It’s coming up on been a year, somehow, since I started this website/micro-studio/space to think in. What a wild choice that was, setting out in October of 2024, eyes on the horizon! We’d hoped things would turn out differently.

The research and thinking I came here to be with you to do has been hard this year, maybe especially because the more I’ve worked on the year’s central project—Unbreaking—the less certain I’ve felt about whether I’ve been keeping the faith with you, at least in ways that are intelligible from outside my own brain. I think I have been, and in ways that I hope will become increasingly clear in the next month or two, but I want to talk about more of what I’ve been doing, more explicitly.

But first, a tiny teaser: I’m hoping to publish a couple of short-for-me essays very soon: The first one is about the continuity between trying to make ways to live together online out of infrastructure and moderation and trying to make ways together out of mud and neighborhood associations, neolithic and otherwise. The second is about the communal context collapses and collisions that make it so hard to think and speak about the design and management of our social networks themselves—using a pretty cursed moment in Bluesky discourse as a point of departure. (Sickos: Nooo.)

Honestly, I’d hoped to have that first post out today, but then more mostly-terrible immigration news happened and…I needed to learn too much about it to get together this Thursday’s Immigration timeline update for Unbreaking. So it’s coming, but a few days later. In the meantime, I’ve quite recently confirmed to myself that I still believe everything I wrote in Bad Shape: the work of maintaining habitable spaces for human sociability online is fundamentally incompatible with the needs of organizations designed to make a lot of money. But that’s just a place to start thinking.

Better platforms, better bridges, better docs

This morning, I sat in on the beginning of the first day of this season’s FediForum and Ben Werdmuller gave a densely packed and excellent keynote on what makes the open social internet so vital right now, given (gesturing) the events. Tomorrow I’ll be there again for the launch of some beautiful new work from A New Social, which is one of the projects wreckage/salvage backers have helped me contribute to this year as a member of the org’s board. I get to hang out with Ryan and Anuj a little bit every couple of weeks and talk through their decisions and hopes and questions, and I won’t lie—I always leave those calls feeling better about our chances.

Also good: Earlier in the year, I got to contribute a tiny bit to the Mastodon team’s work bringing quote posts to the platform in ways that are alive to risk and to joy in ways that I hope will be great for the ecosystem now that they’re out in the world as of just a few days ago. There are a bunch of great, skillful people working on things over there, and they’re not going to get it all right—none of us are—but they’re trying things and they’re trying them carefully. I think that’s the only way forward.

Oh, and I think I forgot to say, but before Google closed the doors on Season of Docs this year, its Dev Rel team—thank you Erin McKean—brought me in to glean everything I could from the case studies that came out of the program’s history and smash it up with my own experience in editorial strategy, user research, and open source. I read a whole lot, I got to talk to a bunch of smart, thoughtful maintainers, and I wrapped up as much of it as I could into Docs Advisor, a guide to better docs for open source projects. Google published the resource this spring alongside a fantastic resource from Daniel Beck that pulled on much of the same material and his own experience in docs to create a series of Documentation Project Archetypes. If you work in open source and want to make better docs, I hope the collective wisdom we pulled together in those two resources can help you get more done, more easily. Ongoing thanks to the maintainers, mostly recruited via the fediverse, who spoke with me for the project.

Knowledge repair, networked edition

And then there’s Unbreaking, which is very much the kind of vernacular institution I talked about this spring at ATmosphereConf. It’s a new nonprofit—technically a project of the wonderful Raft Foundation—that I started with some old and new friends this past spring. We founded it to try to turn the prismatically scattered streams and fragments of news we were all swimming and/or drowning in into durable knowledge that we and others could use to orient ourselves about what is happening in the US as our government gets hollowed out and weaponized against us.

Since April, Unbreaking has gone from a little group of founders to more than a hundred people in a Slack taking in information and checking it and building our collective understanding of what’s going on. We’ve made a lot of knowledge artifacts along the way, and we’re about to try a bunch of new ones to better meet our readers where they are—here in the supersaturated but ultrafragmented information zone trying to understand 1.) how the authoritarian slide is moving and 2.) what it means. The work is unfunded and has been about as harried and demanding as any volunteer crisis response project is, and many of the smartest and kindest and best people I know are working away at their piece of it. (It’s so different from what we did at the Covid Tracking Project and also it’s…really similar, in that we’re just heading out every day trying to figure it out together and explain it to people we care about, including you reading this now.)

Vernacular institutions

Back in the spring while I was trying to understand what I wanted from institutions on networks, I mentioned two existing vernacular institutions that are making our decentralized networks better: IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust & Safety) and Blacksky, which I mentioned as an emblematic example of that kind of institution—of and for a community and run to serve its needs.

Today, in celebration of clearing my desk enough to write this post, I migrated my Bluesky account over to Blacksky’s infrastructure—or to its PDS, at least, which is the infra currently available, with more coming, apparently quite soon. After my last Mastodon migration turned into such a weird hairball of exceptions, I’d put off an ATProto migration for literally months in the belief that I needed real focus and to be ready to handle unexpected weirdness. For me, at least, the docs and tools were great and the whole process took about 20 very easy minutes. My posts came over with me, everything connected up as it should, and now I’m putting my money where my mouth is on a monthly basis, instead of an irregular one when I remember to.

Things have also happened at IFTAS, where I’ve been a pretty lightly involved advisor, and some have been crushingly disappointing for reasons that have nothing to do with Jaz-Michael King’s tireless work as unpaid leader or Emelia Smith’s long stretch of technical efforts. Instead, as global funding and attention swung even further away from moderation work and care than usual, IFTAS spent a year knocking on doors and getting no answers; everyone wants to rack up new builds and nobody wants to fund maintenance. Because it couldn’t raise sufficient funding from institutional backers, IFTAS had to spin down its CSAM detection work. I have more to say about that, but I’m going to give it its own post so readers can work around it more easily if they need to.

Jaz is still doing crucial work with the smaller version of IFTAS he now runs, having just helped uncover a Russian-linked disinformation network that is operating in pretty much exactly the ways many of us expected disinfo networks would: They’re fanning out to create accounts across distributed infrastructure to avoid detection and then using bridges to funnel into more centralized systems, like the current incarnation of Bluesky. New systems, more bridges, new and more vulnerabilities.

Looking both ways

As fall sets in, I’m looking forward to digging in hard on some of the network thinking I’d backburnered over the summer. I’m also looking forward to finally, finally getting to the honestly very exciting work of weaving the kinds of knowledge we’re cobbling together at Unbreaking into the specific shapes and affordances of open social networks. I find it emotionally sustaining that there’s so much potential for trying things carefully, on both sides of the network-making and network-using table. I wrote a bit about it in early summer, but I find that seeing social networks from the POV of a collective actively trying to repair our knowledge is so illuminating for the work of trying make those networks better for all of us. A lot of the work I do every day is in the close handling of frankly toxic information, but I’m gearing up to suit the work, and recently I’m finding that I’m weirdly excited about the ways the various tunnels I’ve been digging sometimes connect up.

Lastly, I will say I’m also just doing better as a person after a bit of a rough stretch. I don’t want to get into details—and honestly, I still don’t really know what happened—but over the summer, I kind of ruined my brain in a way that was genuinely new to me. Maybe I’ll write about it somewhere but not today, except to say that although I was essentially emotionally fine the whole time, my cognition took a wild hit. And that although I’m still not quite back, I’m much better than I was.

So: The post that’s up next here lets me get into not one but two of my favorite examples of wildass, mass-scale vernacular architecture and the reasons I think they have compelling things to show us about life together online. Even now, or especially now. They’re giving me useful things to think with and about, and I’m looking forward to sending them your way.

Membership changes

Thank you, as ever, so much to the folks who’ve supported this first year, Descent Into Authoritarianism Edition and all. I can’t express how much it’s meant to me to have you on my side.

In recognition of the wider situation, I’ve made the decision to keep this little thing going, but I’ve changed it up. The tier that was $12/month is now $8, because god knows your support goes a long way for me as I keep taking way more unpaid work than paid, but also…so many of us are so over-stretched. This is literally the exact opposite of all the doubtlessly wise strategic advice I see going around, but I don’t know! It’s also just gnarly as hell out there, and I feel it. I can’t not! So I made that change. You can also kick a few bucks (or more!) my way any time if you want to support the work that way; it all helps in ways that go beyond the entirely rational.

So in any case, thank you for reading, and thank you for being here with me.

Notes

The image at the top of this post is from the wonderful NOAA image archive, one of my favorite places on the web. The website holding their archive has been slowly falling apart under the current administration’s lack of care, and I don’t have much metadata for this one, which used to live on this page. Tomorrow I’m going to go through the backup drive where I stashed as much of the archive as I could and see if I can find anything, but I think the image is worthy all by itself.

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