{
"$type": "site.standard.document",
"canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2026/going-all-in",
"description": "First Olamaelcu. Next the neighborhood.\n",
"path": "/essays/2026/going-all-in",
"publishedAt": "2026-05-13T14:00:00.000Z",
"site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
"tags": "essay",
"textContent": "I posted on [the site for Olamaelcu][1] and I wrote about it [in my\nnewsletter][2] but it doesn't feel _official_ if it's not coming from my\nwebsite - the one I haven't published on in more than half a year. It didn't\nhelp that the longer I waited, the more I felt like I was letting the site\neffectively grow stale, irrelevant or useless. The only thing stopping me\nfrom using this thing was myself. Seriously — I'm still in the middle of\nthis revival of what would have been what was running at\n<code>v2.jacky.wtf</code> some time ago. Perhaps it'll come out — yet\nanother evolution of [my own worrystone][3]. But I didn't want it to be\nsomething that was _purely_ for writing long form text. I _really_ like the\nidea of being able to pull everything home because when I want to sign off\n— it can be on my own terms (but do I really ever sign off — who\nknows?)\n\nProtocol dogmatism Be damned, We Haven't the time or resources\n\nI'd like to believe that I come off as an opinionated person when it comes to\nsocial networking protocols. My focus was a bit reflected on the _use_ and\n_malleability_ of one's presence in them, unbeknownst to me to be something\nthat followed the logics of [Distributed Blackness][4] and in others of the\nmind of [24/7][5] with a sprinkle of [Debordian thinking][6]. In other words,\nI'm aware that in order to have these systems operating as they do _today_, we\nneed data centers and \"compute farms\" but I'm also keenly aware that a lot of\nthe 'new approaches' of social media — currently — are replications\nof the things that [would end up in a book][7].\n\nThat's made my recent place of work - in conjunction with Olamaelcu\ninteresting. I used to, in passing, have off-hand comments about Nostr: that\nit's crypto-pilled, it's only for right-wing folks, yadda, yadda, yadda. And\nafter a few years of watching the platform that once held the birthplace of [a\nnew era of digital activism][8] devolve into something not too dissimilar from\nwhat Facebook managed to be all along, I had to step back and think. For all\nthe good that The Platforms enable, we see time and time again that morality is\ndifficult to use as a means of swaying the direction of an ecosystem without\n_intentionality_ and frankly, collective governance. I watched a video interview with\n[Rabble and Jack Dorsey][9] where he explains how and why the sale of Twitter\nhappened. I disagree with the rhetoric of submission to a board as a necessary\nmeans of power transfer — as an anarcho-syndicalist by nature but they\nmake it clear that _this was inevitable_. I finished that video realizing that\nif we do try it again, a productive social Web, we _have to_ be intentional all\nthe way to funding and governance. I can talk about this at length and refer\nmany books by folks who've done _way more research_ than I but I think that's a\nbit of a waste of time!\n\nIt's Time to Ship\n\nFor someone who's yapped (and yapped (and yapped!)) about this, you can't point\nto anything I've made that folks are either actively using or I refer to in\ndefense of the ideas of what I do. Sure, I maintain the Rust libraries for the\n[microformats parser][10] and an opinionated (though dated) approach to\n[engaging the IndieWeb][11] from Rust but no one's _rushing_ to add this to\ntheir projects. I don't do a good job of promoting them and frankly, I get\ndiscouraged to for other reasons I might yap about on social media. I'm ending that with recent work.\n\nI've begun working with [diVine][12] as an opportune overlap: working on\nvideo-based social media _with the weight_ of the name that Vine carried: it\n_gave us_ short form portrait video. It being based on Nostr (and silently\nsupporting ATProto — if you know [where to look][13]) made accepting a\nbit risky: my knowledge of Nostr as a technology, now wider, was initially\nsimilar to XMPP. I can talk to the protocol with more confidence now but my\neagerness to work on this was _the cultural impact_ Vine had (has!) and how\nimportant it is to leverage that as we aim to carve out new social spaces. We\n_cannot_ moan about the dangers of social media and sit on our very capable\nhands and do nothing.\n\nAt least, I don't want to — not anymore. So I recommend trying things out\n— pulling up on me on <https://jacky.divine.video/> and on\n<https://blacksky.community/profile/omg.jacky.wtf>; sending and talking about\nthe things we notice about the places we're carving out for ourselves and\ncontinue to determine how we can expand this for everyone else so the walled\ngardens can look more like small plastic play pens that we've all grown tired\nof. A final plug, you should join my wait-list for experiments on ATProto (and\nothers as they come) from my lab at <https://waitlist.olamaelcu.net/>.\n\n[1]: https://olamaelcu.net/blog/2026/sysinit\n[2]: https://buttondown.com/jackyalcine/archive/free-agent-reading-freely/\n[3]: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/let-a-website-be-a-worry-stone/\n[4]: https://nyupress.org/9781479829965/distributed-blackness/\n[5]: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2315-24-7\n[6]: https://hyperallergic.com/an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle/\n[7]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/careless-people-a-cautionary-tale-of-power-greed-and-lost-idealism-sarah-wynn-williams/804251bb5d4b06b3\n[8]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4597/HashtagActivismNetworks-of-Race-and-Gender-Justice\n[9]: https://revolution.social/episodes/jack-dorsey-on-selling-twitter-leaving-bluesky-wha/\n[10]: https://docs.rs/microformats/latest/microformats/\n[11]: https://docs.rs/indieweb/latest/indieweb/\n[12]: https://github.com/divinevideo/\n[13]: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Adivinevideo%20atproto&type=code",
"title": "Where I'm going with the work I'm leaning into now"
}