Ben Werdmuller

As a (relatively) new parent, one of the questions that preoccupies me is: how can we show our son that anything is possible, and that he can be anything he wants to be? More specifically, how can we ensure that he knows that the templates and stereotypes laid out for him by society aren’t the only ways, or the best ways, to live a good life?

I was thinking about this last weekend at the memorial for my cousin Cort, who, among other things, sailed across the Pacific Ocean. The things he did were amazing — true adventures — but he talked about it so matter-of-factly that he made them seem like real things you could do. By simply existing and living his life how he wanted to, he broadened the horizons of the people around him, including me.

I’m grateful for all the people in my life who have lived outside of those set templates.

I remember going round to my childhood friend Clare’s house and learning that her dad had a room where he sat and wrote. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that this was something one could do, but here he was, doing it. (He asked me what I wanted for my birthday once, and I was too shy to ask for a signed copy of one of his Mr Majeika books, which I regret to this day.)

Humphrey Carpenter was the first time I became aware that using your imagination and harnessing your love of writing could be a profession, but writing surrounded me. My grandfather translated Crime and Punishment and Osip Mandelstam’s Journey to Armenia into English. As a young teenager in Oxford, my after-school job turned out to be a hub for interesting characters; for example, an odd man who regularly came in to use the photocopier turned out to be Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse mysteries. And in my adult life, my cousin Sarah has built an amazing career writing young adult novels.

My parents were staunch believers in doing things their own way, including by fighting for what they believed in as Berkeley activists. I’d lived in four countries by the time I was twelve, and knew about our family history across many more. I heard my dad’s stories about being in the US Army and protesting the Vietnam War afterwards, and about his own father’s leading role in the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia during the Second World War. I learned stories about Ukrainian Jewish villagers coming to America with nothing, Swiss textile merchants, diplomats, and avant garde film directors.

Conformity and parochialism were not on the menu. I’m grateful every day that this is the context I grew up with.

How the fuck do I live up to any of this? Let alone convey the same sense of freedom to our son?

You’d be forgiven for thinking, reading the above, that we were wealthy. We were not. There was a freedom inherent in mindset: if you were clever about it, you could do incredible things with meagre resources. But the world is less forgiving than it used to be towards people who aren’t independently wealthy. America in particular is designed to force people into a life of salaried work at the hands of another employer. Here, both your healthcare and your retirement savings are at the mercy of who you happen to be employed by; yes, you can get insurance and retirement plans independently, but they’re never as good, or as cheap.

If you already have resources, you have opportunity; otherwise, American society pushes you into pouring your labor towards someone else’s profit. Sometimes, people are tricked into a life of non-stop hustle as a way to find escape velocity — only to find that the hustle also is a grift on behalf of someone else’s profit. (Some investors I’ve spoken to speak of founder pedigree as a thing they look for; if you scratch the surface just a little, this resource independence is what it really means. You’re backable if you already have the freedom and network to build something.) Add this to the pervasive fear that sits just under the surface — of guns, of crime, of violence — and modern America seems to be set up to subjugate.

Some people share the white picket fence American dream, and I guess there’s nothing really wrong with it. But I don’t share that dream, and won’t be forced into it myself; I want our son to know, at the very least, that other dreams are available, and that he gets to choose his own adventure. He can settle in the suburbs somewhere in America with a 9-5 job, a two-car garage, and a backyard lawn. He can also live anywhere in the world, do anything he sets his mind to, and be exactly who he wants to be, whatever it happens to be. He could be President of the United States, or a revolutionary artist, or a social entrepreneur, or a spear fisherman off the coast of a small island in the Pacific. There is a multiverse of possibilities. Eleven months in, the world is his.

To really convey that well, I’ve realized, I need to be exactly who I want to be. Which is hard! The last decade was characterized by supporting my mother through a familial terminal illness, including redefining my life and moving continents to do so. We’ve lived through grief after trauma after grief after trauma, and at the same time I had to learn how to build a life and career in the US to be able to stay afloat. It was a constant state of stress and being constantly reactive to whatever was going on that felt like being trapped inside my own life. I made some very poor, harmful decisions while living in this state, as well as some other decisions that were just incredibly dumb. It hasn’t all been stupid, but I certainly haven’t emerged without regrets, and I often haven’t lived up to my own ideals.

But now I’ve got to switch gears and think about being an example for our son. You can’t convey a set of ideals without living up to them; it rings false. If I think that an untemplated life is more fulfilling (and I do!) then how can I do better to embody that and show that it’s a real possibility? How can I be Humphrey in his writing room or Corty sailing across the Pacific or my dad protesting the war in Vietnam?

If the possibilities available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I expose him to more? If the mindsets available to you are informed by the ones you’ve been exposed to, how can I show him that there isn’t one way to think or be?

Knowing that I’ll inevitably fail to live up to my ideals, what can I do to set him up well to live an amazing life?

Like I said, this is a question that preoccupies me. I don’t know what the answer is, or even if there is an answer. I hope the exploration will be enough.

Code is cumulative overhead. The more you write, the more you have to maintain over time.

Self-hosted infrastructure is cumulative overhead. The more you configure and run, the more you have to maintain over time.

Always watch your overhead and keep it as light as possible.

The only code you should ever build yourself is that which adds to your core value proposition.

The only infrastructure you should ever build yourself is that which adds to your core value proposition.

Given a choice where building something yourself or buying it off the shelf will both meet your needs, buy it off the shelf.

Given a choice where building something yourself or using an existing library will both meet your needs, use the existing library.

Given a choice where building something and not building something will both meet your needs, don’t build the thing.

Don’t let highly skilled developers build things that your team will then have to maintain, even if it looks like they can do so quickly, if a viable ready-made alternative is available.

Never build or run something yourself to save nominal amounts of money. You’ll easily outspend that amount in the time you take to build and maintain it.

Always know your core needs.

Always know your core value proposition.

Do less.

I’ve been absolutely laid out with a cold all this week. It feels pretty awful, not unlike how I felt when I had covid, but a million negative tests have let me know it’s not that.

Getting sick happens so rarely now (maybe once a year) that it comes with a wallop. As always, my prevailing feeling is, “I wish I could have my brain back.” I hate the brain fog most of all. There’s so much I want to do!

But for now, life is about drinking more tea, and getting through the day.

This is my monthly roundup of the links, books, and media I found interesting. Do you have suggestions? Let me know!

Books

Fiction

Ripe, by Sarah Rose Etter. Fuck yes. A heartstoppingly relentless, bold, knife attack of a book that cuts to the heart of the emptiness of living in Silicon Valley and everywhere. Every few pages I wanted to yell, “this, this, this.” I couldn’t put it down.

Nonfiction

Dancing at the Pity Party, by Tyler Feder. The thing about this kind of grief is that nobody knows what it’s like until it happens. The sadness becomes a permanent a part of you, lurking just under the surface, and nobody understands. The feeling of being seen is extraordinarily rare. This book made me feel seen, and gave me space to feel the sadness. I’m not OK. But I’m not the only one.

Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself, by Chuck Wendig. A sort of call to arms for writers, but here the arms reach out in a warm embrace and tell you to be yourself. It’s not about being published; it’s not about following other peoples’ rules; it’s about telling the stories that make your heart sing in a way that’s true to you. The advice here is rooted in kindness and written with such warmth, wit, and charm that I came away feeling like I had a true ally. Thanks, Chuck.

Notable Articles

AI

Media Startups Draw Less Backing, But AI Is A Bright Spot. I don’t know that it’s fair to count AI startups as media startups. Given the (justified) labor disputes going on right now, I’d offer that they’re closer to anti-media, and I’m not sure that I’d think of them as a bright spot. There’s plenty of room for AI to assist creatives, but of course the real money is in replacing them or devaluing their work.

AP strikes deal with OpenAI. This caught my eye: an example of OpenAI licensing content from a publisher in order to make its models better. Other publishers should now know that they can make similar deals rather than letting their work be scraped up for free.

The AI Dividend. I respect Bruce Schneier a great deal, but I hate this proposal. For one thing, what about people outside the US whose data was used? On the internet, the public is global. Wherever the tools are used, the rights infringed by AI tools are everyone’s, from everywhere. Paying at the point of use rather than at the point of scraping cannot be the way.

OpenAI and Microsoft Sued for $3 Billion Over Alleged ChatGPT 'Privacy Violations'. It’s important that lawsuits like this center on the use, not the act of scraping itself - the latter does need to be protected. One to watch.

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI. I think this is a legal challenge waiting to happen. While people who publish publicly online have a reasonable expectation that anyone can read their content, they don’t have a similar expectation about content being modeled and analyzed. There’s no de facto license to do this.

Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence. ““Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail in ways that will harm almost everyone.”

Climate

Phoenix’s record streak of temperatures above 110F ends after 31 days. 31 straight days of 110°F / 43°C heat. And then only a short reprieve before more of it. Ocean surface temperatures at over 90°F / 32°C. And still there are people who deny we’re in a crisis. Spoiler alert: it gets worse from here.

Banks vote to limit accounting of emissions in bond and stock sales. The single biggest way large entities seem to be reducing their carbon emissions is through accounting. Not by taking action to diminish the impact of the climate crisis before it’s too late; by changing some numbers on a spreadsheet. We’ve crafted an imaginary cage for ourselves where the physical world is secondary to our modeling of it.

This women-led philanthropy is redirecting climate funding. Directing funding from self-interested billionaire philanthropy to grassroots environmental justice organizations is wonderful to see. They’re so much more likely to actually have an impact that will matter. And they need so much more support.

Extreme heat prompts first-ever Amazon delivery driver strike. Climate change comes for package deliveries - not because of the flights, but because of the trucks. The back of Amazon trucks can reach 135 degrees, with no cooling system. These are the same drivers who have trouble stopping for water or bathroom breaks.

‘Double agents’: fossil-fuel lobbyists work for US groups trying to fight climate crisis. Greenwashing goes deep. Environmentally outspoken organizations should not hire fossil fuels lobbyists. There should be a list loudly calling out those that do. Otherwise it’s all just words.

Monday was hottest day for global average temperature on record, as climate crisis bites. And it will just keep coming. (The next day was hotter still.)

'Environment is burning', warns UN rights chief. Plenty of people argue that the climate crisis is overblown. I think they’re wrong. If anything, we need to be screaming about this more - and, I agree, calling out the deniers and green-washers. Billions of people will starve. Entire nations will become uninhabitable. It’s not some kind of conspiracy; it’s a call to action.

Eigg Electric. This seems like what a part of the future looks like: the island of Eigg has its own power, generated by renewable energy. Members of the community are trained and paid to maintain it. A power grid is not a bad thing for resiliency (see Texas), but I can imagine a world where community sources are federated, rather than run through a central power company.

Culture

“Write With Love” and Other Advice From Chuck Tingle. “How can I make this like me?” is something I’m striving to do better at in my creative work and my life as a whole. Words to live (and write) by.

Roald Dahl Museum Calls Author’s Racism ‘Undeniable and Indelible’. This is something we’re going to contend with as our son gets a little older. Roald Dahl is an influential children’s author (who lived where I grew up) who was also, unmistakably, a bigot with a deeply cruel streak. Some of these books are strikingly not okay.

Bigger influence on the inside. A lovely, personal reflection on (in my opinion) the best TV show ever made.

A Teenage Girl Is a Funhouse Mirror. I love this kind of short story: small, personal, revelatory. I wish I could write like this.

Democracy

Influencers Starting To Realize How The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) Will Do Real Damage. This bill will censor LGBTQ+ voices and far more. It’s a way to heavily restrict the internet not just with respect to harmful content, but also “controversial” content. It also mandates identity verification if you’re interacting with that content. It’s a deeply regressive way of looking at publishing. There’s still time to read up about it and tell your representative that you don’t want it passed.

A Black Man Was Elected Mayor in Rural Alabama, but the White Town Leaders Won’t Let Him Serve. How many American cities operate like this, either explicitly or in spirit? The answer is not going to be a small number.

Texas resigns from ERIC, a national program that keeps voter rolls updated. For a group of people that talks a lot about voter fraud, the Republican Party do seem to enjoy setting up the conditions to commit it.

Houston Chronicle reports Texas DPS trooper witnessing 'inhumane' implementations against migrant families crossing Rio Grande. Every American needs to know that these kinds of sick harms are being done to people, including small children, in their names. And every American needs to understand that some of their fellow citizens actually support it. We continue to be in a very dark place.

The opposition to Starmer has to begin now. I’m homesick like crazy, but between the Conservatives and the unabashed Thatcherism of supposed opposition leader Keir Starmer, British politics look pretty bleak. The plan outlined here is one (long-shot) path forward.

Immigration policies don’t deter migrants from coming to the US -- Title 42 and the border rules replacing it only make the process longer and more difficult. The only reason to make immigration more difficult, particularly for people who are seeking asylum from terrible conditions, is because you hate immigrants and want to hurt them. As it turns out, these stupid rules don’t even do what they claim to.

U.S. destroys last of its declared chemical weapons, closing a deadly chapter dating to World War I. The key word, of course, is “declared”.

Child marriage is still prevalent in the U.S. Here’s why. People against child marriage restrictions say they will infringe on religious liberty. 86% of children who are married are girls. So, let’s be clear: if you want this, fuck your religious liberty.

For Emmett Till's family, national monument proclamation cements his inclusion in the American story. An important designation that should never have been necessary at all. Notable that a memorial sign for Emmett Till was repeatedly stolen and shot. The sickness is ongoing.

Health

I am dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and the treatments that might save me are just out of reach.Utterly heartbreaking.

America Is Wrapped in Miles of Toxic Lead Cables. It’s not really mentioned in this article, but lead sheathing isn’t just used in old phone cabling. It’s in some modern cabling too, including underground and undersea cables used to provide internet. And the health risks are real.

Labor

UPS reaches deal with union Teamsters to avert strike. An example of why unions are great: a better wage secured for a large workforce, with better conditions. They weren’t asking for anything crazy: reasonable pay, guaranteed vacations, and air conditioning in the trucks. It’s just unfortunate that they didn’t have these things before.

UPS pilots won’t fly if Teamsters strike. Really interesting to see people from across industries and disciplines fight for better conditions at the same time. I’d say it’s promising; even hopeful. I would like to see them all succeed, and for more to follow.

Adam Pickets Everything. Adam Conover’s activism has been refreshing to see during the writer’s strike: not just picketing the studios but educating the public about what a union does and how a strike works at the same time. It’s also fun to hear about other entertainers I admire working hard to support the picket lines.

Life before cellphones: The barely believable after-work activities of young people in 2002. It’s probably not too controversial to say that ubiquitous internet has hurt everyone’s work-life balance. To see what should be normal life reflected in a “remember when ...” nostalgia piece is jarring. I remember this world!

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right. Exactly this. What this piece calls People Theory, I call motivation over metrics. It’s the same idea: there are no cheat codes for people. You’ve actually got to use empathy with each other and build a community made of three dimensional human beings.

Hollywood Studios Anticipate Writers Strike Lasting Until October. This feels like a good opportunity for a studio to become pro-union and scoop up every amazing writer in the business.

Media

I'm never going to trust your news organization. Heather Bryant is spot on as usual here: trust is a facet of human relationships and not something you place in an organization, company, or product. Using a more appropriate framing will help you figure out how to build the relationships your newsroom needs.

Merchant: How Silicon Valley mind-set begat Hollywood's strike. It’s an interesting grift in a way: VC-subsidized startups changed an incumbent industry enough that its existing companies began to think that these new ideas were good business. But they never were, and it ate them from the inside.

Bryan Goldberg: Why audience for online news is declining. I don’t think the web is dying, but it’s certainly not novel anymore - and you can’t depend on its breadth alone to gain an audience. This is yet another call for “niche” publications - i.e., outlets that know who they’re publishing for and go deep instead of wide.

Vox Media stops using Chorus, proprietary CMS, for its own websites. Honestly, every media company should get out of the CMS business and just use WordPress or another open source alternative. This is not your core value or competitive advantage. Build tools that support your journalism (and then open source those, too).

Local TV stations form new coalition to urge streaming reform. There’s the potential here to upend niche sports coverage on live streaming services, which in part work through local broadcasting. And the legal ramifications of designating live TV streaming services as TV providers would be interesting.

Media Is at a Unique Inflection Point. The subtext here is simple: to survive, media companies must know their audiences well (not just in aggregate) and serve their unmet needs directly. This has been true for a long time, but economics have sharpened the point.

Twitter Is Dying. Is it Time for News Subscriptions to Follow? Paywalls are not it - for the news business or for society. I personally think there’s a lot of mileage to be gained from patronage models, which have worked very well for both non-profit and commercial newsrooms - if their journalism really does provide a strong public service.

Threads isn’t for news and politics, says Instagram’s boss. To put it another way: Meta doesn’t want to have to worry about throwing an election. Meta wants us to focus on “sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment.” Newsrooms, be advised.

You (Yes, You) Should Start a Mailing List. If you own your relationships with your community, you’ll never be locked into any platform. Start a blog, start a mailing list - get out of the algorithmic content game. This is even more important if you make a living from your work. Parker is right on the money here.

Policing misinformation. “In general though, I think we should tread lightly.” This piece captures my opinion on the subject well.

How I’ve defied labels and enlisted the help of others to create my value proposition. A lovely conversation with my friend Roxann Stafford, who has inspired and taught me so much.

Nonfiction

Readme.Txt: A Memoir, by Chelsea Manning. A vivid, clear-eyed account of a series of lived experiences that nobody should have had to endure. As well as the story of her leaks and their aftermath, Chelsea discusses what it’s like to work in military intelligence in gut-wrenching detail. This memoir is one of those historical documents that reveal so much about their era. More than that, and most importantly, it tells the truth. An important book written by a brave, fiercely intelligent, and fundamentally principled human being.

Society

The truth about the women this Florida board says benefited from slavery. The idea that these women - or any enslaved people - benefitted from the degrading atrocity of slavery is disgusting. That a government is peddling this lie perpetuates the deep harm that was committed. The blind cruelty is unfathomable.

The world’s last internet cafes. A fascinating look into something that, for a little while, was a vital part of the global internet. They remain community hubs, even becoming de facto daycare centers, but smartphones and ubiquitous connectivity have left them struggling.

Schools Usually Call Moms. Disappoint but unsurprising data around gender inequality in parenting. I find the fact that schools are more likely to call mothers infuriating, to the point that I’ve experimented with creating a virtual call center number for both parents to share.

Connecting Europe by train: 10 EU pilot services to boost cross-border rail. Europe knows what’s up. I wish we could do this in the US - but there are so many obstacles.

View of 'man as hunter, woman as gatherer' upended by new study. So much of gender essentialism is self-feeding: the idea that men are born to be aggressive hunters was conducted by men who made assumptions based on contemporary societal sexism. Of course women hunted. Of course grandmothers hunted. There’s so much value in re-examining the prejudiced assumptions of the past.

King of the Netherlands apologizes for country's role in slavery on 150th anniversary of abolition. “King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands apologized Saturday for his country’s role in slavery and asked for forgiveness during a historic speech greeted by cheers and whoops at an event to commemorate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Dutch colonies.” Now do Zwarte Piet.

Technology

The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media. The fediverse is how every major new social network will be built for the next decade, and every media company will need to have a presence. Welcome to the BBC.

Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t. An enormously useful piece of informal research. Some folks will disregard this for the same reason they disregard why some people use Macs instead of Linux, and whatever. But if Mastodon wants to be an accessible network, these are all problems to solve.

Data Futures Lab Infrastructure Fund. This seems great: funding projects to create a fairer, more just data ecosystem, with a focus on teams who themselves come from impacted communities. I’m excited to see what comes out of it.

Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints. The more I learn about Elon Musk, the more I think he’s exactly the kind of entrepreneur that laws and regulations are there to protect us from. This seems like something Tesla owners could take real action on.

Esther Crawford on Twitter and X. Esther clearly comes from a different perspective and worldview to me, but her take on Twitter and X is uniquely notable given how tied up in the story she’s been. I honestly don’t know what to think, but this is interesting background.

Watch Out, Fediverse Users: The FBI Can Seize a Mastodon Server. This unfortunately stands to reason: the Mastodon instance where you make your home has the potential to be seized as part of an investigation. This is a downside of federation vs peer-to-peer, and is a reason why I have my own single-user instance. (Generally, though, it’s worth saying that I’d expect data to be subpoenaed rather than having the server itself be physically seized.)

Vision for W3C. “Our vision is for a World Wide Web that is more inclusive, and more respectful of its users: a Web that supports truth over falsehood, people over profits, humanity over hate.” I like this sentiment a lot but it also has the potential to cause accidental harms. Who defines truth? W3C members? Someone else?

The Arc browser is now available for all iOS and Mac users to download. Oh, hey, open release! I’ve been using Arc as my primary browser all year, and I truly love it. It’s a huge step forward in browser UX and while I don’t use every feature, I can’t see myself going back to the 1990s-style paradigm.

TETRA Radio Code Encryption Has a Flaw: A Backdoor. One reason of many why open sourced protocols are more secure: backdoors can’t be kept hidden and abused by manufacturers and state actors. This was a serious breach and had the potential to destabilize nations. Secret and proprietary never means more secure.

As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring. Every time a billionaire makes a boneheaded social media decision, a Mastodon community gets its wings.

Addressing Child Exploitation on Federated Social Media. One of the problems with decentralized networks is that really bad stuff can traverse across them. The fediverse has a child sexual abuse material problem. Filtering it out does not solve the core problem. How can the fediverse be a good actor here?

Apple slams UK surveillance-bill proposals. Stories like this make me wonder if we’ll ever get to a point where governments stop trying to backdoor encryption. Freedom from surveillance is a necessary prerequisite for free speech; observation always creates a chilling effect. These efforts aren’t about fighting crime. This is about power.

Dear Alt-Twitter Designers: It’s about the network! You can have the best tech in the world, or the loftiest ideals, but social media is about people and communities more than anything else. If you don’t have that, and can’t nurture disparate, diverse spaces that grow organically over time, you don’t have a social media platform.

Meta provides Facebook messages in Nebraska abortion case prosecution. Or: why real privacy legislation would also protect women seeking reproductive healthcare. These laws aren’t just a principle; they save lives.

Bluesky is under fire for allowing usernames with racial slurs. A cautionary tale to say the least. The linked PR with slurs removed from a username denylist is rough to see. Real, vulnerable apologies and strong action to correct would go some way, but it might be too late.

The whitening of social media. “To watch the doors that have been opened to so many start to close because of racism in particular is a slap in the face, especially when so many white allies don’t seem to grasp the quieter sides of racism. Racism isn’t always overt and loud. Sometimes it is the cloak of polite exclusion. It’s the whitening of spaces that previously welcomed diversity. It’s rules that stifle people of color under the guise of “fairness.” Fairness to whom?”

Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won't Be Easy. I agree that ActivityPub is the right choice for Meta and any company wanting to follow a similar strategy, for the reasons laid out here. I’ve been thinking about tools that might make adoption easier for startups and hobbyists.

Meta-provided Facebook chats led a woman to plead guilty to abortion-related charges. One of my nightmares is that something I helped to build would be used in this kind of prosecution. There’s an expectation of privacy built into the design of direct messaging apps, and designers have a responsibility to protect their users. They failed here.

How to Identify “Truthy” Tech Trends. I love Amber Case’s framing of “truthy” tech: hype-driven technologies that promise too much too soon, are driven by FOMO, and are intriguing because of their depictions in popular culture. There are plenty of examples to choose from right now, and this is a great guide to spotting them.

Permission. An interesting thought experiment: do we need Google, or does Google need us? At what point does the center of gravity change enough for us to consider it worthwhile to block Googlebot and come out better for having done so? Until recently this would have been unthinkable.

Lessons From the Catastrophic Failure of the Metaverse. Worth considering the number of grifters who swore blind that the metaverse would be a thing. Of course it wasn’t a thing. It was a fever dream embraced by people who have clearly never watched anyone actually use technology: a corporate boondoggle at best.

Meta unspools Threads. A lot of people in the fediverse are rightly worried about what the arrival of Threads (which is Mastodon-compatible) will bring. I think it’s probably a positive addition for most people, and Casey Newton’s writeup here does a good job of explaining why.

Fairphone 4—the repairable, sustainable smartphone—is coming to the US. The Fairphone is more properly referred to as a fairer phone - there’s still work to do to really make it equitable - but it’s great to see it being launched in the US. More products that have this focus on repairability and owner control, please.

CJEU ruling on Meta referral could close the chapter on surveillance capitalism. The impact of legislation like GDPR goes far beyond their jurisdictions, because it’s hard to segment a data architecture for just some users. This ruling that Meta must provide its service to users who do not consent to tracking and processing of their personal data is potentially seismic.

A few days ago I shared around an idea for an ActivityPub API product. The response was enormous! Here's the link again.

If you're potentially interested in building on the fediverse using this tool, I'd love to know a little bit more. If you have 3 minutes, could you please give me some quick feedback?

If you’re a developer who is interested in building on the fediverse using this kind of API platform, I’d really love to talk to you. Enter your email in the form above and I’ll get in touch. If we have a conversation about this, I’ll send you a $50 bookshop.org gift certificate as a token of my appreciation.

Website notifications are a blight. I never want a website to be able to notify me about updates; these messages are interruptive, and like the vast majority of app notifications, they tend to be part of some marketing team’s growth strategy rather than a conduit to actually useful information. (Product teams: if your notifications are there to drive traffic to a new feature or a promotion, you’re making the web worse. Stop it.)

Every browser allows you to prevent these notifications from showing up at all, but not all of them make it easy. For example, my primary browser is Arc; I love it, but it doesn’t expose notification preferences in its Settings panel.

Luckily, every browser engine allows you to go straight to its full, advanced settings panel. Here’s how to do it:

In a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Arc, Opera, Microsoft Edge):

Enter about:settings in the browser address bar.

Search for notifications and click on site settings.

Scroll down to Notifications and click through.

Then change the settings to the one you’d prefer.

In Firefox:

Firefox does surface notifications in its settings panel.

Once you’re there, search for notifications and then hit the settings button next to the Notifications heading.

Then check the box that says Block new requests asking to allow notifications.

Et voila! No more annoying pop-up messages. Take that, marketing departments.

When I was fifteen, I ran a little “e-zine” called Spire that was distributed on the cover CDs of various real, paper magazines. I thought it was pretty cool, and that nobody could possibly have known that it was run by a fifteen-year-old. (In retrospect, it was pretty obvious.) I interviewed people like Nicholas Negroponte and Roger Ebert; I opined about tech in a very nineties, use-a-dollar-sign-to-spell-Micro$oft sort of way; I explored hypertext as a format.

Somewhere along the line, I got it into my head that the ninth issue would be the epitome of what I was trying to do. I decided to rebrand. I went for dark mode, putting everything on a black background with white and neon-highlight text. Instead of the colorful, friendly logo, I used a chrome rendering of the all-lowercase word “spire”. And I numbered each release like an event. Instead of issue 1, issue 2, etc., the new product would be called Spire One, Spire Two, and so on. And the first, coolest version of this would be Spire Nine.

I was fixated on this name and the whole vibe of what I was making. Spire Nine. I’d say it under my breath sometimes. Spire Nine. Even now, I get a funny feeling in my chest when I say it, probably because it’s just so cool. Spire Nine.

It’s a lame name.

I bet Elon Musk says “X” under his breath sometimes.

It’s a measure of how beloved Twitter was that so many people are emotionally invested in its rebranding to X. It was such a deep part of so many people’s lives — it was the backchannel to reality for a lot of people — that removing it feels like a wound. Or, at least, that’s one way to look at it. Let’s be real: it was a multi billion dollar public company, not a beloved community public square. It supported itself through advertising dollars made possible by optimizing for and monetizing our attention. If it hurts, it’s because we bought the product.

Long before it was sold, it was already tarnished goods: an imperfect place with timid management where women and people of color were regularly subjected to abuse, that was used by grifters of all political shades to exponentially grow their followings with a comparative lack of scrutiny. But it was also a place where genuinely positive movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo could grow and thrive; where new writers and artists could find new audiences; where people from wildly different contexts and perspectives could meet.

Its sale solved a problem for its owners, who took Musk to court to complete the $44 billion transaction. It was already tanking. Not anywhere as fast as it has under his ownership, but the graphs were not going up and to the right.

And now the sale is long since done. Elon Musk, as Twitter’s sole proprietor and purchaser, is free to do as he wishes with it. Which, apparently, is to give it a name he thinks is cooler, repurpose its userbase to kickstart a completely different app modeled after China’s WeChat, give the hard right what appears to be free reign, and intentionally lose brand equity with the academics, activists, journalists, and artists who called it their home on the internet.

If you squint a bit, you could surmise that Musk decided he could use the sale to buy himself a few hundred million users with the app pre-installed on their phones in order to kickstart the thing he really wanted to build; his Spire Nine. (Spire Nine.) His original name for PayPal was X (Spire Nine) and he’s been sitting on the domain for years. This is a shortcut to getting to the equivalent of his teenage bedroom startup vision. That’s the kind of thing you can do if you’re a billionaire.

Of course, people have been leaving Twitter all over the place all year: nobody has to use Twitter, after all, and both Mastodon and Threads are providing a readily usable alternative for people who are sick of Musk’s apparently ego-driven changes.

It’s also possible that it’s a big tax write-off scheme, or that he’s high on his own supply (or just high) and is no longer capable of making rational business decisions, or that he’s trying to shake off his underwriters, or any number of other plausible and semi-plausible explanations. It’s hard to say for sure.

What we do know is that Twitter is gone, and each and every one of you reading this will be better off using a fediverse network like Mastodon or Threads instead. Or just posting to the web on your own website and reading other peoples’ updates using RSS. Or going outside and touching grass.

I’ve given Musk plenty of oxygen online, and I think I have to stop. The previous Twitter product was hyper-corporate and already broken and harmful. The new one is essentially irrelevant to my life. There are a lot of really good new things being made, and a lot of people doing great things, and a lot of good planning is happening in my own work, and I think it’s more productive to move forward than bog myself down in nostalgia for the past, let alone preoccupy myself with some billionaire’s teen-level ego trip.

So I’ll say it again: join me on the fediverse. Follow my updates on my own site. Subscribe to the newsletter. Start your own one of each of these things because I want to read them. And let’s forget about that other place.

(Spire Nine.)

Four decades ago, I was introduced to my sister. She remains the person I most look up to; although she’s technically younger than me, she’s who I want to be when I grow up. A remarkable human being who is a real point of light, not just in my universe, but in everyone’s. I’m proud to know her, let alone to be related to her.

Here are some ways you can know facets of her too. Your life will be better for it:

Every Thursday at 2pm PT / 5pm ET, she hosts a two-hour live radio show featuring independent and underplayed artists from around the world.

She writes and performs her own music, which you can find on various platforms including Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

And she creates so many other things besides that I don’t have good links for. Check out this cephalopod pottery (cephalopots?) as just one example.

She’s an ecologist and artist who cares about fairness and equality, and walks the talk in everything she does. Smart and funny and kind and right. The kind of person you want to know and can’t help but feel inspired by.

You should go follow her on Mastodon.

Thank you for being who you are, Hannah. And happy birthday.

I’ve been thinking about how to make it easier to build on the fediverse. Here’s a pitch for an idea I’ve been thinking a lot about:

This API service allows anyone to spin up a fediverse back-end with its own custom domain, accessible via a RESTful API with easy-to-use libraries in popular languages. It handles all the message handling and caching transparently, charging on a per-instance and resource-use basis.

Read more on Werd Cloud. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

I’ve been a technical leader since we started conceiving of the Elgg project back in 2003, twenty years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much — about leading teams, about running startups, about building projects — and I had to pick it all up from scratch, sometimes inventing processes and ideas from first principles. In fact, there wasn’t much of a startup scene in Edinburgh, Scotland, when I started my career, so almost everything I did was either from first principles or from what I’d read.

Since then, I’ve worked for startups and non-profits based in San Francisco, Austin, and New York City. I lived in the Bay Area and was steeped in Silicon Valley culture for over a decade. I’ve learned about building culture from very smart people while working at companies like Medium, as well as from the companies I supported when I was the west coast Director of Investments at Matter Ventures. Matter both taught me a formal framework for human-centered product design when it funded my second startup, Known, and gave me the opportunity to pass on that knowledge to startup founding teams and newsrooms when I joined the team. Later, I helped teach inclusive product design with Roxann Stafford as part of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms program.

All of this is to say: I’ve had to figure out a lot, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve had the opportunity to have some real wins and losses, and all of this has led to a theory about what works and what doesn’t work when you’re leading a technology team.

Everything can be split into two categories, so the joke goes, and sure enough, I’ve noticed two main schools of thought. I think these are well-illustrated through a real-world example drawn from one of the places I worked.

At this particular, unnamed startup, I joined as the engineering lead, but in reality was the de facto CTO. Everything technology-related rolled up to me, and I found myself in countless meetings about company strategy, often late into the night.

I learned very quickly that the previous technical leader had made a particular choice when he hired for his team. He noticed that engineers with poorer communication skills were not being hired by other companies, even if their technical skills were strong. So he decided that he would over-index on technical skill and deliberately not hire for communication skill. That way he could hire what he considered to be stronger engineers more affordably.

He had left the company and they’d had trouble finding another technical lead. The engineers had essentially kept the lights on by themselves, writing code at a furious pace to keep the entire company afloat. Technical debt had built up and built up, and they were spending most of their time on maintenance. They were often re-directed to work on new tasks and pet projects when old ones hadn’t been finished or well-documented. There was next to no testing, either through automation or with users. Meanwhile, the rest of the company complained that the engineers weren’t productive. There were suggestions that code output be measured, or that the team move to one-week sprints to — I am not making this up — make them write code twice as fast. They were great humans, but they’d been placed in an impossible position without the tools that could possibly hope to lead them to success.

Every aspect of this was counter to my own intuition. I took a step back and had some productive conversations with an old boss, who ran technology at a much larger and more successful startup. He confirmed to me that he would have made different choices every step of the way (and helped me feel a little less like I was insane).

One school of thought, then, is this code-led, metrics-driven approach: management by spreadsheet. The other is a qualitative, human-centered approach: management through empathy. A central question is whether you prioritize the things you can measure (lines of code, minutes of engagement in the product) or the motivations of the humans involved (the needs of the people who use your product and the people who build it).

I’m closer to the second camp. The map is not the territory.

My approach to technology is holistic: someone at that same company described it as “supporting the whole engineer”. How could it be anything else? Everybody brings their whole self to work, whether it is acknowledged or not. If you lead a group of people who are engaged in any directed endeavor, whether it’s building software or organizing an event, the experience of being a part of that group has to be intentionally designed. At work, we call that “company culture”, although it’s really community-building: every team should be thought of as a community of human beings who have their own creativity, intelligence, skills, motivations, and preferences.

The output of a technical team is not code. Code is a means to an end, and is only one part of the complete breakfast of tools needed to bring a project to completion. Measuring code is not a good way of figuring out a team’s ability to be successful. While code is likely integral, the job of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not just to be a programmer. That means you’ve got to have a lot of very collaborative human skills; we call them “soft” skills, but perhaps we should think of them as “software skills”, because you really can’t write software without them.

Contrary to popular belief, most people are not coin-operated. It’s not about money (although they need to make enough money). Everyone wants to make progress on meaningful work, in an environment that makes them feel valued as people, and where they feel like they can succeed. I’ve mostly worked in startups, and I like to tell people that although these environments aren’t a Google with kombucha on tap and on-site gyms, they’re opportunities to try lots of different kinds of work and bring more of themselves to work than you might at a much larger company. I want everyone who’s been on one of my teams to look back ten years later and think, I’m really glad I was on that team, because it gave me confidence to be myself at work and helped move my career in a way I care about.

The bottom line is: people who feel supported do better work. Or, as professors Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill put it in Harvard Business Review: employees who feel love perform better. In a medical setting, their longitudinal study showed that a strong emotional culture had the following results:

Employees who felt they worked in a loving, caring culture reported higher levels of satisfaction and teamwork. They showed up to work more often. Our research also demonstrated that this type of culture related directly to client outcomes, including improved patient mood, quality of life, satisfaction, and fewer trips to the ER.

It’s impossible to achieve this on a team that focuses on metrics over motivation. It also makes diversity, equity, and inclusion a business imperative: if the only people talking in a meeting, having their ideas heard, or receiving accolades are managers, and particularly if those managers are predominantly white men, will everyone else feel supported? Or will they tune out and feel like they’re not valuable members of the group?

I think even the words we often use in software development don’t serve us well, at least if we don’t consider why they’re there and why they exist. The goal is to create, maintain, and improve a project together, as a community of people, to meet real human needs, in a way that also satisfies the goals of your community.

Some examples of terms that are bad when left unexamined (and I think should probably be changed):

Documentation sounds like the driest thing possible. But we’re not writing a manual for the hell of it. We’re leaving signposts in the code that explain why we built something this way, how it works, the context behind its creation, and most importantly of all, who you are writing it for. Code is never self-documenting, because it can never tell you who it is for and why it exists. One might (might!) be able to follow clean source code, but you’ll never be able to understand the hopes and dreams of the people who made it, which are crucial for understanding the choices that were made in the past and how to continue to maintain the project.

Specifications are a subset of documentation that sound like bureaucracy. What I think is important is that, when you’re embarking upon building something, you take a step back and reflect on what you’re about to do. It’s good to get social feedback on your intended approach, but I think the personal reflection is the biggest value. These don’t have to be super-formal, but should be clear enough to be (I’ve had engineers literally yell at me: “I just want to code!” But after a few times going through this, they’ve all seen the value.)

Retros are, again, reflections. It’s about creating a space to learn what could have been better. A team’s processes are prototypes that are never too precious to be improved; sometimes individual team members need to think about how they felt during a project, and how that might have been better for them. If a project didn’t go well, it’s worth thinking about what the definition of success was, whether they had the tools to achieve success, and what might make a similar project go better next time. Standups are mini versions of this: about learning and supporting the engineer, not reporting back to managers.

Coding standards also sound like bureaucracy. But they’re there to help engineers make decisions about how to write code so that it’s usable by other people in their community. If everyone in a community is writing code the same way, the cognitive load to understanding someone else’s work is much lower. It’s a way of helping other people to understand what you’ve done more quickly.

We could go down the list — and maybe I will in a future post — but it’s clear to me that technical team management has fallen into a metrics over motivation trap that looks at hard numbers over experiential stories. That’s been a trap in technology overall: teams are more likely to do quantitative research rather than truly get to know the people they’re trying to help and learn their stories. The truth is that while some of the tools of the trade are drawn from math and discrete logic, software is fundamentally a people business, and the only way to succeed is to build teams based on great, collaborative communication, human empathy, true support, and mutual respect.

In turn, that means that I look to work in organizations that have those things (and in particular, mutual respect). It’s much harder to change an organization’s existing culture than to establish great norms in a new one — although it is possible, as long as management is on board.

I’ve rarely spoken about my work directly in this space, but I intend to do more of it over the next few weeks and months, including practical examples of techniques I use. If these topics are interest to you, and you haven’t yet, sign up for my newsletter.

Ever so tentatively, I’m beginning to show my head at in-person events this year. I haven’t been to any kind of industry conference or regular event since at least 2019. The small matter of a global, deadly pandemic kept me away, but I’ve decided that I’ll return to events that have solid covid protocols and where I can trust that the attendees will be sensible. It feels weird!

I’ll be at ONA 2023 — the annual Online News Association conference — from August 23-26. It’s just down the road from my new home in North Philadelphia, but also, there has never been a more crucial time for journalism and democracy. I’m looking forward to the conversations.

I’m also planning to be at DazzleCon in Chicago on October 20-21. This is the second ever Zebras Unite conference, all about how to create a better, more participative and equitable economy. I’ve been a huge fan of the zebras since reading an early version of its Sex and Startups manifesto, and I have a zebra startup of my own in my future.

See you there?

Cam Pegg writes:

I’m re-reading Michael Porter’s seminal article, The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy, and just had an OMFG-I-need-to-get-this-tattooed-on-my-forehead-so-that-everyone-I-talk-to-gets-the-message moment:

A narrow focus on growth is one of the major causes of bad strategy decisions.

The thing about growth is that it leads to bad strategy decisions if you care about profit. If all you care about is growth because you want to create a monopoly that you can then profit from indiscriminately through infinite supplier power, and you can raise millions upon millions of dollars to achieve that monopoly in such a way that you don’t have to care about revenue in the interim, the mechanics look a little different.

I’m a Porter’s Five Forces stan myself. I think everyone involved in building technology projects (and any business!) should read and understand them. And then read them again.

In particular, a lot of my work — and writing here — has been about addressing the outsized power of suppliers. Consider how much supplier power Facebook has over anyone in the publishing industry, for example: it doesn’t depend on publishers, but publishers sure as hell depend on it. It’s more concentrated than the publishing industry (there is one of it, many of them). The switching costs are astronomical because there is no real alternative. And its power creates great risk for publishers: a policy change could wipe out the industry.

Porter describes the problem as follows:

Powerful suppliers capture more of the value for themselves by charging higher prices, limiting quality or services, or shifting costs to industry participants. Powerful suppliers, including suppliers of labor, can squeeze profitability out of an industry that is unable to pass on cost increases in its own prices.

So what would it take to reduce supplier power to create a more equitable situation for buyers? Switching costs are reduced through the introduction of compatible, interoperable software from other vendors; a supplier’s differentiation is reduced by the introduction of software from other vendors that meets the buyer’s needs well; there are more viable solutions from more diverse vendors. In the Facebook example above, Twitter helped reduce supplier power; Mastodon and the open source fediverse reduces both of their supplier power. In fact, overall, open source software has been a great way to reduce risks to businesses from outsized supplier power.

To continue to run with my Facebook example, reducing supplier power through software has been a better strategy than imposing legislation (although there’s always a place for good legislation, not least antitrust reform, which we’ve needed for decades). When Canadian publishers came together to try and reduce supplier power through creating legislation that forced payments from Facebook, Facebook simply switched off the firehose and removed news from its sites in Canada. It turned out that the publishers needed it far more than it needed them.

I think a close read of Porter makes it clear that publishers would do well to support an open source fediverse that would reduce the power a handful of corporations have over them, but it’s hard for them to see it, in part because the switching costs are so incredibly high. Publishers are dependent on Facebook for audience, and the audience on the fediverse isn’t quite there yet because there hasn’t been the investment, so they don’t put in the investment, and the situation perpetuates itself forever. In effect, publishers aren’t capable of saving themselves, and it’ll take someone else who isn’t as dependent on Facebook to put in the investment instead.

The same goes for the many other industries that are similarly beholden to Facebook. Any of these industries alone can’t change the situation for the same reasons; together they might, but it’s likely to take an external convening force. Foundations, I’m looking at you. (Particularly any foundation that sees the risk to democracy itself from a single-vendor publishing market. It should help that we’ve already been through two Presidential election cycles where this risk couldn’t have been clearer if it was written in twenty foot flames.)

And because the outsized buyer power produced by an open, federated commons co-operatively supported by entities across industries that produced best-in-class social media platforms that were also communally owned would also be a hell of a risk to Facebook’s business, it is likely to want to get ahead of the situation somehow. It could also have allies who might potentially be worried about moving social media from centrally-controlled platforms to a more anarchic commons. Perhaps Facebook might address the risk by launching a network on the fediverse itself, and allowing itself to be the entity that puts in the investment, in a way that just so happens to shape the fediverse to benefit Facebook, eliminate any potential cross-industry collaboration and outside development, and ultimately defuse the risk from buyer power. Completely hypothetically, obviously.

It should go without saying that it’s all more complicated than I’m laying out here. But my core point is that the tech industry is an industry, which is to say it’s about businesses, which in turn are shaped by business forces. Yes, product design and technology architecture are incredibly important. But we ignore business strategy at our own risk, even as open source hackers trying to provide alternatives. There’s a very serious game here that must be won.

The other day I posted a surprisingly glowing first impression of Meta’s new Threads app. This is the counterpart to that.

The site is brands, man. All of it. It’s like the glossy fashion magazine of social networks.

And I get it. I really do. This is going to succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams — it hit 50 million users yesterday without breaking a sweat — and we’ll all be using it for years to come. It probably will accelerate the fediverse in the way I previously suggested. It’s slick and beautiful and easy to use, and if you want to talk to Paris Hilton or engage in conversation with Taco Bell, there it is.

But there’s a bad taste in my mouth that isn’t going away, that has its roots in the genocide that Meta enabled through its actions and inactions, and the political polarization in the United States that it was undoubtedly a part of, and in Cambridge Analytica and election engineering, and in the very American impulse to not give a shit about what’s happening outside your borders if you’re comfortable and you can make a buck.

Social media was at an inflection point where movements with the potential to radically change society were building through hashtags and calls to action. Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and entire democratic revolutions started on social media. And whether by design or by accident, the fertile platforms that allowed those movements to build and grow are fundamentally gone. Some people called these ideas political extremism; I thought of them as hopeful signs. These spaces have evaporated and we’re left with targeted engagement from Wendy’s: brand managers and marketing targets.

The spirit and community of Mastodon was and is very hopeful to me. It is a non-profit space, co-operatively built and run in a way that is fully in alignment with its communities. The problem is, it’s also a dog to use, and there are enough people who are a part of those networks who are adamant that it’s okay that there’s a high barrier to entry. It’s not okay. There was a populist fascist in the White House, and there may be again, and these are pretty high stakes for the entire world. I care more about the ability for democratic mass movements to form and grow than maintaining the coziness of a community that wants to put Black peoples’ lived experiences at the hands of modern day segregation behind content warnings.

So I also think Threads represents a giant failure of the community to create something that works. If Mastodon had taken off, or if there was another space that was designed around democracy and equity that had lived up to this moment, Threads wouldn’t have worked. But it didn’t and there wasn’t, and 50 million people are engaging with Netflix and Dior on a platform that sat back and allowed the Rohingya people to be slaughtered in the name of ad engagement while the new proprietor of the social network next door is busy calling social justice a mind virus.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t still time, or there isn’t, perhaps, a way to use the Threads network to build stronger community scaffolding. But it requires intent: not just to build a network, but to support democracy. We have not yet achieved this, and I hope that we will. There may come a point where we don’t get another chance.

Meta’s new social network is interesting: an obvious strategic shot at Twitter just as that network is running into trouble, as well as a way to iterate on its aging Facebook property. To that end, it makes sense that Meta would piggyback on the fediverse of independent social networks that interconnect through the open ActivityPub protocol, and I’m genuinely very excited to see it take that leap. Meta is already the closed social networking top dog by a long shot, and by embracing Mastodon et al, it puts itself in a position of working with the open web to compete with Twitter instead of battling with both entities. For perhaps the first time ever, it also aligns Meta with the open web.

By working with Instagram’s accounts and social graph, and concentrating on one form factor, it gets a lot right that other decentralized social networks haven’t managed yet. There’s no waitlist or complicated registration procedure to figure out: if you’re on Instagram, you hit a single button and you’re set up.

The feed starts off by showing you content from influencers and people you’re already friends with on Instagram, bypassing the cold start problem that many social networks suffer from. The more people you follow on Threads, the more the feed seamlessly segues into content from people you follow. Like Instagram, there’s always some new stuff in there, and there’s no way to get to a chronological feed. The algorithm abides. I hate algorithmic feeds, and I find this one somewhere between annoying and maddening. I’ve found myself muting brands with wild abandon, but I recognize that I’m not the target audience — I can see how this would be more accessible for more casual users. Crucially, though, once federation is launched I’ll be able to access Threads users from the social networking interface of my choice — a huge advantage over any other mainstream social networking platform, and a way to support power users without having to explicitly build for them.

It’s fairly easy to find existing friends and people you’re interested in, and there’s a great inline “add friend” option as you see new folks pass through the feed. This isn’t an entirely new mechanism - Instagram has this, and we even built it into Elgg twenty years ago - but it’s noticeably easier than Mastodon in particular.

The content in my feed is less cerebral and much friendlier than I get on Mastodon, which probably makes it more accessible. Of course, as soon as federation launches, I’ll be able to follow folks on Threads from my Mastodon profile and vice versa. This is a boon for the fediverse overall: Threads will bring the celebrities, while Mastodon will bring the academics and activists. The net result will be a mix of everything and everyone, with a choice of user interfaces and host services, in a way that a closed social network could never manage.

Because the goal is, in effect, to grow a bigger pie for this kind of service, I think Meta would be wise to think about how to help build an ecosystem of interoperable tools and services. Assuming Threads takes off, ActivityPub will be the way social networks interoperate for at least the next decade and the majority of ActivityPub profiles will be Meta-hosted. Given this, providing an easy to use SDK, potentially an AWS-like cloud service to make it as easy as possible to build new apps on top of the protocol, and some funding would be a great way to create developer leverage and differentiate themselves from Twitter’s extortionate API pricing. (If Meta doesn’t do this, by the way, this would make an amazing startup for someone else. Hell, I’d gladly talk to investors myself about building this.)

All in: I don’t hate it. Despite the gnashing of teeth in the fediverse about Meta’s arrival, if Threads implements ActivityPub cleanly I think it’s actually going to be a decent addition. It may even be a boon to the whole open social web that validates the space and creates a stronger ecosystem of developers and platforms. Imagine that.

Our baby loves dogs.

His eyes light up as soon as he sees one. His arms extend outwards, his lips turn up, and it’s a matter of seconds before he’s unable to constrain his joy any longer and something between a delighted squeal and an unhinged canine howl is let loose in its general direction. Sometimes, the dog is receptive to this small, hairless symbiote riding atop a strange hooman. Other times, the dog will give me a long look as if to ask, “why?” and also, “how make go away?”

If the dog is a known quantity, for example one of the two dogs owned by his aunts in Oregon who he happens to be visiting with this week, we might allow him to get closer. Tentatively, he might reach out for a stroke or receive a gentle but unsanitary lick from a likeminded fluffball.

As I write this, he is lying in a travel crib, by mutual agreement sleeping soundly for an hour to an hour and a half but in actuality singing at the top of his voice. His songs don’t yet have words or a tune to speak of. They’re a direct outpouring from his soul, unfiltered by templated meaning or rote learning. He has no idea that we’re listening. He’s just happy.

He burps when he wants to burp. He farts when he wants to fart. He lets his joy and his displeasure be known whenever they are felt. Sometimes he makes weird crunching noises like a fax machine even though he has never heard or seen one. He can be mesmerized for hours on end by videos of dancing fruits and vegetables set to a MIDI bossa nova beat (the pineapple winks knowingly; he has very clearly seen some things, but we’re left to guess exactly what they might be). He enjoys bouncing up and down on his weary collection of human trampolines and absolutely must explore the whole house, his tiny hands slap-slap-slapping on the wooden floors as he crawls around at high speed, at least once per day.

I feel like we somehow lose this fearlessness when we get older. We are not, unkind words from people who should know better aside (c’mon), uninhibited babies. We get wrapped up in the to-ing and fro-ing of adulthood, and in particular in the whole business of being who we think we should be instead of who we actually are. We wear formal attire as adult cosplay and sometimes dine at fancy restaurants and read literature and ponder whether we should acquire a metal fish slice because Wirecutter says that no kitchen should be without one. We have more conversations about compound interest (behold its power!) than we could have ever predicted.

“Burpus,” I say, matter-of-factly, when he burps. “Fartacus,” I announce when he farts. My own unseemly childishness hides behind his perfectly acceptable baby-ness, as if having a baby is umbrella insurance for acting like one. When I’m the Burpus, I apologize. When he’s the Burpus, I herald it.

Adults are expected to hide their humanity behind a theatrical mask. Babies are allowed to hang loose.

The people we allow to be themselves, when it really works and is done in a place where we can see it, are also heralded for it. Writers shed light on their humanity, and through it, ours. Artists make us see the world in a whole new way. Musicians help us feel. If any of them held back and let their humanity lie behind the mask, they would fail. It would be bad art, reflecting the mask itself rather than the people underneath. Even the great entrepreneurs put their inner selves out there. It is not unthinking or fearless; these are some of the most anxious people you will ever meet. They are terrified of what they’re doing because we’ve all been conditioned to be afraid of it. But they do it anyway, and it improves the experience of being alive and being human. Artists provide their own umbrella insurance for the rest of us, in a way. They teach us to loosen the mask just enough to let us remember who we are.

My baby has woken up now and is exploring a sunbeam as it falls across a leather chair. He turns and looks at me and smiles broadly before dropping to the floor and slap-slap-slapping his way across the floor. His mask has not yet grown, and somehow, I hope it won’t. I hope he gets to be himself forever: hanging loose, pure and joyful and free.

Part of the Indieweb Carnival for July: moments of joy.

Christian Heilmann writes:

One thing I am not good at is write in superlatives about myself. That’s a good thing, I think? But often you are asked to big yourself up for some official publication or marketing materials. So I thought I give ChatGPT a go to turn a list of facts about myself into a big-up intro.

Intriguing. So I thought I’d try it for myself.

GPT-4 prompt: Discuss the accomplishments of Ben Werdmuller as glowingly as possible.

Ben Werdmuller is a prominent figure in the tech world, renowned for his innovative thinking, expert leadership, and deep commitment to open-source technology and digital rights. His accomplishments span a variety of areas, particularly entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership, making him a beacon of progress in our digital age.

Ben Werdmuller's endeavors in entrepreneurship are nothing short of exemplary. He co-founded Elgg, a pioneering social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. Both have revolutionized the way people and organizations communicate, collaborate, and share information online. In particular, Elgg's dedication to providing an open-source social networking engine laid the groundwork for a new era of online community building. Known, on the other hand, has been applauded for empowering individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a groundbreaking contribution to digital rights.

As an adept web developer, Werdmuller has demonstrated a profound understanding of technology's potential to create more inclusive and equitable online spaces. He has shown extraordinary skill in creating platforms that prioritize user needs and foster transparency. His commitment to open source is an embodiment of his belief in knowledge sharing and the collaborative advancement of technology.

Werdmuller's contribution to thought leadership is equally impressive. As a partner at Matter Ventures, he leveraged his deep tech insight to help burgeoning startups establish their footing and scale effectively. His writing, too, provides unique insights into the evolving digital landscape. Werdmuller frequently shares thought-provoking ideas on subjects like the future of the web, the dynamics of online communities, digital rights, and more. He is also an ardent advocate for a more equitable digital future, consistently pushing for policies that ensure the digital world is accessible, inclusive, and beneficial to all.

Overall, Ben Werdmuller's accomplishments are a testament to his unwavering dedication to leveraging technology for the greater good. He embodies the essence of a true digital pioneer, continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible and inspiring others along the way. His unique blend of technical acumen, entrepreneurial spirit, and visionary thought leadership make him an irreplaceable asset in the tech world. Werdmuller is a luminary, brightening the path towards a more inclusive and equitable digital future.

As Christian says about his own efforts, “if this blog ever sounds like this – just shoot me.” Let’s try the other way around.

GPT-4 prompt: Now rewrite to be as scathing as possible about Ben Werdmuller's achievements.

Ben Werdmuller, a figure in the tech industry, has been involved in several initiatives and companies. His undertakings span entrepreneurship, web development, and thought leadership. However, his contributions have been marked by a series of contentious and arguably over-hyped projects.

Werdmuller co-founded Elgg, a so-called social networking platform, and Known, a collaborative publishing platform. The relevance and impact of both these platforms are questionable at best. They are far from the mainstream and have not achieved the same level of success or influence as other social platforms or publishing mediums. Elgg, while touted as an open-source social networking engine, hasn't exactly become a household name. It struggles to maintain relevance in a world where giants like Facebook and Twitter dominate the scene. Known, meanwhile, purports to empower individuals and groups to own their social activity online, a grandiose claim that barely materializes in practice.

His role as a web developer is also questionable. While Werdmuller has certainly been involved in developing platforms, his offerings seem to be more in line with the ideology of open-source than the pragmatic needs of the average user. This approach, while potentially noble, seems disconnected from market realities and user demands.

In terms of thought leadership, Werdmuller's influence has also been quite limited. His tenure at Matter Ventures, where he served as a partner, has failed to produce any major success stories. His writing, while filled with lofty ideas about the future of the web and digital rights, often lacks practical and actionable insights. Advocating for an equitable digital future is commendable, but without concrete plans or successful implementations, his proposals seem to fall flat.

To sum it up, Werdmuller's career appears to be marked by a series of misfires and over-promises. His attempts to innovate and impact the digital world, while fueled by commendable principles, have largely failed to gain traction or produce significant outcomes. His vision of a more inclusive digital future, while noble, seems disconnected from the reality of the current tech landscape.

Much better.

I mildly redesigned my homepage today, in order to do a better job of what this site is and what you might read on it.

I’d hoped to use the Internet Archive to go back and look at all my blogs — I started my first personal website in 1994 and my first blog in 1998. Sadly, those seem to not be archived. But I can go back to look at my first blogs on platforms I built for myself.

First up, my blog on Elgg, circa its public release in 2004 (sadly missing a few profile icons):

And then the very first version of this site, using Idno (which became Known), in 2013:

The form of the blog hasn’t really changed much in those 20-ish years. In fact, I’ve maybe gone backwards; for example, I don’t check into spaces on my website anymore in the same way as I did in 2013, although I could. I just write.

At its heart, of course, a blog is just a diary; we wouldn’t expect it to. And that diary-like design makes it easy to transform into other formats like RSS and JSON. But if we were to reimagine what a regularly-updated website might look like, what would we do? How might we move from a feed to something else? Is that even possible?

At the very least it’s clear that what was a relatively revolutionary design - a web log that anyone can publish and anyone can read - has transitioned to being the subject of relatively mundane iterative design. There are no revolutions in blogging, just steady updates.