Are technologists doing anything

I worry that technically-inclined people, people involved in the free software movement, etc etc are kind of off in our own bubble while the screws get tightened further on technology that normal people actually use. Therefore these communities and movements are wastes of time for distracting and entertaining nerds, rather than being vehicles for social change

Social networks

The Fediverse is the social network of the future. Actually maybe Bluesky is the social network of the future? You can tell it’s the social network of the future because if you want to do literally anything in real-life (that is not related to computing, metadiscussion about social networks, or general nerd shit), you need an Instagram.

Am I the only one who constantly sees event posters stuck onto various buildings and signs with a username and “DM for address”, and they don’t even mention Instagram anywhere because you’re already supposed to know it’s an Instagram account, because Instagram is so embedded in the culture that it’s understood?

There is endless technical bickering over the structure of the fediverse and the at proto, and which is better, and how power is distributed through the fabric of the technological structures underlying them, and blah blah blah it’s all very interesting to my computer nerd side. As a non-nerd, it’s a distraction while all of the things that actually matter in the real world happen on Instagram, Facebook, and X The Everything App.

Conspicuously using alternatives

It’s rather difficult to start working with the gemini protocol, so you end up self-selecting for computer nerds, so the only voices in the space end up being computer nerds and it’s just another computer nerd club.

I forgot the real term for this but I think it’s a sort of “oppositional network”. It exists in opposition to HTTP but everyone on it already knows about HTTP (and continues to use it when no one’s looking).

You self-host a blog so you can post the link on five normal-people social media websites and say hello, here is my blog, please click the link.

Many efforts to create old-school forums have the same problems; the forum is relegated to showcasing finished projects and none of the threads get any replies because the real discussion, planning, and social activity happens on the Discord server.

Come on, join our IRC channel. You can’t post images and you’ll have to leave your computer on with a continuous connection for an hour to see any scrap of communication. But isn’t this so much better?

Overemphasis on self-reliance

See the “what’s your email setup” thread on lobsters where a bunch of nerds talk about their hand-crafted artisan email stacks. Most people cannot do this. Most people will get some snarky reply about HTML email if they try to email you because you insist on reading it with emacs or whatever. Basically 80-column hard-wrapped plain-text email is just “how you communicate with email nerds”.

Well I run my own vps, well I use these little programs which fetch and format my email. The technology sphere that technologists envision is apparently ten million people running their own personal email gateways

Self-hosting your own paste service and image-upload service and IRC bouncer so you can show everyone else in the channel how cool and skilled you are at self-hosting stuff. Self-hosting gives you massive hacker cred. (As a secondary reward, you get slightly closer to actually having a reasonable featureset for a communication program.)

What is there to be done

The thesis here is that computing hobbyist communities have got to get more productive and exist in less of their own little bubble.

Dunno what to do about it though.

See also