Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
Sven Slootweg
boosted
and you really aren't supposed to not have a mailing address in your home country. or spend like over a month outside it. the world isn't made to handle people who do.
health, meds
So this is what my post-transplantation morning medication looks like now (which is one of four medication moments, though it is the biggest pile)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
One of the themes for #FluConf2025 is "open licensing and business models".
A lot of people on the fediverse will probably take that to mean *software licensing*, but we're interested in a much broader range of topics.
We want to hear about open licenses for scientific publications, data, art, games, text, and whatever else we haven't thought of.
Share why you think it's important. Write about how overly permissive commons are being enclosed by corporations. Tell the world how you choose licenses for your own creations, and how others licensing choices influence your perception of their projects.
#freeCulture #FOSS #law #publishing #science #games #art #data #openScience #openData #openGardening #open #openCulture #openSource #freeSoftware #openAccess
Sven Slootweg
boosted
It occurs to me that many who have joined since Nov '22 may not be familiar with the some fediverse history. Some context…
One demographic that flocked here early on was made up of unrepentant trolls and abusers who had gotten banned from other platforms. Good mods here would ban them from their instances too, and gradually they banded together into their own servers, often under the banner of "free speech," which mostly meant freedom to troll and abuse.
Decentralization meant they couldn't be kicked off fedi, but self sorting meant instances with good mods could defederate from their servers. The network underwent a sort of ad hoc mitosis, so that there are now functionally two big fedis, this one, and the one built by trolls. And while the fedi as we know it still has serious problems, it's still much safer for a lot of often marginalized groups for having cut ties with the troll servers.
If you're not sure why some instances have defederated from Threads, part of it is because their new "free speech" policies are familiar to fedizens who were here during the mitosis phase. They're the exact positions that were used by the "free speech" instances of that other fediverse to justify tolerating abusive behavior.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@onepict I think this is a very relevant and interesting session:
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6721-organizing-sponsor-free-conferences-bof/
At NixCon 2024, we took the bold step of going completely sponsor-free—and it turned out to be a great success, with 400 attendees, making it the largest NixCon to date.
In this BOF session, I’ll share my experiences as a core organizer, including the challenges, lessons learned, and tips for anyone looking to organize their own sponsor-free events without breaking the bank.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
#FOSDEM does do a lot of good too, bringing people together and promoting Free Software. And there are amazing people putting together the event every year — especially the tons of volunteers spending their time and effort to make this all happen.
But promoting the ideals of Free and Open Source Software is all the more reason they should really respect their audience, be inclusive, and try to be better.
(People critical of FOSDEM aren't attacking it; we all want it to be better.)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
is inaccessible for those with:
- mobility issues
- scent sensitivities (no policy against perfume, uses smelly soap in bathrooms); this affects around 30% of the population
- who need/want CC for videos
And refused:
- to have a code of conduct for years; have no real means of enforcing the one they have now
- to implement any kind of sickness mitigation (COVID, "FOSDEM Flu", or other), including encouraging masks and ventilation
And promotes:
- cryptocurrency
- billionaires
Sven Slootweg
boosted
For zod's sake, PLEASE stop making progressive communications inaccessible.
If you want to get the word out about your union, etc., please make sure all images have alt text, all PDFs are accessible ones, etc.
It literally helps your words reach more people. #Accessibility #Union #Labor
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Enjoy the RedNote cultural exchange while you can.
It would be either US, deathly afraid of Americans learning something from Chinese.
Or China, deathly afraid of Chinese being corrupted by Americans.
But someone's going to pull the plug on the thing, sooner or later, I bet.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
hate it when people are arguing for things i agree with, but do it using bad logic or wrong assumptions
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I don't like the whole generation divide thing. It feels like just another way to split people up instead of having us in community and working together. You know the whole boomers do this, millennials that, alpha over here. Yes, we have differences. We grew up in times that gave us different challenges, necessities, and possibilities. But our differences should be complimentary not dividing.
We should be able to value the skills in each other and support each other with them. For example, I wish I had paid a lot more attention to my Gran when she gardened because I could really use that knowledge now in the face of our exorbitant grocery prices. There are things I could have helped her with too, things I can navigate more easily than she could. I hope my nephews and nieces and I can help each other out with things as we grow too.
I feel like there's not much more scary to leaders than people of different generations working together. Hard to just pin something on one generation and get everyone else to hate on them when we're all here.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
The living internet theory asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort by search engines and major social media platforms to only surface LLM generated garbage, the internet consists mostly of human activity and carefully crafted content that you just will never see
matrix meta
Before believing anything Element promises, you should know that there's years of repeated promises that never materialized across multiple funding rounds
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I’m not attending FOSDEM so I would like to contribute this galaxy-brain idea for those who are: everyone in the crowd gets into a loud, disruptive conversation about software licensing with the people sitting nearest to them for the duration of Jack Dorsey’s allotted talk. Do not back down or lower your voice. Your software licensing opinions are correct and this is your chance to convince everyone.
@vyr So the abbreviated history is that historically there has been an almost 100% overlap between Element and Matrix core folks. They claimed to want to solve this, but attempts at actually doing so were constantly rejected out of hand.
Large amounts of contributors offered to help with spec stuff, but the core spec team insisted on keeping a small spec team, even though they could not keep up with the workload. Proposed process improvements were routinely ignored with comments like "we do not feel this is necessary right now".
Two people in particularly (Matthew and Travis) have continuously pulled governance authority towards themselves, and seem unwilling to trust anyone else to take over any part of the process, causing the whole process to stall on their combined capacity, which simply isn't enough to maintain such a large protocol.
All the while Element has had a very capital-intensive development process, partly due to their insistence on prioritizing feature development over resolving technical debt, despite rapidly mounting maintenance costs and everything being constantly on fire. I have personally warned them repeatedly of the outcome of this approach, and I know that others have too.
What it boils down to is that they have refused outside help that didn't exactly fit into their vision at every turn, ignored just about every warning they've gotten because they were sure they knew better, and have chosen to centralize the process to such a degree that it was never going to run sustainably.
In the years that I have attempted to be involved with Matrix, I have seen at least several obviously more sustainable development models proposed, some but not all of them my own, and none of them were seriously considered. Instead they continued to insist on a highly institutional process that excluded most potential contributors a priori (I can go into more detail on that if wanted).
@vyr People giving up on Matrix is something that Element can entirely thank themselves for, frankly.
I have lost count of how many people have tried to contribute or caution them about their unsustainable development path, only to burn out after being constantly ignored or strung along.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Some quality lichens shot on Harman Phoenix film :3
It was my first time trying out this film and I'm really happy with how some of the shots came out! It's definitely not the best tool for every job, but it's got a really cool aesthetic; I'm excited to pick up some more now that I have a better understanding of how it behaves
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Amongst other things, arguing against gatekeeping by asserting that HTML is a programming language just lets the gatekeeper shift the goal posts. "Writing documentation isn't programming," "triaging issues isn't programming," "project management isn't programming," "UI design isn't programming," and so forth.
I fairly strongly believe that challenging the core assumption is an effective way of cutting that line of gatekeeping off entirely.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
I vastly prefer the second approach, as the first one doesn't actually challenge the core assumption that gives the threat of gatekeeping its teeth.
Also the differentiation between writing a program (very *very* roughly, an executable sequence of instructions) and markup (very *very* roughly the declaration of some data upon which a program acts) is an important one, and I don't think we should let gatekeepers co-opt that distinction to be assholes.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
It's been a few days, with a lot of misunderstanding in replies. That's on me for not communicating my point effectively, so let me expand on and clarify.
Suppose you encounter "HTML isn't a real programming language" as an example of gatekeeping people out of tech. It's a real and really awful canard that techbros use, even now.
Very roughly, you can respond in one of two ways:
• Expand the definition of "programming language"
• Challenge the idea that programming is necessary to be in tech
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
