It feels like deja vu

I remember when I first got into tech. There was a real vibe of people sharing and caring with the goal to advance our industries. Now the goal seems to be to advance individually. And it hurts to say this.

We can see this in the influencers, in the low level content, and playing the algorithm game for attention and followers. It’s become more of how can we look good, rather than how can we help people and our industry move forward.

Of course, we’ve always been self-interested and have had our own personal goals and need to make a living, but I’m also trying to tap into what I feel has been missing for a long while. And I felt hope again when I joined Bluesky, where people are excited about standards and the open web and being able to build upon it.

Sure this isn’t entirely new, but Mastadon for me just doesn’t work, there really needs to be a cleaner UX experience to it all.

I won’t pretend to understand the technicality of Bluesky, nor do I know if it will work out, but there seems to be hope. I’m personally keeping my eye out for when we can start our own servers, it’s a much needed break and different way of looking at things that we’ve had relentlessly from Twitter.

Yet, here I am also writing on a platform which is not entirely Open Web friendly. This does make me feel conflicted and somewhat uncomfortable. At least Substack does support RSS and exporting of data easily enough. This is where I feel many other products are failing.

The joining of Bluesky feels like a bit of a tipping point. Perhaps I will read back on this in the future and laugh at how wrong I am. However, it has also inspired me again on how I can double down on open technologies.

For me and from a community perspective, this means my preferred tech stack going forward would be:

• Ghost (already using for Rosieland and a new project)
• Discourse (I’ve been using this at Ministry of Testing since 2015 and for Rosieland for the past year)
• Bluesky

These may not always have all the bells and whistles. But they are ethical and will increasingly have options for integrations.

My real goal, however, is to ensure I’m working on a philosophy of giving as much back as I can on the internet. My ideal would be to have everything out in the open and for me to be able to make a sustainable but not outrageous living from that.

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