Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@serapath @aral I think it's important to recognize that projects like the fediverse operate on an entirely different timeline from corporate platforms.

The only way something like Bluesky can become successful (by their metrics) is by making a splash, and having everyone learn about it at once, and move over before anyone asks too many questions and figures out that it's kind of crap.

But the fediverse, and other communal projects, don't need to do that. Our metric of success is (or at least should be) one of sustainable growth; and for that, it is entirely fine for people to learn about it and move over slowly. We're not on a deadline, as long as things keep going in the right direction. We're not subject to hype cycles if we create a nice space.

This is very important because you *can't* compete with corporations using their own playbook. You have to take advantage of their weaknesses and your strengths, and "not needing a mass move to retain users" is an example of such a strength for genuine community projects.

As an activist, I really only have one expectation of people: to leave space for activism.

Don't trivialize problems, don't actively demotivate people who are working on the solutions, don't get in the way of those solutions. Leave room for them in conversations. Let activists do their job.

I'm not even expecting everyone to become an activist, or to become 'politically active'. But I *do* expect you to let us do our job, and that is an expectation that I will not yield on.

Shape-shifting snake that disguised itself as computer cables (usually VGA) and would bite you if you tried to pick it up, but it wasn't poisonous

Called in an expert, they pointed out that the snake could be brought to feral court, but "feral court is kind of a hellhole".

The snake at some point turned itself into a plump mouse instead, and sat there looking cute and innocent in what looked like a tiny lemonade stand.

I have lost count of how many developers have told me over the years some variation of "I want to learn to do it right, but my boss wants it done tomorrow so I don't have time".

Your periodic reminder that the root cause of slow/inefficient software is not laziness, or Javascript, or Electron, or "interpreted languages", or people not understanding how to do software development, or not understanding memory management, or libraries, or abstractions.

None of those are the root cause. The root cause is capitalism, and the incentives it creates to build software that works barely well enough to make money under impossible deadlines, often leaving developers no choice in the matter and affecting the broader software development culture.

You want to fix bad software, you need to start by addressing those capitalist incentives. Telling people that they are doing a bad job will get you nowhere, and you will likely get things wrong in the process.

Fedi is consistently better at answering my technical questions than StackExchange ever was, tbh

I'm so used to accident analyses being a never-ending series of "and then they cut a corner here, and they saved a buck there, and that's why it happened".

So I'm positively amazed at this case where it seems that the operator actually did everything by the book, and proactively responded to the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApYID0lAiQc