Easing Into It
At first, I was going to just jump right into it, but rather than spend thirty minutes waxing poetic like a grumpy, old, Gen-X’er, I figured I’d take the other route and just ease into it.
Bluesky was an option, as we have had many options (and still do) to post content and make a new community around a social media platform that is different. Those differences however, I really never fully got into.
Privacy seems to be non-existent. I posted a photo of my son and I, and a few ‘adult-oriented’ accounts decided to spring in and like and repost. Now, do what you want with your life. You be whomever you think or believe that you are and live the fuck out of your life to the fullest. Not with an image of my kid though. Or me, but I couldn’t care any less about me in this scenario.
If sitting there with an account full of pictures with your dicks hanging out is what you want, then let Old Glory hang out and flap away in the breeze! Just don’t make it creepy like you did. That’s not cool. You may think it is, but I don’t. I won’t ever, and frankly, this is the kind of thing that makes my circles a lot more smaller, a lot more introverted, and lessens my desire to post anything family-related at all.
The Problem With No Privacy
That example above is one reason why I value privacy. I don’t want porn accounts or ‘growers & showers’ to have access so easily to what I post, so it leads me to just say to hell with it and post on my own fucking site. It’s this kind of gaping hole in the platform that really makes me not want to share anything.
Is it so hard to bring privacy to the AT Protocol? Probably not. What people have done so far is amazing, so privacy should be a piece of cake. Except I want it to be a piece of cake and not a piece of cake hanging off some guy’s fucking dick or balls! How could privacy not be a concern?! It amazes me when things are made that people don’t think of privacy at all.
The Folks Running The Show
Considering that folks have built other options is terrific. Black folks have Blacksky, the Europeans have mu.social and I applaud that. Why? Because white people are horrible, Americans are horrible, and the world looks at us like we’re trying to lick our own elbow and bite our own ear off. I don’t blame them. I mean, look at the last election. Look at the real history, not the school textbooks that have been whitewashed. It’s a proven track record. White people and Americans are horrible.
The squelching of free speech. The takedown of accounts. The decision-making that was so suspect, there were many, many uproars and debate chains on it. The former CEO getting blasted publicly. This platform had Jack Dorsey’s shitty hands all over it at the beginning, the residue remained. That was the problem. Among other things, of course.
Maybe if someone that had good intentions did something with those millions or billions of dollars, I wouldn’t be writing this and I’d be looking forward to connecting with people online. Instead, I want to run. Maybe I will. This is all fruitless. I mean, I could build something (and started to) but everyone I know, I barely talk to anymore. So why bother?
Those Days of Yore
Before Apartheid Clyde bought and then bought and paid for an election with Twitter (I’ll be damned if I call it by it’s letter name now) Twitter wa a place where the developer community thrived, where regular engagement happened, where, at least in my circles, talk was (towards the end) civil.
Now, it is just a smouldering cesspit of a vast wasteland of tech bros, racists, and Nazis. Pure horrible people. Then there are those people that don’t fit into the aforementioned categories, but yet still engage on that platform because “I have to do it for my job.”
No, you fucking don’t. You can use something like Buffer, or build your own open source tool. I did before I shut it down and I did not add the Twitter API to it. It was Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn oddly enough. To be fair, I have seen many folks say, “I use a cross-posting app and don’t go on that site.” Which is fantastic! But if you’re still slinging posts there, c’mon… You’re better than that. You’re also the product, we all are.
If you want to sit in the shit-riddled sandbox, while Phony Stark whines and cries and pouts, you a step or two below the shit that hangs there to this day. I know for a fact, some, maybe half of developers in total, do not care, nor will they. They’ll keep feeding the machine. I hope that one day, in the next 3-4 years, that motherfucker gets what’s coming to him (I’m talking about Space Karen people!) and one day, you all wake up and it’s gone. In a kimdotcom type deal where you all go to log in and there’s a big huge jpg that reads, “FBI has taken over this site” look itup if that went over your head.
What’s Next?
If I don’t build my own echo chamber, I’ll go to my site and stay there. Bluesky is a graveyard. Mastodon is a graveyard. LinkedIn is an AI-infested, jerkoff festival and people patting themselves on the back. Yes, find your joy, but when I would see a “I didn’t lose my job, but I know a hundred people who lost theirs…” that just makes me sick. It’s now a blog, not a job networking/job search site.
Maybe I’ll post on my site, leave it at that, make the changes I need to make to make this site accessible and just keep to myself in a sort of way but yet post something observational but then again, I think to myself a lot, why fucking bother?
I’m even probably better off just doing the smart thing and following in Mark Pilgrim’s shoes. The Irish Goodbye.