Here’s the thing. I don’t like Bluesky. I think it’s just a corporate plant in the decentralized ecosystem to get people hooked on yet another underdeveloped platform for the sake of controlling how we communicate. But there is something to be said about how corporate entities focus on ease of use over just about everything else for the sake of getting people to use it. I think many people in open source naively depend on the altruism of people to choose their product over a corporate option because of Bad Corporate Reasons and ignore a mediocre experience, poor leadership and difficult installation and maintenance. The rising popularity of Bluesky is showing, again, ease of use is a priority in the carnival of social media. Most people don’t want to go through a twelve step process to install a wheelbarrow of dependencies in the hopes it won’t crash at the first update. Hell, I’m a dev going on 20 years now and I don’t feel like doing that shit.

One thing I will say about Trump is that he has made the fear of a weaponized state real for white people. A fear that Black and Brown folks have been intimately familiar with for centuries.

I’m chuckling at white people trying to scare me with ideas of secret police, law enforcement beatings and injustice in the court system. You’re just telling me you don’t know any Black people and refuse to listen to the millions that have been sharing their experiences for decades. This has already been happening for awhile now. You’re just afraid it’s going to happen to you.

As for me, I’m going to do what I always do: keep working. The election results are irrelevant for me because my goal is to create systems in service of sustainable communities that exist outside of political and corporate interests. I’m interested in building tools that enable us to build and sustain networks that are for our betterment. That is still my focus, no matter what nonsensical shit happens in a rapidly declining empire. Because we need tools for what comes after. Everything is funded by donations because I refuse corporate money. My Patreon is in my bio and I have an ongoing fundraiser for my projects. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-new-way-to-social-mediaI definitely don’t have all the answers, but I’m going to be relentless until I find them. And I honestly believe we are closer than we think.

Scream, cry, and throw things. Feel what you gotta feel. But after, the work continues.

One of the main reasons I do what I do is because I envision a world where our communities are so well organized and connected that it doesn’t matter what politicians do because we have us.I’ve worked under this premise for years and it has led me to a purpose that has sustained me through all of the hate and dehumanization people have constantly thrown at me in my years on the fedi. I gave up on the state being a catalyst for progressive societal change a long time ago. Yesterday was just another confirmation that the US is dedicated to its own destruction and decline and is determined to bring us all down with it. Our job is to refuse to die with the empire. Our shared goal is to disconnect from it and let it kill itself.

It’s not hard for me to be optimistic about the fedi because my view of it is not defined by bigots who want to maintain their fantasies of monoculture and mediocre creators who want to emulate their favorite tech megalomaniacs. And I’m old enough to know that when a need on the interwebs reveals itself, the internet always adapts. This is a contentious time but in these moments great progress can and usually does happen.

@[email protected] country founded on slavery that fought a war over it, pioneered minstrel shows, jim crow, trail of tears, redlining, Hitler thought the US had some really good ideas about concentration camps, imprisoned and stole from anyone who looked Japanese during WWII, imprisoned Hispanic-looking refugees at the border during the Trump presidency, literally stole children from said refugees: "this is not us!111"

@are0h The disproportionate amount of hate TBS and black allowlisting projects receive is a tell.https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/113330402731375981

@are0h yup. slots right in alongside ‘people don’t use protocols (or other behind the scenes technology), they use tools to do thing that matter to them in their lives.’and when bluesky is as easy as picking up something cheap off a harbor freight rack, plug it in, and get going, that’s going to have an effect when compared to buying something potentially much more powerful, that also requires you to read the manual and have a clear understanding of what you want to do.(sadly, i even saw this need to sit down and understand the thing instead of just signing up and using your pre-existing social media platform muscle memory framed as ‘mastodon has bad accessibility’ – questionable use of words that may be, the underlying sentiment is very very real.)

These days, the hoops you have to jump through to get a tech position are insane. I have a resume, references, a portfolio for design stuff, and a repo to see code. If this doesn’t convince you I’m pretty good, after 20+ years in the game, that tells me you’re not looking for a pro with my skillset. I’m not taking a code test that tests skills that have nothing to do with the work. I’m not meeting eight different people over two weeks, so people who don’t know anything about the work feel ‘comfortable.’If you want to see how I am in a working environment, put me on a probationary contract and see how I do after a few weeks.I know I can do the work because I’ve been doing it for a long time. Anyone who has been in the game for a while will know this instantly after a 5-minute conversation. All this other nonsense people do in interviews is because they don’t know what they’re doing and are making the process convoluted and obtuse to give it ‘value.’