Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!

  • 95 Posts
  • 214 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2019

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  • Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It’s one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I’d explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.

    In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment’s notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It’s the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.

    In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?

    I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.

    I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I’m married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.


  • Yeah, the election results were a horrible thing to wake up to. I had really hoped for a better outcome, but this is the direction America decided to go.

    The biggest thing to remember right now is that the progressive cause will always have work to do, and challenges to face. Even if we had won, either partially or by a landslide in the House, Senate, and Executive branch, that would still hold true. The American Right may very well unleash new horrors that make life intolerable for absolutely everyone, and may take up policies that get people killed. Now, more than ever, it is on us to build bridges and networks of support. All we have to do is outlive these bastards, and oppose their worst tendencies at every turn. Vote early, vote often, and vote locally.

    In the coming days and weeks, pundits will likely try to highlight all the possible reasons that the Harris campaign failed, because they love sounding like informed geniuses who take a result, work backwards, and highlight what should have been done. Try not to lean into the tendency to blame people on the left, and try to avoid infighting. It’s going to happen.






  • Basically, this. In layman’s terms: finding the good stuff on a decentralized network is hard, because not everybody or everything is all in one place. Some tools can help make the experience suck less, but it’s a really hard problem that has lingered on for years.

    This proposal is basically a team-up to develop the necessary plumbing so that services, such as search providers or distribution networks, can be easily used by anybody on the network, regardless of whether they’re on Mastodon, Lemmy, or something else.

    There’s a few interesting applications here that go beyond just finding people, showing trending stuff, or providing an index of stuff. Some of this could be used for moderation tooling for admins, or custom feeds for users, or a directory of things to review. If the existing projects trying to solve all these problems came together, it might make a lot of things way easier.





  • Most efforts haven’t moved beyond the planning stages. Just because you can point to a plugin or a FEP spec doesn’t mean that it’s an ongoing active effort for bring a payment layer to the Fediverse, with a consumer-facing tool or platform. I’m sorry if I didn’t catch that Mitra had some of that functionality, but I would also push back and say that the average person is not going to use Monero for payments on the Web anytime soon.

    Those PeerTube plugins are nice, and the Premium Users one was actually something I pointed @quillmatiq@mastodon.social to for sub.club, as an example of prior art. They’re interesting experiments, possibly useful integrations, but not in and of themselves actual platforms to build infrastructure and solutions on.


  • Dude, listen. I am one person running a volunteer news project for free. I try my best to stay on top of researching the space, but there’s no reasonable way for me to catch everything. I’ve written 200+ articles at this point, but due to a combination of factors, I struggle to get more than one article out per week at times. I regularly juggle a backlog of 40+ drafts at any given moment. Add a dash of burnout and fatigue, and you’ll start to get a clearer picture: it’s hard to keep up, and only getting harder.

    There’s no way for me to reasonably catch everything. Mitra’s a cool project and all, but it’s tiny enough that I’ve heard relatively little about it. There are dozens of projects out there at this point, and new ones everyday. If you’re not advertising the thing you’re building and what it does, there’s a high chance I might miss it.

    I keep an eye on the FEP developments from time to time, and I applaud all you’ve accomplished with that. However, the existence of a spec does not necessarily mean that platforms out there are necessarily implementing each and every one of them.







  • Yeah, I’ll try to look into this for clarity. It really depends on what they mean here - I think they’re referring to curated server following between admins, which is what PeerTube does.

    When I tested out the messaging system, I was able to federate back and forth with Mastodon. Maybe it works fine at a user level, it’s just the search entries that don’t get federated automatically?




  • Adderall. There are, of course, some trade-offs. Having gone so many years without any kind of medication, though, it’s a night and day difference.

    I feel like my memory recall is so, so much better with it. When I’m off meds, I often find myself in a mental fog, struggling to remember details spoken to me moments ago. It’s like I’m constantly trying to hold onto a thought, as it’s rapidly slipping out of my grasp.

    I still have to rely on the productivity methods that work for me. I obsessively take notes and make lists, because I would be totally lost without either. I’m slowly making lifestyle changes that are helping me overcome almost 20 years of clutter.





  • Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s still notable that people on the Fediverse managed to scrape $500k together. This is the first time something like that has ever happened on this network. In the world of big politics and presidential campaigns, it’s not much. However, within the scope of grassroots organizing, it’s substantial.

    I agree that I would love to see that funding go towards mutual aid, infra and project funding, and supporting people who work on different parts of the network.



  • I think it’s a big opportunity that the Fediverse has largely slept on. A lot of people shrug it off, but Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and a number of other places offer an export archive of your data.

    Some of it isn’t all that usable, but there’s something extremely appealing about being able to take old parts of your social graph with you, and merge it into a new identity. A fixation I’ve had for the past few years is consolidating all of my data into one place, under one identity, and I’m exploring the possibility of writing data converters.

    Interestingly, Pixelfed allows you to import your Instagram archive, and it’s fantastic.


  • So, to be clear: it’s not a concept like Nomadic Identity. Rather, it’s a demonstration of importing data archives from other social networks and platforms, and integrating that data into an existing Fediverse account.

    In other words: it’s not a singular managed identity for all your apps, it’s a mechanism for marrying data from different systems to a Fediverse Actor. Paired with something like Nomadic Identity, it would be a game changer.