AT friends #6: @chaosgreml.in (aka Bryan Guffey!)

@jakesimonds: So I'm curious about Atlassian, because I used Jira at work and it seems that Jira is a world. So I saw that you have the roundup , do you think jira is social media?

@chaosgreml.in: That's a really interesting question. Really what happens in Jira is a bunch of people have a lot of conversations about work and getting work done and that is kind of like social media.

And honestly Jira has a feed. There's a gadget you can put on a dashboard that's like a reverse-chronological feed of both the things that are happening in the instance but also you can filter to just the ones that are related to you and the same thing in Confluence.

My relationship to Jira and Atlassian goes back to 2007 when I was in a fraternity in college, it's the nation's oldest and largest queer fraternity, Delta Lambda Phi , and I was the president of my chapter because I don't know how to do anything without being in charge.

And I went to school for music theatre, but the other option was going to be computer science. And so I graduated, I wanted to stay involved with the fraternity I got involved volunteering doing I.T. help. We were an all-virtual organization – relatively young, founded in the '80s, compared to other youth fraternities – and they were using like an ancient...I think it was Mambo or Joomla CMS to store information about the fraternity. You only ever got information through email, and we were like, this is terrible.

So I went looking and actually I discovered Confluence which is Atlassian's enterprise wiki, and Atlassian at the time had a very permissive Community licensing program. You just had to be some sort of non-profit.

I have a real fondness for the company, too, particularly because of their vision which is effectively to make every team in the world more effective at getting work done.

And I am a person who really thinks teams and groups of people are like the coolest things ever. Because you, like, choose to do things with other people when you can do them alone and that's really neat.

And also because I have ADHD I hate how long things take sometimes, and often you don't just get to do things you want to do you have to to do the things you have to do.

So I am personally super passionate about, how do I give you an hour more at home with your kids. I am not particularly interested in work except the things that I like doing so I want to give us more time for those things. So yeah Jira is like a weird type of social media but it's only social media that's about getting the work in front of you done. So it's a little different, it's like Linkedin but for one company and only focused on work.

With the ATmosphere and Bluesky, what are you excited about?

I am excited about the explosion of engagement recently, so people building more and more things. It seems like it was quiet for a bit, but in the last two to three months it's really started happening again.

I was one of those kids who could not wait to be on facebook, I was on twitter when you could only text twitter, and I'm a Bluesky elder.

I was on twitter for a long time and didn't really understand how to use it, because I was on facebook. But then I used to make facebook mad all the time by talking about white people. I got to the point where I had a whole months suspension from facebook and so that made me more interested in twitter because I was still looking for a place to talk, and to speak. And I made a lot of really great connections over there in a couple of spaces that I operate in, like the Fat Liberation space and ended up starting a pretty successful podcast called Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back which is currently on hiatus and hopefully coming back this fall.

So yeah when everything started going down with twitter it was kind of crushing and really sad because of the community we had all built there and I think Bluesky is fascinating because of how easy, like Bluesky is like early twitter in the sense of like, you can build anything on top of it. The API is open.

This is a little bit of a turn, but something we have in common, and you more so than me...you were an equity performer?

Yeah, so I graduated from college, did a show in Gettysburg a remount of the broadway musical Civil War and then did a tour, a Theater Works educational theater tour, the story of Harriet Tubman and played all the nice black people.

Theater Works is a national company that does a bunch of different tours, and we did basically the Northeast quadrant in the winter of 2007, which was really bad.

The winter or the tour?

The winter. The tour was a blast except that it taught me that I do not wish to do theater that wakes you up at like six in the morning, performing a kids show.

I was an actor. Can I ask, I find that now having the tech community as my primary community I find it's different than being around theater people. Do you feel that way?

Well, expand on different.

Sometimes I feel like the theater world was on one side of the spectrum of everyone talks about their feelings, all if anything that was too much for me. But now over here in the tech world I almost feel like we aren't as good at communicating and maintaining relationships.

Gotcha. So I think there's a couple of things. I do understand that experience. However, I would say that I think some of that has to do with the fact that a lot of tech people spend most of their time not actually like...when you're in theatre the whole thing is about relating to each other constantly.

That, like that is the work and that's a very weird thing. Like, social services is a lot of that. Care work is a lot of that but knowledge work is not really that, right? You're interacting with the knowledge more than the people often.

But what I find is when I stop and take the time to actually talk to people it's not that different and in fact what I find is that people in tech are often – minus those people who, they are in tech because they are extreme introverts and they do not particularly wish to have lots of conversations – at the tech companies I've worked at people are dying for connection.

But we often experience the tech world through this very diffuse social media mirror where everyone is the last tweet that they made or the last post that they made and so we don't get that level of depth and engagement with individuals and actually that's one thing that I like about meetups is that opportunity to know people in person.

Lightning Round

You have a magic wand, you can bring back one deprecated social experience that used to exist, doesn't anymore, what do you pick?

Live Journal.

Historical Figure you'd love to follow on Bluesky.

Cat Pausé . She was like fat liberation's Martin Luther King Jr.(understanding that she was white and he was Black). Just an incredible academic and person who passed away a couple of years ago just after she and I got the opportunity to meet and begin to collaborate.

Something that exists in software that you wish there was a clone of on Bluesky. For example, for me Calendly. I really like Calendly and I wish there was an Bluesky version.

LinkedIn.

Do you have any unorthodox daily drivers for your setup, for example I have a vertical mouse, that I love.

Honestly my dogs. I have nine of them. So what that means is I spend a lot of time in the living room just on my laptop which has been particularly good because that means I can't have as many windows open.

Oh one other, I have a Pavlok , and it shocks you. It's aversive conditioning, or a reminder for something.

Theatre related one, do you have a favorite role you've ever played?

Jim in Big River .

Do you have a role that you want to play someday?

Benny in In the Heights.

You have to pick one of these two options. It's a professional zoom meeting at 7PM or 8AM?

8 AM.

You said somewhere you were a singer on a cruise ship. Let's go back to an average day on that job, can you name three things that you're gonna see in the course of your day?

I am going to see really old people. I worked on a cruise ship of very rich people, like that was the deal about that cruise ship. I'm gonna see folks doing drills, like the staff doing drills. And then I'm also going to see the ocean.

That's it. Is there anything you want to say...questions I should have asked?

There's one other thing I want to tell you about that I'm working on. And it came out of the whole waffles thing, and then the Link thing and the way that people were treating Hailey. She built this little service called dontshowmethis using LLMs that labels replies to her posts if they're bad faith. And we talked about how I don't love this context collapse, and partially the thing I don't like is how everything on social media people feel the need to turn it up to 11, so everything is the worst thing ever or the best thing ever.

And the other part is that there's this thing that's happened which is people just love snark. Or like being disingenuous or laughing at other people's pain so one of the tools that I'm working on is something called Kindling and the idea is to take feeds that already exist, process them, and remove the most inflammatory posts.

[It will] give you a feed that is built not to censor what people are saying but instead to surface the most factual and even if it's emotional what it's not doing is we're not going to see a bunch of people being mean to each other for no reason. And so to remove that part of the internet cause it's the one part of the internet that I just I find no use in.

I find no use in laughing at the pain of other people or being mean to other people because it makes you feel good I don't care what reason it is.

Yeah, I agree.

Because it's also the stuff that sets things ablaze. It turns into, like, you know, pile-ons and cyber-bullying and all of that and it's just not needed.

You can say things in a nice way. You can say things in a mean way and still not be rude. We can be honest, and direct, and not dicks.