Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 10

@evan Babe, you have to take care to recognize all the other software and protocols in the fediverse!! You can't just call it all "Mastodon"!!!!

This is the best article about the recent rise in the fediverse I've seen! https://thenewstack.io/devs-are-excited-by-activitypub-open-protocol-for-mastodon/

And it opens with a quote by @evan and has several by me and even @blaine appears! Someone actually did their homework!

Relatedly, here's a lovely interview with @evan from just a few months back! https://thenewstack.io/challenges-of-creating-a-decentralized-open-source-twitter/

Raise your hand if you've been on the fediverse since the identi.ca days ?

@evan Evan.

@evan I distinctly remember you objecting when... was it @brion who took down their own wikipedia page and you said it was "false modesty" and "bullshit"

also wtf @evan put something in your bio about you having, more or less, majority-designed BOTH protocols that have run the fediverse

For anyone who doesn't know, @evan was largely responsible for OStatus, which is what the fediverse used to run on. Then later ActivityPub was based on Evan's Pump API.

@evan *more than anyone* did the key design work that the fediverse is based on.

Evan is being too humble. I am making up for it. Evan is awesome.

@evan IS THAT EVAN PRODROMOU?!?!?!?!?!!

Someone was saying they want to write an article about how the queers built this place and I can't find it, but if you're a journalist who wants to talk about this subject, I'm not doing *too many* interviews right now but I can talk about this topic because I think it's important

so it turned out "the fediverse is cool and all but it doesn't have enough people or content on it" was not going to be the problem

The last year or two of ActivityPub development was so stressful and it looked like we weren't going to make it. For a while I was pretty close to suicide because I felt like I had wasted years of my life.

Wish I could have shown distressed me from then everything that's happening now to comfort her a bit

FOX NEWS AT 11: Elon Musk's Twitter sabotaged by transgender hacker activists using "ActivityPunk" technology to build dangerous "fetishverse" network

@evan @aeva that shirt was dope

Well our TinyNES arrived and the TinyNES is AWESOME, an open hardware Tiny Nostalgia Evacation Square which can play Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom games using the ORIGINAL 6502 chips!

So we thought we'd make an unboxing video but I'm cluttered and terrible at opening things and @mlemweb hates leaning over and doesn't like cameras which move around so we managed to make THE WORST UNBOXING VIDEO OF IT OF ALL TIME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhfALUcYSf0 https://share.tube/w/1AGjQU8AzsFd4XBVQiXg1B

@oblomov @me If you or anyone you know has been in academia long enough to see the kinds of effects it has on people, I can assure you, it goes both ways :P

Academia-oriented Mastodon instances ought to set their CSS so that when someone hovers over the "Publish!" button it switches to "Perish!"

There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.

There's so much I'd like to say, but talking about it feels dangerous, forbidden, selfish.

Sometimes I do kinda feel written out of all this history, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's for the best.

I didn't realize how fucked up that is until the other day when I commented out loud that I was "lucky" that I didn't get BlueSky because, given what's happening with Twitter, I'd almost certainly be getting a ton of transphobic attention right now. And a friend pointed out how terrible it was that I was even put in a position to *think* that.

Heck, up until pointing that, that's a thing I never even mentioned publicly. There you go, now you know: I was, I believe, second in the running to run BlueSky. It's not a shock they gave it to Jay Graber, I think she's great. But... (cotd ...)

But that's a thing I haven't really talked about, because talking about it felt weirdly forbidden: I was close enough that I had direct calls with Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. I had a direct one on one call with Parag where I thought they were going to announce I got BlueSky and instead they told me they were giving it to someone else, but maybe if the person and I got along, I could be the tech lead or something. I guess it's not surprising that I didn't get it: I decided to use my presentations as a test, and I told them exactly what I thought we should do in my usual, excited, but completely direct self... and intentionally not filtering any of that, including about what I thought the mistakes Twitter, Facebook, etc had made. So I guess it's not surprising I gave the impression that I wasn't the right person to be the public lead. That experience did lead me to decide to co-found the Spritely Institute with Randy Farmer instead.

I *will* say that I was surprised that the people who were most cool, of all the top exec folks at Twitter, of having me tell them *exactly* what I thought were Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. They seemed entertained and were nodding along enthusiastically. A lot of the other top people seemed stunned to have this nonbinary weirdo saying all this stuff to them that was so *direct*. Or that's the read I got.

I did get the impression that both Jack and Parag genuinely cared about building BlueSky btw, that it wasn't some scheme as I think a lot of us feared. But maybe I just felt that way because they were willing to listen to me, and that they were listening at all, seemingly in earnest, was a surprise.

But it was a blessing in disguise, ultimately, because not getting BlueSky meant starting the Spritely Institute doing *exactly* what I thought we should be doing.

Damn, woulda been nice to start with all that money though. A lot less stress. Probably.

But then again, I'd probably have all the transphobes knocking down my door. The eye of Elon himself would probably be upon me. Guess I'm "lucky". Which is fucked up itself, to even think that.

But all of that makes everything I'm watching right now fill me up with a million emotions. It's great to see success. It's frightening to think that being too successful might make you a target.

There's another thing I haven't said, I think: I almost didn't transition because I *knew* I'm a prominent trans engineer, and I know what happens to prominent trans engineers. Fucked up, right?

And like, I guess it's just *weird* to see this thing I've poured myself into, killed myself over, that I've never stopped trying to figure out how to figure out how to get to the next phase, suddenly get all this attention. ESPECIALLY BECAUSE A RICH DUDE GOT UPSET AT A BAD JOKE SITE GETTING KICKED OFF FOR MAKING A TRANSPHOBIC JOKE

You wanna hear a joke? That a bunch of people who are claiming they're all for "freedom of speech" are kissing the feet of *centralization* now that it's at the end of a despot who might get away with letting them say racist, sexist, queerphobic bullshit.

Just watching all this, it's all too real. It's all too personal. It's hard to look away from.

I'm proud of the fediverse, as it exists. I'm not responsible for it, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say I'm one of the many people who helped make it happen. I don't need to be famous for it... being famous for it is probably even unsafe. The people who need to know, know. That's good enough. There are a lot of other people who worked on the spec, like Jessica, Erin, Evan, Amy, who don't get nearly the amount of recognition I have. I'm grateful the right people know what I did and will listen to me.

But also the fediverse, as it's rolled out, is simultaneously the best option we have for this moment in history and also not ready. It's not the long term answer. We're working on that though. Hell, I'm lucky that I got to co-found an organization that might be able to build that future.

A few years ago I was working 60 hour weeks trying to make this damn ActivityPub thing happen even though all I heard all the time was that there's no way it was going to make it. Now I'm working 70 hour weeks trying to build the next thing. I'd really like to, ya know, get it down to a plain and simple 40. But even more so, I'd like this work we're starting, for the next step of things, to survive.

And someone else will probably be known for that work, but in general... that happens. Hell, you're lucky to make an ounce of impact in this world, let again get some recognition. And recognition isn't always so great either. It can be a real curse. Especially if you, yourself, are somehow against the grain of things. But also just in general. I care more about getting things done than anything. I only need to be well known enough to get the things I care about moving forward, and that's it really.

Anyway, rant over. I've been holding this in for a while. Thanks for listening, to those who did. I'm glad ActivityPub is taking off. I'm looking forward to the future. The state we're in is just the beginning. You'll see. And thanks for being here. Thanks for making it all worthwhile, making these efforts worth their while.