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A few days ago, I wrote a personal blurb about my experience with Return-to-Office, Forced Relocation, and top-down Corporate Bullshit. This was a departure from my usual fare in two ways:
- I talked about myself rather than focusing on other people or ideas I find neat.
- I didn’t bother to edit it for clarity before pressing Publish.
I had figured that quick write-up would fill the void while I work on the more ambitious technical blog posts I have planned for the rest of 2023 (although realistically some will spill over into 2024).
And then it made the front page of Hacker News. It ended up on the top of several subreddits soon after.
Since then, I’ve probably read about 2,000 comments across both websites. If you follow me on the fediverse, you’ve probably seen some of my commentary about the particularly bad takes I’ve encountered.
And while I’m not going to address each and every thing that came up in that mess, I did notice a few themes and trends that I find worthy of further examination. Hence, this post.
My Blog is a Furry Blog First
This blog, Dhole Moments, is a blog where I write about things for the furry fandom, as my fursona.
Yes, I do have other interests and hobbies besides just being a furry. I have a modicum of expertise in some areas within cryptography and information security.
Too many people saw fit to complain about the furry art. Some of the reasons cited were:
- “It won’t be taken seriously by anyone with any authority to change RTO policy at any serious org [because of the furry art].”
- Falsely insisting that furry is inherently sexual.
- Claiming that furry art is “distracting”.
So let’s be clear about something:
I wrote a personal blog post on a furry blog for my predominantly furry audience in my usual furry style.
Someone else saw fit to submit it to news aggregator websites. Thousands of other people upvoted it, which placed it across your feed.
Then a bunch of uninvited guests get upset at the furry art and decided it was appropriate to tell me how I should write my own blog posts in order for them to be able to share them with their boss? Get fucked.
Like, how is that even supposed to make a lick of sense?
If I was at all concerned with being taken “seriously” by a tech company’s management, maybe I wouldn’t have written it here. I probably would’ve dropped it as an open letter under my human name and solicited signatures from my former coworkers or something.
Half the fucking point of doing what I do is to not take anything too seriously. Especially myself.
You’re not reading a programming blog that has furry art. You’re reading a furry blog that has programming on it.
Every time a rando complains, I’m simply going to make it gayer.
What Do You Even Do Here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I
Most of the comments I read about my previous blog post can be sorted into two categories:
- They never read past the title, and are therefore helpless
- They fundamentally don’t understand what my job was
Normally, I’d be like, “OK cool, you don’t need to know what I even do for work”. Most of the time, everyone’s happier not knowing because they have their own problems to deal with.
The comments that spawned from this ignorance seemed to think I was just an easily replaceable cog soon to be obviated by “new grads”, or at risk of being obsoleted by the dreaded specter of “outsourcing”.
I can’t speak to a lot of the jobs the folks in the programming subreddit hold, but if anyone can do my job as well as I can, then they frankly deserve it–in part, because I was effectively on 3 different teams; each needing access to my cryptography and security expertise for different reasons.
Believe me when I say this: I hate bragging. I hate it because I can’t do it without writing about myself, which I also find grueling to do. I’ve missed out on speaking opportunities before because I blanked out on what to put down for the speaker bio. “I’m just me,” is the most I can eek out of my brain in most circumstances.
You cannot replace me with semgrep, or a small pizza party of haphazardly selected CompSci undergrads. I’ve looked at projects on the heels of major crypto/security consultancies and immediately found severe bugs they missed (although I usually just assume that’s due to timeboxing rather than skill). I have definite blind spots, even with cryptography, but the subjects I know, I’m damn good at.
When I was pushed out of my previous role by the RTO mandate, it caused visible pain for the teams I worked with, which rippled across the entire department. So many of my most senior colleagues told me they were thinking of leaving because of how I was treated.
And if it wasn’t clear from my previous post, I’m not happy with this outcome. These were people I respected and enjoyed working with. Everyone up to the vice president I reported through was excellent and tried everything to protect their remote employees.
Other Remarks
I had other things to talk about, but I already added an addendum to the original blog post to address the other misconceptions and weird reactions people had.
Header art by AJ.
https://soatok.blog/2023/10/04/i-dont-care-if-strangers-can-take-me-seriously/
#furry #FurryFandom #HackerNews #InternetCulture #meta #Reddit
I quit my job towards the end of last month.When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to bend that rule for once. And most likely, only this one time.
Why? Since I wrote a whole series about how to get into tech for as close to $0 as possible without prior experience, I feel that omitting my feelings would be, on some level, dishonest.
Refusing Forced Relocation
I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida.Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).
The COVID-19 pandemic forced a lot of people who preferred to work in an office setting to sink-or-swim in a remote work environment.
In early 2020, you could be forgiven for imagining that this new arrangement was a temporary safety measure that we would adopt for a time, and then one day return to normal. By mid 2022, only people that cannot let go of their habits and traditions continued to believe that we’d ever return to the “normal” they knew in 2019.
As someone who had been working remote since 2014, as soon as the shift happened, many of my peers reached out to me for advice on how to be productive at home. This was an uncomfortable experience for many of them, and as someone who was comfortable in a fully virtual environment, I was happy to help.
By early 2021, I was considered to not only be a top performer, but also a critical expert for the cryptography organization. My time ended up split across three different teams, and I was still knocking my projects out of the park. But more importantly, junior employees felt comfortable approaching me with questions and our most distinguished engineers sought my insight on security and cryptography topics.
It became an inside joke of the cryptography organization, not to let me ever look at someone else’s source code on a Friday, because I would inevitably find at least one security issue, which would inevitably ruin someone’s weekend. I suppose the reasoning was that, if the source code in question belonged to a foundational software package, it carried the risk of paging the entire company as we tried to figure out how to mitigate the issue and upstream the fix.
(I never once got earnestly reprimanded for finding security bugs, of course.)
I can’t really go into detail about the sort of work I did. I don’t really want to name names, either. But I will say that I woke up every day excited and motivated. The problems were interesting, the people were wonderful, and there was an atmosphere of respect and collaboration.
Despite the sudden change in working environment for most of the cryptography organization in response to COVID-19, we were doing great work and cultivating the same healthy and productive work environment that everyone fondly remembered pre-pandemic.
Art: CMYKat
And then the company’s CEO decided to make an unceremonious, unilateral, top-down decision (based entirely on vibes from talking to other CEOs, rather than anything resembling facts, data, or logic):
Everyone must return to the office, and virtual employees must relocate. Exceptions would be few, far between, and required a C-level to sign off on it. Good luck getting an exception before your relocation decision deadline.
Hey, tech workers, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
To the credit of my former managers, they sprung this dilemma on me literally the day before I went to a hacker conference–a venue full of hiring managers and technical founders.
On Ultimatums
If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be:Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.
Art: AJ_LovesDinos
If your employer tells you, “Move to an expensive city or resign,” your best move will be, in the end, to quit. Notice that I said, in the end.
It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else.
That’s what I did. Just don’t start selling your family home or looking at real estate listings, and definitely don’t accept any relocation assistance (since you’ll have to return it when you split).
Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission.
(Yes, you did just read those words on a blog written by a furry.)
If you take nothing else away from this post, always keep this in mind.
Art: MarleyTanuki
From Whence Was This Idiocy Inspired?
Nothing happens in a vacuum.When more tech workers opted to earn their tech company salaries while living in cheaper cost-of-living houses, less tech worker money circulated to big city businesses.
This outflow of money does hurt the local economies of said cities, including the ones that big tech companies are headquartered in. In some cases, this pain has jeopardized a lot of the tax incentives that said companies enjoy.
That’s why we keep hearing about politicians praising the draconian way that the return-to-office policies are being enforced.
At the end of the day, incentives rule everything around us.
Companies have to kowtow to the government in order to reduce their tax bill (and continue pocketing record profits–which drive inflation–while their workers’ wages stagnate).
This outcome was incredibly obvious to everyone that was paying attention; it was just a matter of when, not if.
Signs of Things to Come
Do you know who was really paying attention? The top talent at most tech companies.After I turned in my resignation, I received a much larger outpour of support from other very senior tech workers than I ever imagined.
Many of them admitted that they were actively looking for new roles; some of them for the first time in over a decade.
Many of them already have new gigs lined up, and were preparing to resign too. Some of those already have.
Others are preparing to refuse to comply with either demand, countering the companies’ ultimatums with one of their own: Shut up or fire me.
What I took from these messages is this: What tech companies are doing is complete bullshit, and everyone knows it, and nobody is happy about it.
With all this in mind, I’d like to issue a prediction for how this return-to-office with forced relocation will play out, should companies’ leaders double down on their draconian nature.
My Prediction
Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade.The bridge has been burnt, and the well has been poisoned.
Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback.Dutch proverb
The companies that issued these ultimatums are not stupid. They had to know that some percentage of their core staff would leave over their forced relocation mandates. Many described it as a “soft layoff” tactic.But I don’t think they appreciate the breadth or depth of the burn they’ve inflicted. Even if they can keep their ships from sinking, the wound will fester and their culture will not easily recover. This will lead to even more brain drain.
Who could blame anyone for leaving when that happens?
Unfortunately, there is a class of people that work in tech that will bear the brunt of the ensuing corporate abuse: H-1B visa employees, whose immigration status is predicated on their ongoing employment. Their ability to hop from abusive companies onto lifeboats is, on the best of days, limited.
And that? Well, that’s going to get ugly.
There’s still time for these companies to slam the brakes on their unmitigated disaster of failed leadership before it collapses the whole enterprise.
If I were a betting dhole, I wouldn’t bet money on most of them doing that.
Their incentives aren’t aligned that way yet, and when they finally are, it will be far too late.
Toward New Opportunities
As for me, I’m enjoying some well-earned downtime before I start my new remote job.I wasn’t foolish enough to uproot my life and everyone I love at some distant corporate asshole’s whims, but I also wasn’t impulsive enough to jump ship without a plan.
That’s as much as I feel comfortable saying about myself on here.
If you’re facing a similar dilemma, just know that you’re not alone. Savvy companies will be taking advantage of your current employer’s weakness to pan for gold, so to speak.
You are not trapped. Your life is your own to live. Choose wisely.
Addendum
After I posted this, it made the front page of Hacker News and was subsequently posted in quite a few places. After reading some of the comments, I realize a few subtleties in my word choice didn’t come across, so I’d like to clarify them.When I say “RTO is bullshit”, I don’t mean “office work is bullshit” or anything negative about people that prefer in-person office work. I mean “the forced relocation implementation of transitioning a whole company to never-remote (a.k.a. RTO) is bullshit”.
If working in an office is better for you, rock on. I don’t have any issue with that. The bullshit is the actions taken by company’s leadership teams in absence of (or often in spite of) hard data on remote work versus in-person work. The bullshit is changing remote worker’s employment agreements without their consent and threatening “voluntary resignation” as the only alternative (even though that’s pretty obviously constructive dismissal).
When I discussed ultimatums above, I’m specifically referring to actual ultimatums, not colloquial understandings of the word. If you can talk with the person and negotiate with them, it’s not a goddamn ultimatum. What I was faced with was an actual ultimatum: Comply or suffer. I chose freedom.
Hope that helps.
CMYKat made this, I edited the text
Regarding some of the other comments, I come from the “I work to live” mindset, not the “I live to work” mindset. My opinions won’t resonate with everyone. That’s okay!
Update: I wrote a follow-up to this post to address a lot of bad comments I saw on HN and Reddit.
https://soatok.blog/2023/10/02/return-to-office-is-bullshit-and-everyone-knows-it/
#business #businessEthics #forcedRelocation #returnToOffice #Society #techIndustry #Technology #ultimatums #work
Sometimes my blog posts end up on social link-sharing websites with a technology focus, such as Lobste.rs or Hacker News.
On a good day, this presents an opportunity to share one’s writing with a larger audience and, more importantly, solicit a wider variety of feedback from one’s peers.
However, sometimes you end up with feedback like this, or this:
I’m no stranger to gatekeeping in online communities, internet trolls, or bullying in general. This isn’t my first rodeo, and it won’t be my last.
These kinds of comments exist to send a message not just to me, but to anyone else who’s furry or overtly LGBTQIA+: You’re weird and therefore not welcome here.
Of course, the moderators rarely share their views.
https://twitter.com/pushcx/status/1281207233020379137
Because of their toxic nature, there is only one appropriate response to these kinds of comments: Loud and persistent spite.
So here’s some more art I’ve commissioned or been gifted of my fursona over the years that I haven’t yet worked into a blog post:
If you hate furries so much, you will be appalled to learn that factoids about my fursona species have landed in LibreSSL’s source code (decoded).
Never underestimate furries, because we make the Internets go.
I will never let these kind of comments discourage me from being open about my hobbies, interests, or personality. And neither should anyone else.
If you don’t like my blog posts because I’m a furry but still find the technical content interesting, know now and forever more that, when you try to push me or anyone else out for being different, I will only increase the fucking thing.
Header art created by @loviesophiee and inspired by floccinaucinihilipilification.
https://soatok.blog/2020/07/09/a-word-on-anti-furry-sentiments-in-the-tech-community/
#antiFurryBullying #cyberculture #furry #HackerNews #LobsteRs #Reddit
My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…
I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize
— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020
Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019
Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives
https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018
Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others
In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.The kids loved it.
This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave
https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what
What’s there to hate?
The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass
Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press
90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019
SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016
Seriously.Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries
eSports Champions:https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed
Musicians:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed
Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.
Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.
The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.
Why So Curious?
If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed
Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?
Furry Fandom Documentary When?
https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembedAsh Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.
https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/
#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society
Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline,
code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
- Fediverse.Party - explore federated networks
Let's make social media free, federated and fun! Fediverse.Party is your guide into the world of decentralized, autonomous networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world. No ads and no algorithms.fediverse.party
This one goes out to recently arrived or aspiring Twitter refugees
- Mastodon is a 1:1 #Twitter clone, just without Elon Musk, but otherwise absolutely identical to Twitter. I mean, how could a microblogging service possibly be any different from Twitter? That's just as strange an idea as a desktop operating system that isn't exactly like Windows. Unless you're a Mac user, that is.
- Mastodon.social is Mastodon. Because that's the website you've been pointed at on Twitter.
- Also, the Fediverse = Mastodon. Only Mastodon.
Now you try to register an account on Mastodon. Which means on mastodon.social. And you discover you can't do that because registrations on mastodon.social are closed, because mastodon.social is full.
Either you can't be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then your understanding is that Mastodon itself is full. And you're back at Twitter. Avoidable mistake; see right below.
Or you can be bothered to read what the pop-up says. Then you discover the blue button that takes you to a list of public Mastodon instances on the actual Mastodon website.
Um, instances? Servers? What the...? What's that?!
Okay, this'll be hard to wrap your mind around if the entire IT world has only consisted of commercial, corporate-owned walled gardens so far. Windows/macOS, iOS/manufacturer-provided Android, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer/Edge/Safari/Google Chrome, Google Search, Google Maps, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Spotify, maybe iTunes, your Microsoft/Apple/Google cloud etc. You couldn't even imagine that alternatives to these exist, much less alternatives that don't belong to yet another U.S. gigacorporation. Or even alternatives that aren't as monolithic as these.
Mastodon feels like a revelation to you, an epiphany. All this commercial, corporate-owned stuff is, in fact, not the entire IT world. It's a bubble. And there's a world outside this bubble. And this outside world is strange.
For starters, Eugen Rochko is the core developer of Mastodon. And yes, he is also the admin of mastodon.social. But that does not make him the owner and overlord of the entirety of Mastodon, just like Elon Musk is the owner and overlord of Twitter.
Also because Mastodon is, in fact, not mastodon.social. Not only. Mastodon.social is only one out of many Mastodon servers or instances. Thousands of them. Literally. Those listed on the official website are only those recommended by "the makers" of Mastodon. Here are even more.
There are instances for all kinds of special interests. There are also instances for lots of places in the world. People have set up instances for cities; Chicago actually has two of these.
Mind-blowing, right?
Okay, so you still absolutely have to join mastodon.social because that's where people went whom you know from Twitter. You want to stay in contact with them. So you can't join a different instance.
Wait, wait, wait, calm down. You can. And you can still get back in contact with your acquaintances on mastodon.social.
Even more mind-blowing, right? How can this possibly work?
Well, I take it you use e-mail. You need an e-mail account to use Mastodon after all. Most likely, you're on Google Mail. Are all your e-mail contacts on Google Mail, too? Do you only ever receive mails from accounts on Google Mail? Does Facebook send mails from a Google Mail account?
No, Facebook doesn't send mails from a Google Mail account. Facebook runs its own mail service. And yet, Facebook's mails get through to your Google Mail account. And that has probably been perfectly normal for you.
This is made possible through a technological miracle known as "federation". Basically, all e-mail servers in the world can communicate with one another, send mails to one another, receive mails from one another.
It's the same with the Fediverse. After all, the "Fed" in "Fediverse" comes from "federation". Generally, all Mastodon instances can communicate with each other. Unless one instance has "defederated" (completely blocked) another instance. There are actually Mastodon instances which are defederated by most other public Mastodon instances. But otherwise, everything connects to everything.
Once you've joined an instance, you'll discover first-hand that you can, in fact, follow people who are on mastodon.social. Or just about any other instance, all without having accounts there.
There goes the second bullet point.
And the first one will quickly start to crumble, too. First of all, Mastodon looks nothing like Twitter. Also, everything is named differently. Tweets aren't named "tweets" but "toots". You don't retweet, you don't even "retoot", you "boost".
And Mastodon works quite a bit differently from Twitter.
- You've got three timelines. Next to your personal timeline which lists whatever your contacts have tooted or boosted, there's the local timeline which lists what the other users on your instance have tooted or boosted (this is how and why special interest instances or local instances make sense), and there's the federated timeline which is the local timeline plus what local users' contacts on other instances have tooted or boosted.
There is, however, no timeline for the entire Fediverse. - There's no full-text search for the entire Fediverse. Deal with it.
- There's no secret algorithm telling you what to read or whom to follow. All timelines are strictly chronological.
- This also means that there's no secret algorithm shoving your toots into other people's faces. If you want people to discover your toots, use #hashtags. On Twitter, hashtags are a gimmick. In the Fediverse, they're vital.
- There's a #newhere hashtag. It matters. As someone who is new here, you're expected to write an introduction, use the #newhere hashtag in it and then pin your introduction so that it's always on top or near the top of your personal timeline for others to read.
- There's no quote retweet. And there will never be. Eugen Rochko has a very strong opinion on that, he doesn't want that popular trolling tool on Mastodon, so this won't happen.
- Privacy settings per toot. You can choose who can read your toot. If you write threads, it's common practice to only set the first toot to public and all other ones to unlisted so that they don't clutter the public timelines.
- Delayed toots. You can choose when your toot goes out.
- Content warnings (CW) that blank out your toot. And yes, they're taken very seriously. People are likely to demand you use them when you don't.
- Alt-text for images. Again, people are likely to demand you create them when you don't. Some people on the Fediverse are blind and use screen readers, and they, too, want to know what that picture in your toot is.
- Not to mention that toots can be almost twice as long as tweets, namely 500 characters. Unless the owner of an instance has changed that number.
Speaking of the latter: As the first bullet point from the beginning crumbles to dust, the one about Mastodon being Twitter minus Elon Musk, you may have been rubbing your eyes in disbelief already.
How can I possibly write more than 500 characters in a toot? How can you write in italics on Mastodon? Or use lists with bullet points in a toot? Where on Mastodon are the buttons for that?
Well, you are right now having a glimpse at the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. As in: There is a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. There are other projects out there which are federated with Mastodon just like Mastodon instances are federated with one another. This is possible because they speak one common language: #ActivityPub. And they're all decentralised themselves with multiple instances each. For example:
- Not all of them are "not Twitter clones", i.e. microblogging services. Pleroma is another one which was created out of disagreements with how Mastodon works. Akkoma is a Pleroma fork which came to exist because someone didn't like where Pleroma went. There's also Misskey. Obviously, they aren't "Mastodon clones" either, they were designed to be different from each other. And there's GNU social, the oldest one on the list.
- Pixelfed is "not an #Instagram clone".
- Friendica is definitely "not a #Facebook clone" because, while created for a similar purpose, it's still vastly different. And it federates with just about everything that moves including e-mail or WordPress. It even used to federate with Facebook itself eons ago. By the way, #Friendica makes everything possible that I've done in this post which is also why it's usually filed under "macroblogging". But I'm not on Friendica; I'll get to that. Also, Friendica is the second-oldest one on the list.
- Mobilizon is "not a #GoogleCalendar or #Doodle clone".
- Funkwhale is "not a #SoundCloud or #BandCamp or #Spotify clone", also because you're unlikely to find mainstream commercial music on it. Castopod: ditto, but specialising on podcasts.
- PeerTube is "not a #YouTube clone".
- Owncast is "not a #Twitch clone".
- Lemmy is "not a #Reddit or #HackerNews clone", although the "not a Reddit clone" part can be debated.
- WriteFreely and Plume are "not #Medium clones".
- BookWyrm is "not a #GoodReads clone".
- Flockingbird is "not a #LinkedIn clone" at all, also because rather than being a service of its own, it piggybacks on the rest of the Fediverse by picking up hashtags.
- Hubzilla was a successor to Friendica, but it's much more than "not a Facebook clone". It's also not a clone of whichever CMS and/or cloud service you use. It can provide you with your own personal organiser including a #CalDAV calendar (next to the public event calendar) and a #CardDAV addressbook, your own #WebDAV cloud space, your own online photo album, your own website, your own blog and/or your own wiki on top of just about everything that Friendica does. It's the third-oldest on the list and still older than Mastodon.
- And there's much more.
Thanks to ActivityPub, these services are federated with Mastodon which means that you can follow their users from your Mastodon account. You don't necessarily need accounts on these services. Okay, you need them to fully make use of them. You can't start discussions on #Lemmy or upload videos to #PeerTube without having an account there, but you can follow and comment on PeerTube channels and reply to discussions on Lemmy from your Mastodon account.
Want proof? Well, this post came from a #Hubzilla channel. You can still read it on Mastodon. And if you reply to it, I can still see it on Hubzilla.
And there went the misconception that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
Stay tuned until next time when I explain to you how "Facebook's #Metaverse" (it's called #HorizonWorlds, in case you don't know) is not and will never be #TheMetaverse, and that free, open-source, (largely) non-commercial, decentral #VirtualWorlds exist already now.
Obligatory hashtags: #Pleroma #Akkoma #MissKey #Pixelfed #Mobilizon #Funkwhale #PeerTube #Owncast #Lemmy #WriteFreely #Plume #Flockingbird
Mastodon
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profitMastodon hosted on mastodon.social
There's a tool to look at #HackerNews authors and see if their writing is similar to another user (sock puppets anyone?)
This of course leads to larger discussions about #privacy, #cybersecurity, #impersonation, and of course, #shakespeare
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2022/12/04/episode-352-stylometry-removes-anonymity/
Episode 352 – Stylometry removes anonymity
Josh and Kurt talk about a new tool that can do Stylometry analysis of Hacker News authors. The availability of such tools makes anonymity much harder on the Internet, but it’s also not unexp…Open Source Security
https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
What comes after the « ? » isn’t necessary afaik, and the « trkid » name suggests it is a #tracker identifier. Facebook uses this, Spotify too. I don’t know what they do with it, as it works like a black box to the public, but it could help profile you and everyone who uses this link, e.g. by registering a connection between two users.
(There is a discussion about fbclid here on #HackerNews :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18275061 )