Rethinking the Future of Bluesky: Challenges and Possibilities of a Decentralized Social Network
The fact that a banned account in one unit can simply join another underlines both the promise and the difficulty of decentralization. What one person sees as resilience, another may see as irresponsibility.
in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
['Social aggregation' features like global search, notifications, feeds, and shared moderation are what] blows the “personal sites” paradigm out of the water. People are social creatures, and we want to congregate in shared spaces. We don’t just want to visit each other’s sites—we want to hang out together, and social apps provide the shared infrastructure.
The web Alice created—who she follows, what she likes, what she has posted—is trapped in a box that’s owned by somebody else. To leave it is to leave it behind.
Those megabytes of JSON you got on your way out are dead data. It’s like a branch torn apart from its tree. It doesn’t belong anywhere. To give a new life to our data, we’d have to collectively export it and then collectively import it into some next agreed-upon social app—a near-impossible feat of coordination. Even then, the network effects are so strong that most people would soon find their way back.
Open social frees up our data like open source freed up our code. Open social ensures that products can get a new life, that people can’t be locked out of what they have created, and that products can be forked and remixed. You don’t need an “everything app” when data from different apps circulates in the open web.
Observations on 6 years of journaling
["Rubber-ducking" is a programming term referring to people solving their own block by explaining it to another person; the lister can be replaced with a rubber duck.]
my journal is my rubber duck.
the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce.
pagination is more humane than infinite-scroll since it gives users a natural breathing point where they can decide whether they want to keep going
How I coined the term 'open source'
I am the originator of the term "open source software" and came up with it while executive director at Foresight Institute. Not a software developer like the rest, I thank Linux programmer Todd Anderson for supporting the term and proposing it to the group.
I said little, but was looking for an opportunity to introduce the proposed term. I felt that it wouldn't work for me to just blurt out, "All you technical people should start using my new term." Most of those attending didn't know me, and for all I knew, they might not even agree that a new term was greatly needed, or even somewhat desirable.
Instead of making an assertion that the community should use this specific new term, he did something less directive—a smart thing to do with this community of strong-willed individuals. He simply used the term in a sentence on another topic—just dropped it into the conversation to see what happened.
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
[The term "barefoot developers" is a riff on the Mao government's 1960s "barefoot doctors" initiative to train people from rural villages so they can serve as healthcare providers in their undeserved communities.]
[Barefoot developers] are technically savvy and interested in solving problems for themselves and people around them, but don’t want to become fully-fledged programmers. They still live within the world of end-user-facing applications.
they rely on low and no-code tools. And they do wildly complex things within them, pushing these apps to their limits.
This describes my technical capacities well. Though sometimes I can surmount the "command line wall", I almost always prefer other ways.
[If the thought of him dying pleases you] because you think it will end our present horror, you are the problem.
Have you heard the expression self-defeating prophecy? It's a prediction that prevents what it predicts by predicting it.
CSS can do nesting now!
How We Encourage Self-Improvement at Buffer
Unlimited books
Every teammate receives a free Kindle when they join Buffer and can expense any digital or audiobooks they choose. No approvals needed. No need to tie it directly to work.
Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic. My favourite example of this is how Byrne Hobart broke out with his piece on the 30-year mortgage. It’s kind of surprising that this kind of post had such influence - it’s wonky, it’s not written for a general audience whatsoever. But it turns out that people think and talk about their mortgages a lot, and like to feel competent when they do. Reading that piece equips them with a kind of legitimacy to speak on the topic.
One lesson hiding in plain sight here is that most of the audience of any successful post does not actually read it. They are told it by someone who did read it. There’s a primary audience who carefully reads the piece and does the cognitive work of “restructuring their consciousness” (see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy) around good writing. And then there’s a secondary audience, who are re-told the content, either verbally (including group chats, podcasts, Youtube) or in other oral formats like Twitter.
This is why, paradoxically, to reach the widest audience, you write to the narrow audience. Your objective as a writer is to give your primary audience material they’ll want to re-tell. They do the work of translating it to wider audiences in specific contexts; you do the general articulation in rich detail.
My first open source psyop - postmortem
[Information asymmetry is not only about lies, but whether someone can hear the correction or feedback.]
For many people, terms like ActivityPub, Fediverse, bridge, protocol, server, toot, boost, and Webfinger are alienating and confusing. They subtly imply that unless you understand what all these words mean, this might not be the place for you; in the same way crypto terms—blockchain, web3, wallet, keypair, nonce—are a wall of jargon that scream "you don't belong here" to normal people.
To send an email, you don't need to know what SMTP, IMAP, POP, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC are. To browse the web, there's no requirement to understand HTTP, DNS, servers, SSL, TTL, load balancing, or caches. The most significant impact these protocols have is perhaps that users never have to think about them.
Over time, you start repeating yourself, rewriting the same paragraph for different people, reposting the same message in different groups, reframing the same problem with different jargon. And when something finally connects, it often feels like luck. Like you just happened to be visible at the right moment.
This is the system we pretend works: discovery as noise, identity as content, and visibility as a full-time job.
Zero-sum Thinking and the Labor Market
Boomers could trade 4 years of college for 40 years of middle-class security (more or less). Today's 25-year-old faces a negative net-present-value on that same deal. When the fundamental economic bargain breaks down, it flips everything - your discount rate, your risk tolerance, your entire worldview, again, leading to zero-sum beliefs.
Back in 2019, I applied to over 150 jobs when I graduated Western Kentucky University. LinkedIn had their little QuickApply feature, but I wrote so many essays, did many projects, and endless interviews. The entire process made me better, but I was rejected from most of the jobs.
I had a 4.0 GPA, was valedictorian with three majors, worked three jobs for most of my time at university, sold cars, ran D1 Track and Field for a year, and yet, I only got into my first job because the recruiter and some people at the company took a big chance on me (and I only got there because they had a blind resume process where they hid the school. Says a lot about a lot).
The only reason I got my chance - a truly lucky break - was because people bet on me. A computer would have instantly rejected me because I didn’t meet some arbitrary qualification. AI has spurred us right into the depths of what David Brooks calls the rejected generation - endless nos from platforms that are meant to serve as human interfaces (slot machine grabs across dating, investing, and now jobs), but really end up dehumanizing the whole process.
This is the casino economy in action. Again, just like dating apps and meme stock trading, the job market has created the illusion of abundance by replacing meaningful friction with meaningless volume. It has become a dopamonster, to borrow Scott Galloway’s word. More applications, more swipes, more trades - but every extra option raises the noise-to-signal ratio, making the median outcome worse for everyone.
The Web is a cool thing because anyone can just put stuff on it. It is the largest town square bulletin board ever devised. Back in the day, your ISP would even give you your own website! I don’t think they do that so much any more, but there are more cheap or free options than ever — hell, you can host a little website on GitHub.
And it used to mostly consist of little things made by people, and that was pretty cool! You would see more than four websites in a day. Websites would have colors! They wouldn’t all be designed for a three-inch-wide screen and then just scaled up when you’re at your desk! Twitter once let you set your own background image for when people looked at your profile.
Look at it. Look at it, you stupid baby. Look how outlandish or shocking or extreme or dramatic, Whatever it is. Just shut up and look at it, so Home Depot will give me a quarter of a tenth of a cent.
At least when I write a lot, you know it’s because I wanted to write it. Also I’m probably not lying to you because someone paid me to do it!
But we didn’t really get that. We got, I guess, sparkling autocomplete — a fancy chatbot that can string words together in the most inoffensive people-pleasing customer-service voice you’ve ever heard.
What even is this thing we’ve invented? Stack Overflow, but you only get the answers people scramble to type first so they can get the points? Oh and they just lie to you sometimes? Why would I want this?
Knowing what I want to offer is more important than knowing what another person expects.
I don’t want to reward myself with things that undermine my efforts.
My empathy extends beyond my capacity; therefore, my boundaries should not exist at the edges of my empathy.
When I feel self-righteous and sure of myself: tone it down about 25%. When I feel uncertain and hesitant: crank it up about 25%.
The Hero as Flexible Bureaucrat
[Bureaucrats that are incorruptible become like machines (until they're replaced by machines), and this inflexibility counterintuitively makes them anti-human.]
“I’d bend the rules too, if I knew it would save millions of lives”. Yes sure of course so would I, but would you bend the rules to save someone an hour of unnecessary paperwork? Knowing that if your boss found out he might use it as a pretext to fire you? That’s the kind of subtle, small-scale heroism that, repeated millions of times, creates a more humane society.
Corporations and governments are already rushing to replace many customer-facing jobs with language models. This makes a lot of sense if you take the State-eye view and see human bureaucrats as faulty robots. But if you see the work of a flexible bureaucrat as noble, sometimes even heroic - these are precisely the jobs we should protect.
The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction
we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn't disappear; it just moves.
The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.
friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.
The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it's been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.
When Mark Zuckerberg's Meta builds frictionless social interfaces, that cognitive smoothness is subsidized by somewhere, somehow, right? The same economy that produces simulated friends for the lonely American also produces understaffed air traffic control towers. The same investor class that funds "never think alone" startups also lobbies against infrastructure spending, or perhaps, housing.
Amazon's one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.
Compliance is the New American Dream
a world built on compliance might function for a while. But it will never lead. And right now, we really need people who can lead.
You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.
