So after twenty-something years on social media, along with mailing lists, messageboards, usenet, this is a topic I think about literally every time I have to add, change, migrate, delete my account as I migrated from platform to platform like some virtual vagabond between text-driven city-states. A virtual vagabond with no worldly goods, no name, no history, and completely invisible to all. To exist, I must apply to the City Leader, and if accepted, I get a name, a nice studio apartment, and visibility as well as contact with other humans after watching a short commercial every five or so humans. If I leave, am thrown out, or the city is burned down, I can’t take anything the city gave me with me. By ‘gave’, I mean ‘loaned’ btw; none of those things were actually mine.
All the discussion of whether or not to federate with Threads were interesting in that in general, it’s kind of pointless. A server instance isn’t a democracy; the owner’s opinion is the only one that matters. If you don’t like it, leave. And I don’t argue their right to do so; they’re paying the bills, doing the upgrades, eating grapes with robot butlers, I don’t know their lives. Federated means anyone can run their own not-twitter or not-reddit; go for it. All you need is money, free time, and the knowledge of how to register a domain name, get, run, secure, and maintain servers, and install and configure the program, lure people in, and avoid breaking any national or international laws. Like I said: I really seriously do not argue the owner’s right to decide anything for their server. i know how to do all those things and I ran several websites and archives: I wanted a nap before installation step.
Fediverse is a massive step in loosening the stranglehold megacorporations had on our ability to shitpost in peace and talk about our cats without feeling stalked by people wanting to sell us shit or sell our browsing habits, blood pressure, and underwear size to those who will the try to sell us deeply individualized shit; it’s the circle of life, man.
Wow this got long but feelings.
So at this point–two decades and change of social media, the rise and fall of social empires, so much virtual vagabonding across the virtual desert to find a new city-state…I don’t think it’s too early to consider getting around to a productive discussion of how we go about separating the individual identity from the community and define what is theirs to keep no matter where they are. If there was ever a place and time to start building a model, it’s where all the city states are allies and the individuals can interact with each other no matter what city they’re in. The account transferability in Mastodon is a really good start, but it’s not a solution, much less the solution. It’s a beginning.
I don’t expect to have a working, finished, flawless product in six to eight weeks or six to eight months; I expect it to slide in three weeks and two days after the announcement that it’s ready for alpha testing and immediately break the first time a tester opens it; it’ll be another month before it goes into testing again. I expect it will be a weird buggy mess of wtf after months of virtual warfare and everyone will hate it before the rough draft of the design documents are even released. I expect there will be one weird guy who really thinks everything should be written in Rust because he’s insane and never sleeps. Five to eight devs will dramatically quit; one will quietly move to Utah and farm emus. None of them will be the Rust guy; you’re stuck with him. I expect the working version after testing is done will be hated by everyone and probably kind of crappy. But it will also be amazing, because as of it’s release–no matter how shitty, buggy, or how many inexplicable design choices are made–the individual exists outside of being community property and that no matter where we go or how much we pissed off that admin or if our city-state was nuked from orbit, there are things that are ours and we get to keep them.
I like this comment but in the end this is something most people won’t want, me included, because a decentralized identity would just mean an even better way to track and get yourself doxed for people who want to remain unknown to rulers of city states
Oh God no, that’s not where I want this to go; that pretty much defeats the entire point. This is to expand our options so we can use the plural form of ‘options’ and not the singular and I’m optimistic there will be more.
I’m a QC analyst and we are fully Agile, so I’m required to attend ever. team. meeting. Discovery, story point estimation, design spikes, any day can be poorly handled emotional regulation day and whoever’s feeling it is making it everyone’s problem when all we want is to finish a few maintenance items and maybe add a comma to some text. Though the testers have nothing to do with this after story point until there actual code migrated to one of the testing environments, we are forced to bear witness to entire dev teams made up of people from three to eight countries, whose only common language is English and as often the only native speaker, I am the only one who can’t mutter not very goddamn quietly in my native tongue that no one else understands; this may have been my motivation at one point to learn Welsh on Duolingo. A Project Manager making three times more than anyone else in the room sometimes swoops in during SCRUM two weeks into our sprint cycle to be perky at us and–on far too many occasions for this to be random–informs us the acceptance criteria had a couple of updates before swooping back out to PM something else’s life. We all hate her quietly until someone who went to check JIRA notes there are double the number of criteria and the user story is not the same in any way;. then everyone but me gets to hate her verbally with no one the wiser. I maintain bitterly grudging silence because everyone in the room speaks English, sometimes better than I do, and they have been in Texas long enough to pickup conversationally hostile Spanish. Our scrum master will either grimly pretend it’s always been this way or very blatantly not care.
At final demo as the tester, I will perform a dramatic rendition of ‘page with comma’ and ‘title:justfication left’ or run batch scripts in terminal while they watch absolutely nothing happening and nod wisely. Half the people in attendance wears suits for a living and have never used a computer; they have secretaries for that. Two worked with my mom and are quietly judging my performance and find me lacking. One stakeholder will ask a thousand questions, five of which have any relation to what we’re doing and I am expected to answer with no discernible change in my performance. Someone is watching TV and can’t be fucked to turn down the volume. Everyone else sits in eerie silence and I might hear a snore. Every one of these people are considered qualified enough to decide if we’re did a good job and sign off on it so we can finally end the sprint and the code can be added to the next release to production. No one feels a sense of relief or satisfaction; at least one dev hasn’t slept since the PM destroyed our lives and may be clinically insane.
Our sprints last four weeks with a prep week in between; we will experience some version of this cycle of dev hell roughly eight times a year and sometimes involving the legislature making their lack of time management all of our problem. Only one sprint will go as planned. One.
The worst part is; despite this, knowing full well what hell is before me, I went back to college for software development of my own free will.
As much as I disagree with him, like a LOT, I do think Nilay from the Verge has a point. It does feel like the “new” internet we have become used to over the years is starting to shift. It feels like people are becoming more and more fed up with social media and want to go back to just hanging out with virtual strangers online. Like, arguing on Twitter with people is all well and good, but it’s also miserable and stressful and it’s been getting worse. Not to mention Elon has no idea what he’s doing. Mark is pivoting away from Boomerbook and Instagram because one isn’t growing and the other is an amalgamation of every other feed based social network, and Reddit is burning down. At this point it was only a matter of time before Corporations set their sight on the Fediverse. Nothing else is working.
The problem with that is that big corporations have no idea why the Fediverse exists and think selling personal data and being free is enough to attract people. Hell, I didn’t even know what the Fediverse was until Reddit immolated itself so I don’t expect your average person to be aware of the inner workings either. That being said it doesn’t take long to realize that the Fediverse is something altogether different once you are a part of it.
There isn’t an algorithm pushing negativity to the top, and each instance is like a person inviting you into their house to stay if you want; as long as you don’t mess up the furniture you are good. At the end of the day you have been allowed in so you should be on your best behavior and follow the rules. You can argue all you want but you are not in control, and if you want control open your own house. Simple as. You can also stroll through the neighborhood if you want as long as a wall hasn’t been built around other houses.
So after twenty-something years on social media, along with mailing lists, messageboards, usenet, this is a topic I think about literally every time I have to add, change, migrate, delete my account as I migrated from platform to platform like some virtual vagabond between text-driven city-states. A virtual vagabond with no worldly goods, no name, no history, and completely invisible to all. To exist, I must apply to the City Leader, and if accepted, I get a name, a nice studio apartment, and visibility as well as contact with other humans after watching a short commercial every five or so humans. If I leave, am thrown out, or the city is burned down, I can’t take anything the city gave me with me. By ‘gave’, I mean ‘loaned’ btw; none of those things were actually mine.
All the discussion of whether or not to federate with Threads were interesting in that in general, it’s kind of pointless. A server instance isn’t a democracy; the owner’s opinion is the only one that matters. If you don’t like it, leave. And I don’t argue their right to do so; they’re paying the bills, doing the upgrades, eating grapes with robot butlers, I don’t know their lives. Federated means anyone can run their own not-twitter or not-reddit; go for it. All you need is money, free time, and the knowledge of how to register a domain name, get, run, secure, and maintain servers, and install and configure the program, lure people in, and avoid breaking any national or international laws. Like I said: I really seriously do not argue the owner’s right to decide anything for their server. i know how to do all those things and I ran several websites and archives: I wanted a nap before installation step.
Fediverse is a massive step in loosening the stranglehold megacorporations had on our ability to shitpost in peace and talk about our cats without feeling stalked by people wanting to sell us shit or sell our browsing habits, blood pressure, and underwear size to those who will the try to sell us deeply individualized shit; it’s the circle of life, man.
Wow this got long but feelings.
So at this point–two decades and change of social media, the rise and fall of social empires, so much virtual vagabonding across the virtual desert to find a new city-state…I don’t think it’s too early to consider getting around to a productive discussion of how we go about separating the individual identity from the community and define what is theirs to keep no matter where they are. If there was ever a place and time to start building a model, it’s where all the city states are allies and the individuals can interact with each other no matter what city they’re in. The account transferability in Mastodon is a really good start, but it’s not a solution, much less the solution. It’s a beginning.
I don’t expect to have a working, finished, flawless product in six to eight weeks or six to eight months; I expect it to slide in three weeks and two days after the announcement that it’s ready for alpha testing and immediately break the first time a tester opens it; it’ll be another month before it goes into testing again. I expect it will be a weird buggy mess of wtf after months of virtual warfare and everyone will hate it before the rough draft of the design documents are even released. I expect there will be one weird guy who really thinks everything should be written in Rust because he’s insane and never sleeps. Five to eight devs will dramatically quit; one will quietly move to Utah and farm emus. None of them will be the Rust guy; you’re stuck with him. I expect the working version after testing is done will be hated by everyone and probably kind of crappy. But it will also be amazing, because as of it’s release–no matter how shitty, buggy, or how many inexplicable design choices are made–the individual exists outside of being community property and that no matter where we go or how much we pissed off that admin or if our city-state was nuked from orbit, there are things that are ours and we get to keep them.
I like this comment but in the end this is something most people won’t want, me included, because a decentralized identity would just mean an even better way to track and get yourself doxed for people who want to remain unknown to rulers of city states
Oh God no, that’s not where I want this to go; that pretty much defeats the entire point. This is to expand our options so we can use the plural form of ‘options’ and not the singular and I’m optimistic there will be more.
Your comment was a roller coaster of emotions. I loved it!
I’m a QC analyst and we are fully Agile, so I’m required to attend ever. team. meeting. Discovery, story point estimation, design spikes, any day can be poorly handled emotional regulation day and whoever’s feeling it is making it everyone’s problem when all we want is to finish a few maintenance items and maybe add a comma to some text. Though the testers have nothing to do with this after story point until there actual code migrated to one of the testing environments, we are forced to bear witness to entire dev teams made up of people from three to eight countries, whose only common language is English and as often the only native speaker, I am the only one who can’t mutter not very goddamn quietly in my native tongue that no one else understands; this may have been my motivation at one point to learn Welsh on Duolingo. A Project Manager making three times more than anyone else in the room sometimes swoops in during SCRUM two weeks into our sprint cycle to be perky at us and–on far too many occasions for this to be random–informs us the acceptance criteria had a couple of updates before swooping back out to PM something else’s life. We all hate her quietly until someone who went to check JIRA notes there are double the number of criteria and the user story is not the same in any way;. then everyone but me gets to hate her verbally with no one the wiser. I maintain bitterly grudging silence because everyone in the room speaks English, sometimes better than I do, and they have been in Texas long enough to pickup conversationally hostile Spanish. Our scrum master will either grimly pretend it’s always been this way or very blatantly not care.
At final demo as the tester, I will perform a dramatic rendition of ‘page with comma’ and ‘title:justfication left’ or run batch scripts in terminal while they watch absolutely nothing happening and nod wisely. Half the people in attendance wears suits for a living and have never used a computer; they have secretaries for that. Two worked with my mom and are quietly judging my performance and find me lacking. One stakeholder will ask a thousand questions, five of which have any relation to what we’re doing and I am expected to answer with no discernible change in my performance. Someone is watching TV and can’t be fucked to turn down the volume. Everyone else sits in eerie silence and I might hear a snore. Every one of these people are considered qualified enough to decide if we’re did a good job and sign off on it so we can finally end the sprint and the code can be added to the next release to production. No one feels a sense of relief or satisfaction; at least one dev hasn’t slept since the PM destroyed our lives and may be clinically insane.
Our sprints last four weeks with a prep week in between; we will experience some version of this cycle of dev hell roughly eight times a year and sometimes involving the legislature making their lack of time management all of our problem. Only one sprint will go as planned. One.
The worst part is; despite this, knowing full well what hell is before me, I went back to college for software development of my own free will.
As much as I disagree with him, like a LOT, I do think Nilay from the Verge has a point. It does feel like the “new” internet we have become used to over the years is starting to shift. It feels like people are becoming more and more fed up with social media and want to go back to just hanging out with virtual strangers online. Like, arguing on Twitter with people is all well and good, but it’s also miserable and stressful and it’s been getting worse. Not to mention Elon has no idea what he’s doing. Mark is pivoting away from Boomerbook and Instagram because one isn’t growing and the other is an amalgamation of every other feed based social network, and Reddit is burning down. At this point it was only a matter of time before Corporations set their sight on the Fediverse. Nothing else is working.
The problem with that is that big corporations have no idea why the Fediverse exists and think selling personal data and being free is enough to attract people. Hell, I didn’t even know what the Fediverse was until Reddit immolated itself so I don’t expect your average person to be aware of the inner workings either. That being said it doesn’t take long to realize that the Fediverse is something altogether different once you are a part of it.
There isn’t an algorithm pushing negativity to the top, and each instance is like a person inviting you into their house to stay if you want; as long as you don’t mess up the furniture you are good. At the end of the day you have been allowed in so you should be on your best behavior and follow the rules. You can argue all you want but you are not in control, and if you want control open your own house. Simple as. You can also stroll through the neighborhood if you want as long as a wall hasn’t been built around other houses.
Okay, I apologize for missing something; I don’t disagree with any of that. Did I give the impression I did?
I was only saying that Nilay actually brought up a good point.