skyline

Skyline

✨ Bring your own algorithm for Bluesky ✨

Skyline allows you to create your own AI algo-feeds (or use one of our pre-defined ones). Try it out here!

My goal with this project was to create a social media that makes you happy, not just optimizes engagement.

We have the following feeds:

• One post from each person you follow (let's not forget the shy poasters) 🙈
• Mutuals feed, to keep up with your friends 🤗
• Wholesome-only, to remind yourself of the best in humanity ❤️‍🔥
• What's Hot, but only in your preferred language 🌐
• Make your own algorithm! Just tell the AI what you want to see and what you don't 🤖

The way custom algorithms work in Skyline is via LLM embeddings. You can write a positive prompt "I want to see more of...", and posts matching will be brought to the top, and a negative prompt "I want to see less of..." which decides which posts to push to the bottom.

Ultimately, my interest in bring-your-own algorithm comes down to encouraging more love & kindness in the world. And I found this had a bigger impact than I thought it would! You can try this for yourself: does browsing Wholesome put you in a lighter, better mood than browsing Following?

In the long-term, I imagine safe MDMA-analogs in our coffee and other wild transhumanist stuff as the way, but in the short-term I think we'll be going the memetic route! That means kinder algorithms, kinder chatbots, new secular "religions", etc.

Everyone knows "social media makes you angry" - but maybe the tech is finally here for "social media makes you kinder"?

Getting Started

This is a Next.js project bootstrapped with create-next-app.

First, run the development server:

npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

To-do List

Here is the to-do list I use to track progress - feel free to contribute!

• Project "Management"
  • Share timelines
  • Delete timelines
  • Edit timelines
• Project "Smooth As Balls"
  • Handle Retweets
  • Cache threads to Local Storage
  • Log out when session over
  • Stay logged in across sessions
  • Full context for wholesome feed
    • getThreadQuickAndDirty() which will do it's best to recover the thread from (1) cache and (2) already-loaded posts
  • Refresh token usage for infinite sessions
  • Info about App Passwords in Login Page
• Project "Better Feeds"
  • Language-specific What's Hot
  • Reddit-like scoring algo: recency * quality, with a minimum threshold to appear
  • Infinite feeds - query with the next cursor
  • Unify custom-timeline & built-in timeline concept
  • NSFW what's hot (https://staging.bsky.app/profile/emily.bsky.team/post/3jup7xawstc25)
  • Three new base-feeds:
    • "In network" - basically two-degrees of following instead of one (optimize this by requiring at least x% of people you follow to follow that other person; or only taking the top 200 or whatever it is; maybe at some entropy / randomness to give small accs a chance)
    • "Liked Posters" - your timeline + the 100 posters most liked by your follows (recently)
    • "Liked Posts" - your timeline + posts recently liked by your follows
  • Custom feed settings:
    • Base: What's Hot / Mutuals / Following
    • Sorting: Best / Combo / Recent
    • Show replies: Yes / No
    • Multiple prompts
    • Language filter: english / portuguese / japanese / farsi
    • Muted keywords
  • Automatic infinite feeds - when you're 6 posts away from bottom, load more
• Project "Nice"
  • Sticky timeline selection
  • Dark mode
  • Auto-refresh feed
• Project "Full Client"
  • Like tweets
  • Repost tweets
  • Post top level
  • Click and see profiles
  • Follow / unfollow people
  • Click and see threads
  • Links in Posts
  • Post replies
  • Quote post tweets
  • Notifications
  • List likes, reposts, quote posts (quote posts you can do by using the Bsky search endpoint & looking for the link; https://staging.bsky.app/profile/liz.rip/post/3jup5h3rucq2g)
  • Click images to see expanded
  • "Interactions" tab on profiles
  • Delete tweets
  • Own profile link + editing
• Project "Performance Optimization"
  • Don't render out of view - it's lagging intensely on mobile
  • Much smaller images! (both in size & jpg compression)
  • Figure out anything else that's slow
• Project "DMs"
  • DB-based DM system
  • Bot @skyline.gay account to notify users of new DMs
• Project "Lists"
  • Ability to use custom list as the baseFeed for a timeline
  • Role Play: automatically create a new list from someone else's following (https://staging.bsky.app/profile/lka.bsky.social/post/3jumlzmjnf32u)
  • Own followers list
• Project "Graysky Integration"
  • Expose timelines as an API
• Project "Analytics"
  • Keep stats on logins, usage time, feed %, created timelines, etc.
• Project "Social Audio"
  • Skyspaces.net (https://staging.bsky.app/profile/geeken.tv) integration
• Project "Marketplace"
  • Get a notification when your timeline gets 20+ installs
  • Timeline Library: a place that lists shared timelines, which you can then install
  • Mute-list marketplace, globally applied
  • Sort marketplace items by whether someone you follow made it, or has it installed
• Project "Fleets"
  • Custom fleets
  • Auto-post link to fleet
• Project "Search" (We should have at least as advanced search as Twitter!)
  • Capture every tweet via Firehose (similar to https://github.com/ericvolp12/bsky-experiments) & put them in Postgres
  • Allow user to query by text, date published, and author
  • Register every post the user has seen & allow searching for only posts they've seen before
• Project "Alt Text"
  • Generate Alt Text for every new post Skyline comes in contact with & save in the Database
  • Use GPT-4 to give people compliments about their photos
  • Automated "[compliment]. Alt-text: [alt text]" replies from @skyline.gay to every post it transcribes
  • Use alt-text in custom timeline embeddings, for much greater filtering abilities
• Project "Autist Power Tools"
  • Digital Nomad: find everyone (in following, network, or similar) in X city
• Project "Cache"
  • Cache every text:embedding pair (with no reference to the post itself)
• Misc
  • "Posted from Skyline" flair
  • "Uses Skyline" flair
  • Private prompts feature (e.g. saved in DB, executed on backend, if you like it you can pay the creator to keep it after the trial)
  • Code-powered timelines (ran in a very restricted VM with a very restricted version of BskyAgent - read only, basically)
  • Github Link in Footer
  • Create a list of top developers who worked on Skyline (with their profile links) and put it in the sidebar
  • Created-on info on profiles: https://staging.bsky.app/profile/ansh.bsky.team/post/3juq55sdqpk2h
  • Minecraft Server (https://staging.bsky.app/profile/cam.fyi/post/3juwweycwa72h)

Bugs list

• Installs don't seem to increment
• Very slow on mobile
• Load more (upwards at least) doesn't load replies / threads
• Load more downwards takes your scroll with you
• Images in Quote Tweets