Subject: Too many things
Author:
Posted on: 2024-11-18 18:11:04 UTC

I've been doing anything to keep myself going and functional. I'm still looking for a job but it's hard not to despair during the hunt so I'm trying to do some programming projects to keep myself sharp, employable, and not going crazy. I've also been doing a lot of other things: I've been working on creating my own 78-card tarot deck in pixel art, I finished watching The Good Place, started digging into Klingon as a language (and also examined some other conlangs and conscripts, like the tiny and simple language of toki pona and its sitelen pona writing system).

I've also been spending time on Bluesky, the new Twitter clone everyone is raving about. It's typically framed as a Jack Dorsey project, which is a little misleading: Bluesky was funded by Twitter while Dorsey was CEO, and he had a position on the board, but he was never the primary person in charge of the project and he actually left and deleted his account quite some time ago when it became clear that the people working for Bluesky the company weren't interested in building an entirely moderation-less libertarian hellscape.

But there is a lot that is cool and interesting about Bluesky. You can make and publish blocklists that anyone else can subscribe to in the app, but you can also make lists of people to subscribe to ("starter packs", they call them). You can even make a list of users and get a feed of only posts by those users, whether you're subscribed to them or not. So if you want to, say, corral all the posts from news organizations into a feed separate from your normal subscription feed that you have to click to read, you totally can do that. Or make a feed that only shows posts from artists you like. Or a feed that only has your friends on it so you can go to one place and make sure you've seen all their posts.

Bluesky's also very technically open. The people in charge are hardcore about making Bluesky an open system (up to and including doing their best to protect users from their future selves should they ever turn evil). You can export your data from their servers and stand up your own personal server to host all your content, if you want to do that, and the network will transition over seamlessly so your followers may not even notice it happened. Basically all the software is open-source, even for the bits of the network that are currently centralized under bluesky's control (short version: there are some critical pieces of the network that Bluesky controls that would be problematic if Bluesky turns evil. Bluesky says they are actively working to change this, and they have been willing to put their money where their mouth is on that front in the past so I trust them for now). It's pretty clear the end goal for Bluesky is to ensure that the network can live on even if they become evil or go out of business.

Also if you're a programmer there's a ton of really cool stuff you can do. I already mentioned how you can make a custom feed from a list of users, but programmers can actually create custom feeds with their own algorithms. For example, I follow a feed that only shows posts made by people I follow, but not reposts. There's a science feed that shows science-related posts (marked with a 🧪 emoji) from confirmed scientists and science communicators. There's a cat feed, which I think is using computer vision to recognize cats?

You can also create what are called Labelers, which are kinda like user run moderation services? They can attach content warning tags to posts and users and then you can decide what you want to do about those posts/users. People have used this so that you can, say, have your pronouns labeled on your profile, but there are also a lot of more niche things labellers detect that you can warn, notify, or block posts based on. There's one labeller that only IDs social media screenshots and even tries to identify what site they were from, so if you want to block twitter screenshots, hide reddit screenshots behind a warning you have to click through, and show Tumblr screenshots by default, you can totally do that. It's all very cool and interesting and it makes me want to build something stupid and fun. Social media just hasn't been this open since... when was livejournal again?

(I mean, I was never on livejournal, but I know it was open enough that you could interact with alternate journal sites. Actually, fun fact: the "sign in with Google" etc buttons you find in websites now rely on the descendent of the system Livejournal originally developed so you could post comments on alternate journals using your LJ account. This is kind of a digression but I don't think people give Livejournal enough credit for how influential it was, socially and technically. It was hugely important for the free press in Russia since it had good international language support at a time when that was rare and was hosted in the US and therefore safer for dissenting voices. Of course, they got DDOSsed a lot. And then LJ was sold to a Russian oligarch so they could get information on these folks and get a ton of them arrested...).

So yeah! That's what's up.

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