, well, this is just a big...circle. Right. This is just a everybody over there are people with reasonable followings who essentially just want to keep kind of laying into that sort of clout. If you like that social clout of shit-posting and being in that environment and very cynically, I was sort of looking and going, well, if that's all you've got to offer, good for you. Off you go."

Daniel: "Oh, no, what they also have to offer is about every other account on there that follows me. Because, like, I already have, like, I don't know, 20 followers. I don't know why, but I really do know why. Because there's, like, five people who are actual people, and the rest is, if not bots, then very bot-like people who follow, like, 30,000 people and who just want to, like, promote their very tiny software-as-a-service startup or their Bitcoin IPO or something like that."

Dave: "Ugh...and this is the other side on some Mastodon instances, people have been shut down from promoting anything. Like I've seen artists get told not to boast advertising things they were selling. And so everybody's experiences vary. Right. And I have to understand that my experience being on a solo instance has been very easy for me. Right. So and there's a bunch of these edges and things that I just never say. Right? I'm not in a minority community that is going to get the type of treatment that other people have complained about. And potentially when I've been particularly blunt or forceful in my opinions about things, I've potentially been the one giving people some of that to some extent.. Like, y'know, I like to think I'm not bigoted, so I've not treated anybody badly in that way. But certainly I've been the reply guy to somebody at times because of that effect you've spoken about as well, where, you know, somebody's already had that reply five times, 10 times, whatever already. So I guess what I'm saying is, you know, because we're at risk of this just being a complete derailment of the show for a second. But to sort of sum it up, I think what I'm saying is I understand everybody's experiences vary. And actually, there's a part of me that just wants the unified social feed. Because actually, when I've been annoyed at people sort of going, oh, screw Mastodon, I'm off to BlueSky. I'm actually like, oh, God, we just got here. You know, I'm kind of going to miss interacting with you. So this is why I'm sort of putting hopes on the ideas of bridging technologies, the idea of clients that can potentially bridge it. I don't give a stuff about algorithmic feeds myself. Right. That's not really something I care about. But that's not to say they're bad. Right. You know, maybe there's a version of this where I host my own algorithmic processor or whatever. And I get a much improved sort of global feed, if you like, given to me, because at the moment, that sucks. Actually, Mastodon just doesn't work very well for me."

Daniel: "Oh, yeah. Do you remember Adium, which was a chat program for macOS about, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, I want to say? Oh, my God, I am old."

Dave: "Yes! And it was it was on more than one platform as well."

Daniel: "It, like, its stated goal was to be the chat program for all the various ways of chatting with people, like, all the messengers. And it did work for me for a while, but nowadays I'm just, I just have a folder on my phone, and that folder contains, hang on, let me bring it up. It contains Slack, Signal, Ivory, Instagram, BlueSky, Telegram, Messages, Gmail, Threema, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, a dead TweetBot, Zoom, Snapchat, Viber, RocketChat, FastMail, and that's it, basically."

Dave: "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, this is ridiculous. Right."

Daniel: "So, I've just, what I'm saying is, it is ridiculous, but I am just resigned to it. Like, I used to be, I used to be someone who always wanted to force people or to convince people to use the important or the quote-unquote good messengers. And I used to be someone who was like, who was hoping for a universal solution. I was like, oh, yeah, I can just use this app, and this app will make me be able to just talk to the different people. Now, I'm just like, I have in my head a lookup table that says, Dave is iMessage."

Dave: "Yes."

Daniel: "I don't know. A very tiny group of people are still in WhatsApp. Yeah, whatever. So, and I feel I'm okay with this, and I feel I'll be okay with doing this for social media as well..."

Dave: "OK, because I see..." 

Daniel: "...Because I feel I want to keep the character and that doesn't have to be the main app, but if I'm mixing all of them together, even now, if I mixed my admittedly very small Blue Sky timeline with my Macedon timeline, it would be very jarring, I think."

Dave: "OK, but I think there's I think there's scope for all of this within all of this, if you like. Like there's even if we sort of approach the situation where everything's bridged, everything can interoperate. There will be nothing stopping you from still maintaining your best separate client life. You know, and I if I think about all of this for me, I guess I'm starting to see social feeds a little bit like email or like email was."

Daniel: "Oh, yeah, I get that."

Dave: "Yeah. What you've said about the chat things is actually probably closer to the truth of it. Right. I mean, this is a bit like early 2000s where we had MSN, Yahoo Messenger. I used to use IRC. There was ICQ. There's a whole bunch of these and we had separate apps for those. And then the chat client you talked about before Adium. That was a response to try and unify some of this. And so you didn't have to care. And it worked reasonably well for a couple of messaging platforms and it was terrible IRC, if I remember rightly. Yeah. So I get it right. There's also a balance where we could unify this stuff, but maybe we don't. But yeah, like I say, part of me, I just kind of don't want to have to care anymore. I want to be able to say, OK, these are my feed. These are people who are posting wherever. And I want to be able to see that and interact with that from from one place. And it's just just my socials, you know, and I could imagine I probably would have in my. And you can see I'm mentally building an app for this. Right. Full disclosure."

Daniel: "Or an SDK."

Dave: "Yeah, we'll get to that. Because, yeah, what I'm thinking is you've got your your feeds and potentially an ability to split things up by listing or by functionality. Maybe there's a separate view for photos and videos, that sort of thing. But I could see this being quite a nice experience, at least for me, for a user of one. And it's to me, it's much like my email. Right. When I go and check my email, I don't particularly care if you're on Yahoo, if you're on Gmail, if you're self hosting your email doesn't matter. We can still speak."

Daniel: "Not a sponsor, but Fastmail is just the best."

Dave: "They are. They really are. And I'm using Fastmail and I'm using that with my own domains and everything. But again, like, you know, if I email my mother or somebody who's on Gmail, neither of us have to care about that. We've just got each other's handles and the mail gets sent and the reply gets received."

Daniel: "Because email is like DNS, it's like one of the few remaining infrastructure protocols of the internet."

Dave: "Yeah. Yeah. And so to sum it up, I guess what I'm hoping for and looking for is for this to happen for social feeds in a sense where you can be blue sky only if that's really where you're at, you know, or you can be mastered on only if that's where you're at and never interact with people on anything else other than that. But then if you're somebody like me who has friends in sort of all camps, maybe it just doesn't matter. And I think that that's my goal, if you like, in terms of things I'm working on in this space is to sort of think about it just not mattering."

Dave: "Like one of the goals of TootSDK, which is the SDK for the Fediverse that me and Konstantin, a friend of mine, have been working on. And we've talked about loads on this show. One of the goals of TootSDK is the fact that there are different mastodon type Fediverse type instances, right? There's mastodon, there's a server type called Pleroma, there's a fork of that called Akkoma. Like these are open source projects and there's, you know, a fork every other month. But with TootSDK, you could build a client app that connects to these things. And then what we're doing is where there's variants, we're doing that under the hood in the SDK so that the app author doesn't need to care. And, you know, the eventual goal of that is like, well, OK, I've got my app Topiary. At the moment, you can connect to mastodon, you can connect to Pleroma as well. And I believe PixelFed instances. And as a user, you just connect your account and you can use my app for wherever your account is. And to me, that feels quite, quite powerful. Right. It's like it's I'm not dictating 'Oh, this is only for Mastodon. No, only our finest artisanal posts and toots.' "

Daniel: "Toots!"

Dave: "You know, it's. Yeah. So I don't really know what I'm trying to say other than I think. Taking a step back politics to one side, all I really care about is this ability to to have our cake and eat it with this stuff, you know."

Daniel: "That is cool. That is really cool. By the way, I love the fact that you're saying politics and it's really just, you know, politics, like something you can actually discuss about and it's not about denying people human rights or something, which is somehow something that politics also means these days."

Dave: "Yeah. Yes, yes, I'm I'm old school. I'm not not talking about political tribalism, I'm talking about differences of opinion."

Daniel: "Right. Right. Political tribalism. I love that phrase. I should incorporate that into my vocabulary or something."

Daniel: "I wanted to tell you something else, and I have in the meantime decided that I'm not going to tell you, because actually you can look in our proto show notes and probably see the link. But so I am like preparing a talk for this Friday. So what is that? May 12th, I want to say. I'm flying to Amsterdam tomorrow to AppDevCon. Say hi if you see me here. If you see me there, by the way! If you listen to the show, I will have stickers and pins with a very cute and cool TelemetryDeck logo. And I'm preparing a talk for that about A-B testing, and I have found the perfect way to illustrate it, because it just fits with my hobbies, and it's a very cool aesthetic and everything. And I wanted to tell you about it on air, but I'm just not going to!"

Daniel: "If you want to know, you just have to watch the talk. I'm sure it's going to be live streamed or streamed later on the AppDevCon website, or you just have to come to Amsterdam and meet me or just find me and listen to the A-B testing talk. It's going to be cool. It incorporates with the fact that about two hours ago I pushed a button, and now the A-B testing feature for TelemetryDeck is actually live."

Dave: "Eeeey"

Daniel: "Shocking announcement here. I'm very, very much soft launching this feature right now because I want to work on the UI some more, but I wanted to have some version out. If I'm talking about A-B testing in general, I want TelemetryDeck, the platform, to be able to do it somehow, even if the user interface is not exactly the way I like it right now. And so it was really important to me that I had this out of the door before I leave the country. But yeah, meet me at AppDevCon. Come say hi."

Dave: "I'm just looking at, you sneaked me a message with a screenshot of your slides and - "

Daniel: "I did send you a few screenshots."

Dave: "Dave: "Yeah, I I wish I could be there, but it looks like that's going to be an awesome presentation. Is it being recorded?"

Daniel "Yeah it's going to be, I'm very sure, because they have on their website that they have recordings from all the previous years. And I used to be at this conference years ago when it was still called M-DevCon, Mobile DevCon, and even then they had recordings. So I'm very sure there will be a recording, and I will share it with you and the general audience as well."

Dave: "Awesome. Well, Daniel, I don't know if you can hear this on my mic. I think it's actually coming through, but we've got weather here right now."

Daniel: Oh, you have weather. So earlier this week we talked about earthquakes in NZ, and now you have weather."

Dave: "We have torrential rain and some parts of the country have got flooding. I'm OK where I am, but if anybody can hear any noise on this show, it's probably the horizontal rain hitting my window."

Daniel: "I did hear it a little bit, and I was like, okay, I thought it was static or something."

Dave: "No, no, it's it's it's weather with a capital W."

Daniel: "Oh, wow. Take care in this case. I think I'm going to have to leave you soon because I do have to pack some more because I have to pack about 14 billion stickers and several metric tons of pins into my suitcase."

Dave: "I'm wondering if I can convince you to post one to New Zealand, but I'll talk to you about that after the show."

Daniel: "Aw, we can make that happen. I did send you the sticker. You'll just have to decide whether you want the smaller one or the bigger one. We have ones that are about 1.5 centimeters, and we have some that are about 2.5 centimeters. I like the smaller ones better because they're cuter, but the bigger ones are cooler if you don't put it on your shirt but on a backpack or something."

Dave: "Yeah, I sure we'll talk about that in the iMessages and yeah. So to wrap things up on the show, Daniel, where can people find you online?"

Daniel: "Right, people can find me online at telemetrydeck.com, which has released its A-B testing feature, and you should really check it out. We've also incorporated a tiny, tiny A-B test into the application itself, both in the mobile and the web version, where we exchanged the logo for a slightly, slightly different version just to have some A-B testable data to see if you log in with that logo. That's just some inside baseball for you. People can also go to @daniel@social.telemetrydeck.com. That's my Mastodon account. And if you want to find me on BlueSky, I am BreakTheSystem there, and the full account name is something like BreakTheSystem.B-S-K-Y.social. That might change in the future when I have figured out how to do your own domain thing. What about you, David? Dave?"

Dave: "Dave, yes, definitely Dave when when talking to me.

Daniel: "I've been anticipating your username already."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah, I guess it gets a little confusing. Username wise, I'm always David. But actually, personally, if you talk to me, just call me Dave. But anyway, yeah, no, I am @davidgarywood@social davidgarywood.com over on the Fediverse. And again, that is always linked in the show notes. You can find my apps at lightbeamapps.com. And if trigger kit is released anytime soon, you'll be able to find it hanging off of my organisation on GitHub, which is just GitHub dot com slash lightbeamapps, all one word. And then trigger kit will be off there somewhere soon, hopefully."

Daniel: "Fantastic. Awesome. Then I am really looking forward to you to speaking in the fortnight. And in the meantime, I'll see you on the various socials and on the Internet. Have a great day and catch you later. Byeee!"