Hawk Ticehurst
@hawkticehurst.com
1.6K followers 280 following 490 posts
UX Engineer @vscode.dev. He/Him 🕸️ hawkticehurst.com 📍 New York, NY
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hawkticehurst.com
I created a new feed for trending developer topics on Bluesky. Go check it out!

I've loved @hipstersmoothie.com's Web Dev Trending, but have for a long time felt like it could be refined and improved. So with @danabra.mov's "we can just do things" I felt inspired to just make the change myself!
hawkticehurst.com
Also the response from Nirav (CEO) in the forum I linked to –– which confusingly/incorrectly has @jakelazaroff.com blog post as the SEO image –– didn't really acknowledge the core critique and cut the convo short basically saying it would be too hard to have nuanced discussion that reaches alignment
hawkticehurst.com
They're financially supporting one of DHH's open source projects (Omarchy) and have apparently been promoting it on Twitter. They've also sponsored another Linux project (Hyprland) that has a very problematic creator/community.
Hyprland is a toxic community
drewdevault.com
hawkticehurst.com
This makes me really sad.

I absolutely *adore* my @frame.work laptop and have been such a big fan of the ethos and values that they have talked about striving for as a company up to this point.

I feel so depleted by an industry that seems happy to ignore politics if a technology is cool enough.
Framework supporting far-right racists?
Hi, I am not exactly sure how best to frame this, but recent events have got me wondering where exactly Framework, as a company, stands with regards to human rights and equality. If I understand cor...
community.frame.work
hawkticehurst.com
Finally, if you *can* store private data in a PDS, do we start to see more and more data in the ATmosphere become private / inaccessible to the collective?

Does the ATmosphere start to become a layer of the internet strictly used as a form distributed data storage?
hawkticehurst.com
If you build a genuinely valuable / novel service that uses atproto data, your moat is likely the “secret sauce” of that service.

If everyone has access to the same data, we see increased competition to figure out the secret sauce or make a better sauce, yes?

Result: A win for consumers?
hawkticehurst.com
If you sell ads, your moat becomes your ability to make a great product and/or your ability to make the best algorithm for connecting ads to people.

What happens if someone starts selling a great ads-algo-as-a-service? Does that become a collapse of value or an expansion of value for the ecosystem?
hawkticehurst.com
I can think of a few answers, but I’m curious if anyone else has talked or written about this yet?

A) The usual — sell ads
B) Build a genuinely valuable service
C) Apps maintain the data moat by encrypting their data
D) What else?

There a few interesting consequences and sub Qs for these answers…
hawkticehurst.com
7. What happens when data is no longer the “moat” for businesses?

If anyone / anything can access any data in the ATmosphere where does value; aka money; aka the thing that keeps this ecosystem going come from?
hawkticehurst.com
6. Is there anything stopping an AI lab from traversing the entire ATmosphere, scraping PDS data, and using it to train their models?
hawkticehurst.com
5. If private data is possible (one way or another) does that mean you could theoretically build an app / business where you do not have to pay or be responsible for hosting the data?
hawkticehurst.com
4. Is there a way to store private data in a PDS?

If not, is it possible to encrypt your lexicon data / app data before sending it to a PDS, then decrypting it on the other end?
hawkticehurst.com
2. If the answer to Q1 is yes, what happens if a rich, massive, ecosystem of apps start showing up in the ATmosphere?

How does Bluesky handle that?

Do we eventually see a scenario where Bluesky starts charging individuals or 3rd party apps for the cost of hosting their PDS / their data?
hawkticehurst.com
Folks who know #atproto, I have Qs I still haven’t found answers to and would love any thoughts / opinions you have!

1. Given that most PDSs are hosted by @bsky.app, if an atproto app comes along that gets really popular, does that mean Bluesky is now covering the hosting costs of that app’s data?
hawkticehurst.com
Update #1: Having a post always pinned at the top of the feed was getting annoying, so I’ve updated this post to now be pinned in a random location further down in the feed timeline.
hawkticehurst.com
That’s about it!

I’ll also make sure to update this thread with any major changes I make to the algorithm or guiding principles.

And finally, if you have feedback about these principles, suggestions for keywords or users that should be included please respond to this post!
hawkticehurst.com
While some may not prefer this, I strongly believe it is important that we (dev community) have the opportunity to engage in discussions about the more challenging topics and events that unfold in this space.

To clarify, however, posts that promote hate and harm will still *always* be removed.
hawkticehurst.com
Politics:

This feed will seek to filter political keywords/discussions, with one major exception.

Political topics scoped to the developer space *will* be included.

This means, in general, posts about people like DHH or Guillermo Rauch will be included, while posts about Trump or ICE will not.
hawkticehurst.com
6. Posts that are about an unrelated topic will be actively removed.
7. Posts that *directly* promote hate or harm towards a person or group of people will be removed. To be specific, this means posts that promote racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and so on will be removed.
hawkticehurst.com
4. Strive for a balance of posts and topics. This will naturally ebb and flow with trends, but in general one topic should not overwhelm this feed.
5. Game dev is intentionally not included in this feed. I consider it to be a large enough sub-niche that it should be filtered to its own feed(s).
hawkticehurst.com
Guiding Principles:

1. The algorithm should always be evolving. The dev industry is dynamic and so should this feed.
2. Include a wide variety of developer niches.
3. Include a variety / diversity of voices in the curated user list. Please offer suggestions! I want this list to grow.
hawkticehurst.com
Currently, the algorithm is comprised of:

1) A list of developer keywords used to match against post and image alt text
2) A curated list of user accounts that represent well known or interesting voices in this space
3) Filtering logic for unrelated topics
4) Logic (from Graze) for ranking posts
hawkticehurst.com
There are several key principles I’m using for this feed and think it’s important I share them here.

The motivation is to be transparent about how I’m thinking about the algorithm for this feed and leave space to have conversations that allow it to evolve to fit community wants/needs.
hawkticehurst.com
[Pinned Post]

Do you like this feed? Please repost, share, and like it!

Also read more about the philosophy guiding this feed and share feedback below.
Reposted by Hawk Ticehurst
jakelazaroff.com
put another way: i don't want your data—not just from an ideological "users should be in control" perspective, but from a pragmatic "this makes my app harder and more expensive to run" perspective

we've been so focused on making it easy to scale up that we've accidentally made it hard to scale down
jakelazaroff.com
i like making little web apps for myself/family/friends. the most annoying parts — the parts that drastically increase the scope, from "a bunch of HTML, CSS & JS files" to "a web server and database" — are auth+persistence. so i am very excited about atproto including a user-owned solution for both.