Meeting notes april 1st, 2025

Quick catch up with Sam Gbafa, founder of TinyCloud, who I've worked with hacking on various local first / user owned data / identity stuff for a while.

He didn't make it to ATmosphereConf, but is interested in ATProtocol. Like I've been telling everyone, 34M+ DID based account identities and user owned data on a PDS is a very good starting point for discovery and distribution of your apps today.

TinyCloud is working on a sovereign data protocol. It re-uses some concepts from Kepler, built at SpruceID. The core of it is a permissioned key-value store. Maybe also use UCAN? UCAN may still make it into ATProtocol at some point. Will point Sam at ATProto Private Data Working Group when that spins up.

Challenge: many people are building in this space! Malleable Software, personal data, LLM agents. Which protocols do you have to build, which can you build on top of, how do you interop, what is your unique approach to the market / adoption / business model.

Some similarities to Tonk, I mentioned User & Agents, Familiar, Unternet, the Automerge work at Ink & Switch, and that I share an office with Huge.

A number of teams are building on top of Automerge, and are planning to adopt Brooke's new Keyhive E2EE sync + capabilities permission model, which was designed specifically to work with Automerge's CRDT model & local first.

Talked about Bee Computer as an example of cheap hardware that is linked to centralized cloud storage again.

Sam has Poaster as a side project, to go from Telegram to Twitter posting. Is going to add Farcaster and Bluesky support. I wrote this up previously as Threadstorm Builder, my own ATProto to a "Knowledge Graph Notes" lexicon is what this has evolved into. From personal, multi-player, private notes, to selectively publishing microblog or full "note" sized info.

HOPE conference is coming up in NYC in mid August. Talking about an Unternet event (with Web Applets, MCP, ATProto and related) and maybe Causal Islands or similar adjacent thing and collabing on that. Will intro Sam to Parabl and Rudy Fraser in NYC.