jklb.social's anti-manifesto

(inspired by: https://venkateshrao.com/twitter-book/chapters/chapter_655913909086384128.html )

Contradiction 1:

I want more from social media, while spending less time there.

I want/expect social media to:

entertain me

keep me connected to people I care about

connect me to new people

connect me to a scenius of like-minded awesome people

find my dream job for me

find me a life partner

Despite those lofty expectations, I also hate how much time I spend on social media. So I still want all those things, yes. For free. With less time invested on my part.

jklb.social tries to thread this contradiction by being designed to make you more sociable while you are on social media. Interacting with a post is literally just as easy as even seeing the next post. Keybindings are better than mouse-and-click for things you do 10+ times. jklb.social is also an opportunity to break the decades-long habits you have with traditional social media UI.

Contradiction 2:

My favorite thing about jklb.social is the agency that comes from intensely customizing the experience. No one else gets that.

I think LLMs are going to render software unrecognizable. jklb.social is me making bold, opinionated choices only possible because of 1: the difficult engineering work of the Bluesky team building & maintaining the indices as well as the larger ATProto community making something great for building on and 2: because LLMs can take care of the rest.

I am trying to build something interesting that I like to use, and that other people might like as well. This project is also, though, a sandbox for me personally to try out the latest and greatest of LLM models and tooling. And I am building it a little bit on a bet that as tooling around LLMs improve/if the models keep improving more people can do what I am doing. And so the dreamy-dreamland goal of jklb.social is partly to make a template that others could point their LLM towards, and say "I want that but with less X and more Y."