Dear world,
For some time now, I've wanted to write to you, but wasn't really sure what to write about. It's difficult to know who you are and what you are interested in, and therefore what we could be talking about. It's also been long enough since I really quit the "small" social networks, the ones where you could identify your connections personally and spoke more or less directly to them.
This feels like a small social network, because I am writing in to you in the first person, but indeed you are an amorphous concept of "out there". It's nice.
Over the last few years I have undertaken a process of decentralisation of my presence on the internet. I used to be a strong advocate of using single identity providers to access services, signing in to anything I could with my Google account. Then, however, I came to have a better understanding of how these "identity providers" were really just data marts, selling their knowledge of me to others to exploit. I started creating dedicated accounts with one-use emails to log into individual services I use, especially those where interaction with others is the main experience.
Doing things this way made it feel a bit more like I was coming into a club rather than a stage. In a club, we had a common interest and mostly spent our time talking to each other and not about each other.
My interests change over time, and I find the time I spend in various places on the internet shifting from forum to forum. For example, I've spent a lot of time on the StackExchange sites, and a similar amount of time on the Hashicorp Discussion forum. Although I come to these places for more or less the same reason: to improve my knowledge and skills on professional topics, I find the experience subtly different. The former is designed to be transactional, while the latter is a place to discuss. I am lucky to have had the experience of moderating a few instances of Discourse in the past, and I have a good feeling for the behaviour it encourages. While it is definitely satisfying to get that answer to the issue that is blocking you, or that +15 hit on an answer you provided, it's not the same as engaging in an actual discussion with actual people on the internet.
I hope to have more of those.
Have a good Sunday,
Bruce
For some time now, I've wanted to write to you, but wasn't really sure what to write about. It's difficult to know who you are and what you are interested in, and therefore what we could be talking about. It's also been long enough since I really quit the "small" social networks, the ones where you could identify your connections personally and spoke more or less directly to them.
This feels like a small social network, because I am writing in to you in the first person, but indeed you are an amorphous concept of "out there". It's nice.
Over the last few years I have undertaken a process of decentralisation of my presence on the internet. I used to be a strong advocate of using single identity providers to access services, signing in to anything I could with my Google account. Then, however, I came to have a better understanding of how these "identity providers" were really just data marts, selling their knowledge of me to others to exploit. I started creating dedicated accounts with one-use emails to log into individual services I use, especially those where interaction with others is the main experience.
Doing things this way made it feel a bit more like I was coming into a club rather than a stage. In a club, we had a common interest and mostly spent our time talking to each other and not about each other.
My interests change over time, and I find the time I spend in various places on the internet shifting from forum to forum. For example, I've spent a lot of time on the StackExchange sites, and a similar amount of time on the Hashicorp Discussion forum. Although I come to these places for more or less the same reason: to improve my knowledge and skills on professional topics, I find the experience subtly different. The former is designed to be transactional, while the latter is a place to discuss. I am lucky to have had the experience of moderating a few instances of Discourse in the past, and I have a good feeling for the behaviour it encourages. While it is definitely satisfying to get that answer to the issue that is blocking you, or that +15 hit on an answer you provided, it's not the same as engaging in an actual discussion with actual people on the internet.
I hope to have more of those.
Have a good Sunday,
Bruce