To Blygger discord this hopes to turn into a thread

A few random thoughts

(1) the technical design values of Blygger seem very old-school, Web 1.0 (not meant as criticism or praise, just an observation). No more centralized platforms, everybody acts as their own publisher of static content, the way Tim B-L would have wanted it.

(2) the user level design values are explicitly biased towards a particular model of communication. I'm not sure I share those biases, but it's your design so not going to argue about that (unless you want to). But it raises a kind of meta-question about protocol design, should something at this level be as general as possible (which probably would help adoption) or tuned to particular use cases?

(3) The [tk] stuff is neat but seems mostly orthogonal to the rest of the protocol. It could be split out as a general markdown/html extension.

(4) scaling issues. eg index.json is defined to include every item ever published. Should I put my 27K published wiki blocks into it? Probably not! But (a) would be cool if I could and (b) if this is heavily used, in a few years everyone will have the same problem.

Kyle matthews Blygger Studio (that was fast)

Got it running, some notes if they care

I don't really understand this tk stuff. I mean it is the equivalent of /AskClaude but it doesn't do the wrapping, and doesn't have fine-grained control (but it DOES have the ability to add extra prompt which is obviously good (although in Logseq you can just add in the text why not))

Not actually sure how it handles the prompt, lets see...

publish button has no feedback (or is broken) oh it had an error (at the top where you couldn't ee it)

Cannot publish: fragment exceeds 1000 characters. Well then why did you generate a big chunk of text?

OK figured out the [TK] syntax, wasn't obvious. So it DOES retain the prompt, that's good. And in a more structured way than I have been doing with Logseq.

The published version doesn't include the prompt or any indication of AI-generation. Which I guess can be a choice! SHoudn't be the default though. (Looks like the protocol supports this fully so this is a reader choice?)

Subscription

The resolve step in subscription is unintuitive and no feedback?

Allows duplicates which are a pain to remove.

Reading

Somehow all of these blygs look kinda unpolished, but I suspect that is deliberate.

no feedback on thumbs up (and, I realized later, this is not like a like button, its purely local and never gets shared)

A refresh didn't pick up Venkats latest. Not sure what the mechanics are or how long updates take to percolate. (and needs a refresh button if it isn't automated)

Responding

OK it is so fucking weird not to have any kind of reply affordance. I mean I guess I can understand. But it would be trivial to add something reply-like without changing the protocol, so why make it go underground? I'm sure this is discussed somewhere.

This is on venkat blyg, should check out others

Weird Kyle somehow responded to a blyg of mine, in a thread with just an eyeball emoji. But he is using the same software I am...I'm confused 👀 Huh Apache getting into the ontology business Home - Apache Ossie (… — Kyle's blyg

What you can do is transclusion. But the frag selector seems borked, only showing me entries from one blyg and not the one I ased for.

Random

All of the above activities are quite independent of each other, and I think the protocol design wants to think of them that way. So they don't all need to be bundled in a "studio". Although it doesn't hurt for convenience, it might give people the wrong idea

Sep 30th, 2026

Implementing threads and pinning so Venkat can reply to some of the stuff above.

I have to say I Do Not Get the design philosophy here. It seems like it is trying to make responding as awkward and difficult as possible. So – Venkat wanted to respond to something I had written. Yay, dialog! First I had to implement threads, but that's OK. But then he tells me I have to pin it so it can be forked so others can include it as a quote.

So someone who wants to respond to me has to ask me through a side channel to pin my post first? You gotta be kidding (note: I may just not understand the model here).

The alternative seems to be to pin everything by default, then you get a Twitter-like model where posts are immutable. But that seems to be discouraged.

I'm pinning this because I'm interested in responses, and its not the sort of thing I'd be likely to want to revise.

A discordant political note

The presence of Elon Musk as some kind of hero of maintenance is a turd in the punchbowl for me.

Whatever else Musk may be, he is also a fascist lunatic racist eugenecist. This sounds like invective but it is also 100% factual. He is personally responsible for an all-out assault on the institutions of American government – important parts of the machinery of civilization. Whatever he represents, it's the opposite of maintenance – he is a destroyer of infrastructure.

Yeah he also builds some, and at least some of his innovations are useful and important. There are some reasons to admire Musk for his technical and organizational accomplishments. And perhaps his purported goal of being of service to making are sincere and Brand sees a fellow big-thinking-world-savior. They probably hang out at the same high-end conferences. That's more salient to Brand than the fascism, fraud, and lunacy that he spews on Twitter.

BUT – we have to look at the full record, and Musk has destroyed more systems than he's built (hm is that true, would have to quantify it). The DOGE effort that he led was a deliberate and sytematic attempt to destroy or corrupt the machinery of government, the sort of thing Brand is encouraging us to take care of.

US federal agencies targeted by DOGE - Wikipedia

Brand has a history of wanting things both ways (the Wendell Berry blowup, which also involved an enthusiasm for space colonization now that I think about it), eventually the contradictions catch up. TODO explanation needed

The lack of female representation as noted in Unsung review. Less obviously egregious than Musk, but probably a bigger omission. Actually, one other instance of female besides Statue of Liberty – the book is dedicated to Brand's partner "who maintains him". Yeah no shit, maybe one future chapter should be dedicated to the largely unsung work of basic human biomaintanence, mostly women's work which is a big part of the problem.

This is a huge blind spot – not just with Brand, it didn't occur to me either until it was pointed out. Oh well he has 6 more volumes to write so maybe he will address this vast unsung enterprise, that which really keeps the thing going.

OK I am completely confused about the status of "replies" in Blygger. The 0.3 spec says both "a stub is a response" and "a stub is not a reply". I don't understand the difference. And if its too obscure for me to grasp it probably needs to get clarified if this is going to be a widely-shared protocol. blygger-spec/docs/protocol-v0.3.md at main · blygger/blygger-spec · GitHub

will blyg about this in hopes of a response if not a reply haha.

I suppose this is an aspect of the design principle "this is a network of soapboxes, not a conversational medium". I not only don't like this rule, I think it's incoherent, as the confusing language indicates. Are you trying to technically legislate non-arguments? I suppose a lot of that kind of thing is tedious and boring, especially when it is across ideological lines, but calling it something else probably isn't going to help.

Oh actually I just figured out the difference (I think): "reply" denotes a kind of 1st-person style of direct argument, where person A and B are talking back to each other. "response", or citation, implies that you are talking to a 3rd party about a 2nd party. A is talking about B to C, where C is the audience. Isn't there a senate rule about that?

Ask Claude

• Yes, you've hit on exactly the right analogy. Under Senate Rule XIX:

• All speeches must be addressed to the Presiding Officer. Only the Presiding Officer may be directly addressed in speeches; other members must be referred to in the third person.

• In most cases, senators refer to each other not by name, but by state, using forms such as "the senior senator from Virginia" or "the junior senator from California."

• So the structural logic is identical to your reply/response distinction: a Senator never directly addresses a colleague on the floor — they speak to the Chair about the colleague. Senator A addresses the Presiding Officer (C) about Senator B. Direct second-person address between senators isn't the form debate takes...

• That seems like a crisp way to clarify the spec. The distinction is real and meaningful — it might just need a sentence in the docs that makes the rhetorical direction explicit, perhaps something like: "a stub is addressed to readers, not to the author of the cited post."

Yes, you've hit on exactly the right analogy. Under Senate Rule XIX:

All speeches must be addressed to the Presiding Officer. Only the Presiding Officer may be directly addressed in speeches; other members must be referred to in the third person.

In most cases, senators refer to each other not by name, but by state, using forms such as "the senior senator from Virginia" or "the junior senator from California."

So the structural logic is identical to your reply/response distinction: a Senator never directly addresses a colleague on the floor — they speak to the Chair about the colleague. Senator A addresses the Presiding Officer (C) about Senator B. Direct second-person address between senators isn't the form debate takes...

That seems like a crisp way to clarify the spec. The distinction is real and meaningful — it might just need a sentence in the docs that makes the rhetorical direction explicit, perhaps something like: "a stub is addressed to readers, not to the author of the cited post."

Hm maybe, I think it needs better naming or it will cause a lot of confusion. Why not "citation" as the primitive if that is what they are? It was explained to me as like quoting a tweet, so maybe call it a quotation?