rzazueta's comments

I have a pet conspiracy theory that the leadership there thinks this may rid them of "troublemakers". Huffman's seemingly ludicrous hardcore stance against third party Apps and mods who disagree with him would seem to reinforce this.

Basically, they're chasing away the folks who are most likely to cause a ruckus when Reddit inevitably tries to go IPO or otherwise make a profit. Everyone is saying this is in prep for their IPO, but I agree with Huffman's analysis that now is a really shitty time to be pondering an IPO. My guess is he has a checklist of items he needs to accomplish on the site handed to him by leadership to make everything look good for an IPO. He may have realized a lot of these would not go well with the community - this isn't his first rodeo with this stuff - so he applied draconian measures, hardened his heart against the mods and app devs who made the site what it is, and is hoping and praying there will be something left when the smoke clears. And there will be, especially as they force subreddits back into the light and encouraging mods to turn on each other. Basically, this is a loyalty test, and all of the disloyal people are being forced out. The loyal people who will pretty much go with anything Reddit leadership wants will be all that's left, and they're banking that will be enough. Add the influx of Facebook and Twitter refugees who likely see all of this as just nerd posturing, and, yeah, Reddit will likely survive and go IPO.

But it will not be Reddit. It will be a sad, corporate shadow of the vibrant community it once was. And it will not last. I honestly believe distributed social media - ActivityPub, BlueSky (ew), or something yet to come - will be the future. It will look like your favorite social media feeds now, but it will act like email, just hopefully with better moderation and spam handling. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube will eventually relent and tie themselves to this ecosystem as a last ditch effort to stay alive, then probably picked apart by private equity vultures in an ignominious final act.

EDIT: WOW - within five minutes of posting this, this other news story crossed my transom, more or less confirming my theory. Neat! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...

I run my own instance of Mastodon just for myself - and am thinking of doing the same for Lemmy. I, of course, can do that because I have the skills - most don't, so they must rely on sites like these for their accounts.

I've been working on an alternative that is, ultimately, a standalone and lightweight ActivityPub server that handles only one account at a time. The idea would be to serve an account as - in essence - it's own container. If a person just wants to run an instance for themselves off an old laptop in their livingroom (which is how I run my Mastodon instance), they can do that themselves if they have the skills - which I would strive to be minimal.

But, if they needed to rely on someone like beehaw, they could sintead join a "collective" - a central site on one domain that handles all incoming and outgoing messaging, DDOS protection, CDN caching, and even blocklist handling (e.g. reading a user's blocklist and blocking at the outermost layer) then passes what gets through to the individual service running on the backend. A collective could apply a site-wide blocklist, but the users would be able to opt back in because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who are actually federating with these other instances - the collective is, in essence, a firewall or "management layer", akin to an APIM for APIs.

Obviously, I'm not done building this, but I'm going to try and accelerate my work once I get some paid work off my desk. Why wouldn't something like this work? If an account wants to stay connected to a problematic server for whatever their reasons, how would that impact the rest of the collective if federation is handled at the user level?

Or, perhaps a better question, what's wrong with handling federation at the user level? Should I not be able to follow any account or block any account I want? Why must this fall on the backs of the admins?

And all of their wealth - including that of Gates, Bezos, Ellison, ad nauseum - is built on the knowledge, expertise, and labor of people they ruthlessly exploit and manipulate for their own gain.

And everyone still celebrates these assholes. Even as the scales fall from our eyes, they are still supported by their staff and employees, who continue to sell their lives to these narcissistic pieces of shit for a discount. The folks who do the real work should literally walk off the job and go start their own thing together, sharing the work and sharing the proceeds. Cut the rich assholes out of all of it.

The crypto hype bubble was the new mobile hype bubble.

The mobile hype bubble was the new portal hype bubble.

The portal hype bubble was the new dot com hype bubble.

I swear there's a pattern here... Maybe I'm not seeing it...

Cold calling is a numbers game - better suited for larger orgs with a defined process for driving prospects down the funnel. Not ideal if you are independent.

Your best bet is referrals - from family, friends and especially colleagues in the industry. Make a list of folks you know who may be in some position to advocate for you, then call those folks up and ask them for help. Make sure you are able to clearly articulate the services you are willing and able to offer in a way that makes it easy for them both to understand and share with their contacts.

In the meantime, do some thought leadership - start a blog or do a series of videos helping folks in your area of interest while demonstrating your expertise. Post links to them on LinkedIn and anywhere else your prospective customers are. Don't be afraid to give away "secrets" - most are more willing to hire someone who knows what they're talking about rather than trying it themselves.

Make sure everything you put out there - emails, blog posts, videos, etc. - show how folks can get a hold of you. It can be as simple as including your URL prominently.

You will always have to work - you need to feed yourself, clothe yourself, shelter yourself, etc. How you go about doing all of that is what matters. With that in mind, I think you;re asking "What would I do if I didn't have to have a job," which is a more interesting question.

I would find people in my community to band together to help us build and maintain our community - helping maintain each other's home, build new homes for expanding families and new comers, produce as much of our own food as possible, and adopt various technologies to make it all easier on us so we could also enjoy abundant free time for art, play, relationship, and joy.

This could be us now, but too many people sell their lives at a discount to rich narcissists. If we, instead, turn away from those useless assholes and turn, instead, to each other and form cooperative work environments where the work is equally shared - as are the proceeds - we can start building a better, more freer world where you can answer this question in real time for yourself.

This just... WAAAAAAY too on the nose...

I went through something almost exactly the same a few years ago, and I'm almost completely on the other side of it now - far happier and with a new set of life goals.

We are told that money and our jobs are what are most important in life. I mean, yeah, all the aphorisms deny this - "Money can;t buy happiness", "The best things in life are free", etc., but all of society is set up for us to sell the best parts of our lives to further enrich the wealthy while we're left with scraps. Your boss makes significantly more than you do, their boss makes significantly more than them, and the majority of the profits are directed to investors who contribute nothing of substance to the company. You take a job that pays well that you can tolerate - few of us "love what we do" because we're often doing things we don;t benefit from directly, are doing things we know are incorrect but that;s what the boss wants, or doing things we really don;t understand just to make ends meet. Quit your job and you will find yourself homeless and starving - at least, that's the message.

You need to recapture the meaning in your life. I worked like a dog for years, traveling the world, leaving very little time left for the family I built, the family I wanted. When my father got sick, I had to move to be closer to him, but my wife and kid had to stay behind. We were separated for seven months. That forced separation killed my soul. When I took the time to stop and evaluate the situation, I realized I was so angry because I missed them - that all I ever wanted was to be with them, that even my job was a hindrance to that. When things settled with my dad and I could move back home, I tried to figure out how to change things so I could focus more on what matters to me - my family, my home, the communities that support me that I choose to support and participate in.

I lost my job just before the pandemic, and all the interviews that seemed very far along suddenly stopped as those companies circled the wagons in the face of uncertainty. I watched my savings was rapidly dwindle. My family adjusted and started to learn to live with less - less eating out, less buying things to fill the void of loneliness we felt, etc. After a couple of abortive attempts to get a new job, I decided to just start consulting. I hung out the shingle on LinkedIn (Like you, I thought I had killed my professional network, but I have built up a lot of goodwill over the years that loads of folks were eager to pay back - I bet you'll find the same) and got a couple of clients pretty quickly. It took six months of scraping and struggling and borrowing before we had enough consistent income I could relax.

It;s been two years now. I work from home and no longer travel unless absolutely necessary. Since I don't go into an office - and since I set my workload and hours - I have more time for things around the house. My garden is improving. My house is cleaner. I cook more elaborate meals for my family because I have the time and am in the right place to go and monitor things. We home school our son (he spends some time at a co-op style school as well) and I get to help - I often jump in with math and science issues and get to teach him things like programming and electronics.

The point is not that you need to quit your job and start consulting - that may not work for you. The point is to sit down and figure out what actually matters to you. You already said it - "a wife, kids, a house, meaningful work, etc." Do you have any of these things in your life? If so, it;s time to start readjusting your life to focus on them - these are the rewards for your efforts, you should enjoy them now as life is short.

But, in re-reading, it sounds like perhaps work and life may have prevented you from finding that family. 43 is still quite young, and you have plenty of time left - truly - to find peace and love in your life. But you need to readjust your focus. Let go of the idea that your value lay in the money you make - that is an insidious lie used to control you and force you to work for pennies. We spend too much time optimizing for money as a society and practically zero time optimizing for humanity. You can't change the world - but you can change YOUR world. YOU don;t need to optimize for money. Figure out how to live comfortably with less - all we truly need in life is to be well fed, well loved, and well rested. Figure out what that means specifically for you - for it;s different for everyone - then put your focus on that. Make enough money to support your efforts in finding personal peace and happiness, but don't sacrifice your own happiness for money. You did that for 43 years - so did I - but, together, we can be done with it.

Do you wish you were a happier, more congenial, more friendly person? Then BE that person. Who do you admire and what do you admire about them? Impersonate those qualities until you can truly call them your own. And forgive yourself when you screw it up - because you will screw it up again and again. That's not a personal flaw, that's just being human. Forgive yourself, love yourself, and learn from your mistakes. It's hard work, but it's the most satisfying and will pay in far greater dividends than any job you have ever had.

And becoming a caring, empathetic person has a tendency to draw other good, empathetic people to you. Build a community of people who support you, and whom you can also support. Your friends, your chosen family, groups to which you belong that you genuinely feel improve your world - seek them out with patience for them and yourself. And make sure you stop on a regular basis to evaluate things - many call this a practice of "gratitude" or "counting your blessings". Done wrong, it's just toxic positivity - "Oh things are bad? Just count your blessings!" Done right, it can give your perspective as well as lay out the path for you to follow - "I have a lot of good friends, but I still feel a bit disconnected. Let's try engaging with them in a different way - being more honest and open, or spending more time listening than talking, or suggesting an activity for us rather than just doing whatever they want..."

If you need help from a professional like a therapist, seek it. But you mentioned having a hard time getting access to mental health services. A therapist at this point is helpful as someone neutral to whom you can speak and get everything in your head out - like laying the pieces on the table to examine them and figure out why they aren't fitting. If you can't find a therapist, find a friend. or use ChatGPT. Or start a podcast or diary just for yourself and no one else, a safe space to share and explore your thoughts. The simple act of approaching these problems with the intent to examine and find a solution to them is often enough to unstick whatever is holding you back and get you started on a path toward a better life, so try something now and don't give up.

You got this.

3. The willingness to egregiously exploit others for personal gain. You touch on this a bit with the privilege answer, but the truth is those who come from privilege often see themselves as "above" others. And they encourage this worldview in everyone, largely to keep themselves above the rest. They pay themselves more even though, as you rightly point out, they only might know how to code or do the actual work that is generating value. Their "special skill" is in using their wealth, privilege, and occasionally charm to convince others to dedicate their lives to them - or at least 40 hours a week, though Musk is a greedy asshole with his bedroom offices and shit - and direct most of the proceeds from their labors toward the folks at the top who, let's be honest here, don't actually do meaningful work.

SBF and his team fully exploited the investors who entrusted them with their money. I have a little less sympathy for those folks - well, really, for the folks who make the majority of their money off the backs of someone else's labor and call it "investing" - but it's still rampant exploitation. The entire system is built on it and we keep falling for it.

If I want the young folks reading this to take anything away, it's that selling your lives to rich assholes will never free you. Stop competing with each other and start working together cooperatively. Shun the VCs and pool your own resources to build an organization where each member's contribution is equally valued, where decisions are made by consensus, where leaders lead and guide rather than rule and intimidate and make no more than twice the average pay for the extra workload. And any profits generated are partially retained for growth, but otherwise distributed evenly among those who contributed the labor. No need for a revolution, for new laws, for a new system of government or anything like that - stop fighting each other and competing against each other, it only serves the malignant narcissists who keep trying to tell us they are in charge. Work together, share the proceeds, build and support your communities, and focus on finding contentedness and happiness rather than the false promise of wealth and riches.

Been going through something similar. I still enjoy technology, though my passions have cooled into what I think of as "useful technologies" as opposed to "toy technologies" (basically - is it useful, or is it just entertaining?). I, too, have been in tech for at least 20 years now. The funny thing is, I remember when I got into the career right out of college how resistant I was to the whole idea. I recall very clearly sitting in my college apartment the week of graduation cursing the fact that I was now facing down a couple of decades of sitting in a cubicle instead of actually living a life. Everyone told me to suck it up and get to work - parents, mentors, media, etc. - so that's what I did.

I think a big part of the reason so many people are miserable - not just in tech, but across every industry - is because we have all been convinced to sell the bulk of our lives to rich people for the sole purpose of making them richer. We spend on average 40 hours a week dedicated to jobs whose sole focus at the end of the day is to make the owners and investors richer. We get a piece of it - some more than others - and we're told to be happy with that as we spend the best parts of our lives not with the families we have built, the communities we have chosen, or in celebration of the life with which we have been granted, but dedicating ourselves to the betterment of a wealthy few. And it's only getting worse. Elon Musk's expectation of having a "hardcore" group of employees willing to work 80 hour weeks just so he can save his $44B mistake is peak malignant narcissism, and there are folks actively praising him for it. Fuck. That.

Find work that is meaningful to you. Not that bullshit "save the world" type of crap that hides exploitation of workers beneath a veil of toxic positivity (effective altruism is, at best, bullshit, at worst it allows these assholes to not only exploit the labor of others, but their sense of good will as well) - I mean true, meaningful work that you and the communities most important to you see direct benefit from. Rather than work for another bloated rich asshole, either work for yourself or find a group of local, like-minded folks and work cooperatively - sharing the duties and sharing the proceeds equally or equitably. If you can't find folks locally and want to stick to tech - the choice I'm currently making until I can be in a position to start something locally - then do the same thing, but with a group of like-minded techs. I am now a full time independent consultant, but I occasionally hop on to projects with friends in the industry in similar positions. We name our prices and often kick a little more to the person handling the coordination with the client, which grants us control of our time and a reasonably steady income. You may be surprised how easy it is to build such a group of people. You say you've been in the industry for ~20 years - my guess is you have developed a pretty strong network. Shake that tree and find your people.

If you've completely lost your passion for tech... well, first, I'm very sorry to hear that. I'm willing to bet if you can take a break from having to rely on it to make all of your income, you may find yourself drawn back into it. Until then, I'd suggest looking around your community and starting a small local business, run as a worker-owned and operated co-op. Get loans or fund it by providing the loans yourself, but no one should have an ownership stake unless they work directly for the company, and everyone working for the company should have an ownership stake and a say in how it's run. Spread the risk among everyone who joins, and also spread the reward when you succeed. Don't build a business, don't be a boss - build a community, become a leader. Unless you were born rich or are willing to commit the majority of your time and life to becoming rich by exploiting other people, you will never be rich yourself. Instead, shoot for thriving in a community where you are well fed, well loved, and well rested. There's no single or simple path to it, but focus on that as an end goal and you'll find the path that works for you.

My beard's not even grey yet, c'mon!

I feel like that's part of the point of the Fediverse, though - it;s not a centralized social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. - it;s really for creating interconnected communities that are mostly self-supporting and grow very deliberately.

The benefits of discoverability - gaining a following of strangers, reaching new audiences for marketing purposes, etc. - are also what breed a lot of the problems associated with centralized social media. If Twitter is an international airport, then Fediverse apps are like your local regional airports - like the ones you pass on the freeway but never really notice are there. If you;re looking for a true Twitter replacement, Mastodon and the others aren't it - they're building smaller, focused, organic communities rather than incentivizing engagement to sell eyeballs to advertisers. That changes their whole dynamic.

I also used to enjoy coming into the office. That shifted, though, when the company I was working for got bought out twice by two major companies. When it was just the folks from the original startup - we'd grown to about 190 people by the time of the first acquisition - we all pretty much knew each other well, enjoyed working with one another, and were able to focus on the things that not only moved the needle for the company, but that we found interesting. We also had stock and hope that we'd build in enough value to strike it well. That happened in the first buy out, but - as expected - the proceeds from that buy out weren't evenly distributed. Everyone on the team suddenly knew their relative value to the company based on how much they made from the sale, regardless of what they contributed. Some folks straight up quit and moved on to bigger and better, while many of us wound up having to stay with the acquiring company. I joined the company late so saw little to no proceeds from the initial sale, so I watched all this happen as a mostly passive observer. When we got sold - twice - it was like a baseball player being traded in the night to a new team.

What I'm getting at here is that, when you;re working with a team of people who are all committed to the same end, who enjoy working with one another, and who believe they will share in the proceeds, you tend to create a sense of harmony. Working in that office in the way you describe - hours at the desk, quick over the shoulder help sessions, after work drinks and dinners - comes from that sense of camaraderie and common purpose. Take that away, and you wind up with angry people who feel their time and their lives have been exploited for someone else's gain - which is true for every single hierarchically structured company on the planet, which is, like, 90% of them. The sense of camaraderie can hide that feeling of exploitation, providing a false sense of community that is further exploited to make the investors richer. When that veil is lifted, as it was during the pandemic when people were expected to work as normal in the face of existential uncertainty all in the name of supporting the economy instead of caring for people, you;re left with a whole bunch of folks who see the whole system as bunk. That's where we are right now.

I refuse to work full time for another company now that I've realized this. But I am eager to get back to that sense of working with like-minded people for a common cause - that's something I think most of us crave. My answer is to find a way to build a co-operative business that allows all members to share in the proceeds equally and have greater control over their lives while truly working together toward a common goal rather than just making some VCs and their investors richer. I already do something similar with a group of consultant friends, which is cool - we pull each other in on jobs and charge each person's going rate, occasionally pushing each other to charge more since we're terrible at that sort of thing. I want to try and start some kind of co-operative business in my town as well and start to experiment more with this model - a coffee shop or a restaurant, potentially something small at first.

If we own our work and enjoy the full proceeds of that work, we tend to be happy. That is simply not how the corporate world is structured, and I believe that;s the source of so much work unhappiness.

Agreed - all of the things said below, plus: depression; less activity due to cars, sitting at desks all day, and other non-active activities; the absolute contant confusion about what foods are healthy and aren't; the complete confusion over what "food" actually is (Michael Pollan has done some great writing there).

It's a combination of all of these - and many other - variables, which have different influences on different people. For every morbidly obese person dealing with all of the health, societal, and metal affects, I can just as easily find at least one unhealthy "healthy" person who obsesses WAY too much over this stuff. Both have eating disorders for pretty much the same reasons, but with different results. And there are more than enough folks who continue to take advantage of all of this confusion to make money at both ends who see no reason to stop it and prefer to prolong it.

Who is there left to trust here?

Same boat. I've spent a lot of time learning about permaculture, soil science, etc. I found "Teaming with Microbes" by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis to be right at the level I needed - not so deeply into the weeds that it;s boring, not so surface that I don;t actually learn anything. This book is the first in a series, and it does an excellent job in addressing the exact topics you mention above:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008K8HACU/ref=kinw_myk_ro...

I think from there you'd have a sense of the topics you'd want to pursue and should have enough knowledge to be able to use the right search terms to find it.

I'm not a smoker, but know many, many people who are legitimately addicted to tobacco. What is it about the content of this book that made such a change in you? I'd love to hear about your experience - it sounds like an extraordinary approach if it indeed works as well as you're saying, which makes me think it's some kind of written neurolinguistic programming thing, a technique that could be helpful in a lot of other situations.

> 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled.

I'd rather the law be more around information than control. If one believes in the idea of freedom and liberty in the US, then one should support a model where individuals are allowed to make their own decisions, but ensure the facts around such substances are well researched and publicized.

Alcohol kills, and yet is not actually very well controlled at all. Marijuana doesn't kill anyone directly, and yet the lies told about it has kept it tightly controlled, even as the real facts continue to come out.

I don't believe the government really has any obligation to keep us safe from our own poor decisions, assuming those poor decisions can be argued to be have been informed using truthful information.

Depends on how you ask the question.

"Is it fair to incarcerate individuals for their preference of intoxicant in a free and liberal democracy?"

"Should drug users and other junkies be taken off the streets to keep them safe for the rest of us?"

Or creates and reinforces those class lines.

My town in the Bay Area has always been considered one of the more "affordable" options (which is why we live here). The estimated cost of living to do more than just survive here is roughly estimated to be about $96,000/yr. That factors in rent / mortgage, food, transportation, etc.

So who are really the one's doing the poor estimating? The new college grads staring down the barrel of a career that will allow them to just skate by after paying the cost of living on top of their loans, or the companies making record profits but exploiting new college grads by paying less than a thriving wage?

"Pay your dues" is the cry of the exploiters who profit more from your labor than you do.