Where I'm going with the work I'm leaning into now

I posted on the site for Olamaelcu and I wrote about it in my newsletter but it doesn't feel official if it's not coming from my website - the one I haven't published on in more than half a year. It didn't help that the longer I waited, the more I felt like I was letting the site effectively grow stale, irrelevant or useless. The only thing stopping me from using this thing was myself. Seriously — I'm still in the middle of this revival of what would have been what was running at v2.jacky.wtf some time ago. Perhaps it'll come out — yet another evolution of my own worrystone. But I didn't want it to be something that was purely for writing long form text. I really like the idea of being able to pull everything home because when I want to sign off — it can be on my own terms (but do I really ever sign off — who knows?)

Protocol dogmatism Be damned, We Haven't the time or resources

I'd like to believe that I come off as an opinionated person when it comes to social networking protocols. My focus was a bit reflected on the use and malleability of one's presence in them, unbeknownst to me to be something that followed the logics of Distributed Blackness and in others of the mind of 24/7 with a sprinkle of Debordian thinking. In other words, I'm aware that in order to have these systems operating as they do today, we need data centers and "compute farms" but I'm also keenly aware that a lot of the 'new approaches' of social media — currently — are replications of the things that would end up in a book.

That's made my recent place of work - in conjunction with Olamaelcu interesting. I used to, in passing, have off-hand comments about Nostr: that it's crypto-pilled, it's only for right-wing folks, yadda, yadda, yadda. And after a few years of watching the platform that once held the birthplace of a new era of digital activism devolve into something not too dissimilar from what Facebook managed to be all along, I had to step back and think. For all the good that The Platforms enable, we see time and time again that morality is difficult to use as a means of swaying the direction of an ecosystem without intentionality and frankly, collective governance. I watched a video interview with Rabble and Jack Dorsey where he explains how and why the sale of Twitter happened. I disagree with the rhetoric of submission to a board as a necessary means of power transfer — as an anarcho-syndicalist by nature but they make it clear that this was inevitable. I finished that video realizing that if we do try it again, a productive social Web, we have to be intentional all the way to funding and governance. I can talk about this at length and refer many books by folks who've done way more research than I but I think that's a bit of a waste of time!

It's Time to Ship

For someone who's yapped (and yapped (and yapped!)) about this, you can't point to anything I've made that folks are either actively using or I refer to in defense of the ideas of what I do. Sure, I maintain the Rust libraries for the microformats parser and an opinionated (though dated) approach to engaging the IndieWeb from Rust but no one's rushing to add this to their projects. I don't do a good job of promoting them and frankly, I get discouraged to for other reasons I might yap about on social media. I'm ending that with recent work.

I've begun working with diVine as an opportune overlap: working on video-based social media with the weight of the name that Vine carried: it gave us short form portrait video. It being based on Nostr (and silently supporting ATProto — if you know where to look) made accepting a bit risky: my knowledge of Nostr as a technology, now wider, was initially similar to XMPP. I can talk to the protocol with more confidence now but my eagerness to work on this was the cultural impact Vine had (has!) and how important it is to leverage that as we aim to carve out new social spaces. We cannot moan about the dangers of social media and sit on our very capable hands and do nothing.

At least, I don't want to — not anymore. So I recommend trying things out — pulling up on me on https://jacky.divine.video/ and on https://blacksky.community/profile/omg.jacky.wtf; sending and talking about the things we notice about the places we're carving out for ourselves and continue to determine how we can expand this for everyone else so the walled gardens can look more like small plastic play pens that we've all grown tired of. A final plug, you should join my wait-list for experiments on ATProto (and others as they come) from my lab at https://waitlist.olamaelcu.net/.