I'm sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco on Wednesday night after a lovely day at Sync Conf and an evening dinner with ATProto builders.

Last week, I was in Montreal Saturday through Thursday for ATProto Community Sessions.

This coming Saturday, I leave for a week in Berlin, to speak at EuroSky Live and a few other ATProto community events.

Yes, that's a lot of travel. Honestly, too much travel to pack into one month, and that's following up on my Salt Spring Island > Bristol / London > New York > back to Vancouver that filled my August.

And the ATProto Sync dinner had a lot of people wondering about that.

Part of it is of course that if I'm traveling for ATProto community events, of course I'm promoting them and posting about them, and highlighting the people and projects that are there. And those posts get boosted by the community so they spread wider than me going for a fall walk at home.

Oh yeah, and I also work part-time for Ink & Switch, which also involves travel (Barcelona and London earlier this year, and this San Francisco trip was for that).

It's not sustainable for me to do this level of travel. If you're wondering how I'm able to do it at all, it's because I have a contract with Bluesky to ship the next community conference. That lets me at least afford to burn a lot of opportunity cost in doing ecosystem work. (Note that I'm also subcontracting multiple other conference producers but I'm at least not paying out of pocket).

I'm not going to get into more ATProto ecosystem strategy here, and no one should feel bad for me. It just really struck me, that of course, the social media view of who I am, and how/why I'm doing things isn't actually going to be connected.

Let it highlight at least that there are many people putting many hours into growing an ecosystem, reach out if you need help, and that we can put time in to build important things together.

This doesn't need to get broadly shared anywhere, hence only posting about it on my alt.