(2023-06-08) Kissane All This Unmobilized Love

Erin Kissane: All this unmobilized love. Straight out of undergrad, I applied to a bookselling job and didn’t get it, so I started working in tech

25 years into the social internet era, we’ve seen weirdly little experimentation with social forms at scale

Where are the networks that deeply in their bones understand hospitality vs. performance

The big promise of federated social tools is neither Mastodon (or Calckey or any of the other things I’ve seen yet) nor the single-server Bluesky beta—it’s new things built in new ways that use protocols like AT and ActivityPub to interact with the big world

I’m online enough to pause here both for the folks who are assembling their responses about why I should never mention Bluesky—I wrote this for you, it’s okay if you hate it, my hopes for Bluesky are that it provides productive competition for the fediverse and eventually becomes a really interesting distributed option

I will also acknowledge the people about to say that AT or ActivityPub or indeed anything federated cannot ever be truly good or safe, etc. Thing is, the centralized systems never belong to good.

What most of us rarely have time for is the organizational work that runs alongside and on top of technical protocols to enable participatory design processes, build institutional knowledge, and establish the kinds of multi-facted support and user-accountable governance that produces sustainability.

We also need new generations of user-accountable institutions to realize the potential of new tech tools—which loops back to what I think Holgren was writing toward on Bluesky

(”Unmobilized love,” is a callback to one of Mike Davis’s final interviews.)