My social media strategy for 2023 still needs to be defined. In my previous post, I wrote about Twitter and Mastodon and how the future of Twitter looks unclear. I’m interested in decentralized networks, so I should use Mastodon more. But I was also thinking about investing more in Twitter and using it strategically for my business and personal goals, trying out new social media marketing tools. I should also post more regularly on LinkedIn to reach those who don’t hang out on Twitter. There are other networks that I’ve joined but don’t use. And overall, I need to ensure that my usage of these sites is healthy and that I don’t end up doom-scrolling or procrasti-reading.
However, for now, I have decided on a wait-and-see approach. More specifically, I have added figuring out social media to the not-to-do list for January. My reasoning is as follows.
At the moment, the situation with Twitter is in flux. What will Elon Musk do next? I assume things will stabilize, and he will put someone else in charge, but the company’s strategy needs to be clarified. And Mastodon is growing, but I’m curious if it will become a target for social media marketing and if third-party tools like schedulers will support that or if the Fediverse will actively resist this commercial side of social media. In about a month, I can be more confident about the state of things and see where they’re going.
The other reason is that I should focus on something other than marketing and personal brand building right now. I have a few long-term and returning clients and projects in the pipeline, so I can wait to sell more. I need to establish goals first. Three years ago, I created a website focused on selling developer content production. However, that was only one aspect of my work since then, and I’ve worked on many other things.
I’m often thinking about whether I should add more focus to my work and establish myself better in a niche or continue doing what I’m doing right now. Focusing would mean saying “No” to current projects I enjoy - and I don’t like saying “No”. But the path to growth from freelancer to an entrepreneur is productizing services, which requires some focus. So, there’s a lot on my mind that I need to figure out finally. The social network on which I announce the result has yet to have priority.
I’ll end with a Twitter thread by Thomas Frank, who claims that regularly posting on social media is insignificant. What matters more is working in seasons. Sometimes you need to go into hermit mode and create great things. Then, start “touring season” and reap the rewards. Now is my time for hermit mode.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I had very few expectations about the impact on the service. I’m neither a Musk fanboy nor an Elon hater (as the meme goes, I’m a third, more complex thing). He deserves credit for his entrepreneurial activities, including bringing electric cars to the mainstream car lover and reviving space travel. On the other hand, I knew some of his behavior and opinions were questionable, at the very least. And I’m generally wary of billionaires accumulating too much power, including control over an essential communication and media platform. However, I didn’t expect that Twitter would change significantly under Musk’s leadership. Now I have to admit I was wrong.
After he entered the Twitter headquarters (with a sink, just for a pun’s sake), Musk quickly changed the culture into “move fast and break things”, a motto that might work for an early startup but not for an established platform. Things have gotten chaotic, making many people worry about the long-term stability and viability of the service. I don’t want to recount everything he did and subsequently roll back. However, I’m pondering how to use Twitter in the future.
The chaos at Twitter has been great for alternative social networks. Tumblr appears to make a comeback. New competitors like CoHost are appearing. The biggest benefactor is Mastodon, though, along with the whole cosmos of ActivityPub-powered federated platforms often referred to as the Fediverse. There have been exodus waves from old social media sites into new networks, but they have yet to be sustainable. It could be different this time. I don’t expect Twitter to die or claim the Fediverse is already a complete replacement. Still, Mastodon might be the first federated network since email to graduate from geek toy to mainstream endorsement. There might have never been a better time to migrate.
From seeing the first drafts of OpenID to being a participant at IndieWebCamp, I’ve always been interested in federated and decentralized technology. Hence, observing these developments is interesting. However, I’m also worried about the financial and administrative sustainability of the Fediverse. Decentralization has a lot of advantages, but it’s neither a business model nor a panacea that solves all problems inherent to social media. In “Smoke alarm and snowfall”, Julia Racsko shares similar sentiments. Decentralized social media is an experiment that can fail, and we may find that centralization is better.
While Elon Musk seems erratic as the head of Twitter, his general idea of emphasizing the Twitter Blue subscription model over funding from ads seems intriguing. It’s another experiment that I want to see played out. It could change the overall vibe when Twitter rewards paid users more attention. The most active and visible Twitter users could be those who can justify Twitter Blue as a business expense, engaging more in promotion than conversation. Maybe we see a split where Twitter becomes even more of a broadcast network, and regular discussions move to Mastodon. Also, if the paid model works, Twitter could become what app.net tried to be. Of course, this is all speculation.
As I’m observing and speculating, I need to develop my social media strategy. I have two Mastodon accounts, but I rarely post on either. That should change because I don’t want the Fediverse to be a ghost town. On Twitter, I promote my business and my book and drive the conversation with the tech community around APIs and Developer Experience. I also engage in discussions around a broad range of interests with a vast community of active Twitter users. Doing both from the same account seems challenging, but setting up an “alt” account seems overkill, and I know there will be analysis paralysis if a tweet could fit both, and I can’t decide where to post. On top of that, I should spend less time on social media and more time creating stuff and engaging with people in the real world or more intimate virtual spaces.
While figuring mine out, I’m curious to hear about your goals and plans for social media usage in 2023 and how you deal with the Twitter situation.
“How to flirt with the world” was the name of the Interintellect salon I attended tonight. Pragya G., who I’ve been following on Twitter for a few months now, hosted it as her debut salon. I want to give a personal recount of my experience at the salon and why I attended it in the first place.
“Flirting” isn’t a word that’s been part of my regular vocabulary, and I’ve long had a lot of negative connotations. I would mostly think of cheesy pick-up lines and people (primarily men) aggressively forcing a sexual or romantic layer into a conversation instead of letting it flow naturally. It wasn’t until I came across an article (to which I sadly don’t have a link anymore) that my perspective changed. It described flirting in different terms. It doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic at all. It’s mostly just an open-minded, cheerful, light, and playful way to interact with the people you meet. It’s certainly not something I’m good at or do regularly, but I deem it positive and desirable. According to her tweets and the salon description, Pragya’s idea of flirting seems to be similar. She’s also someone I admire for her capability to feel gratitude for other people and the mundane aspects of life, something I’m not good at either.
Having attended multiple Interintellect salons, I observed that various hosts have different hosting styles. For Pragya, I noticed that she practiced what she preaches and flirted with all the attendees. But most of all, she cared a lot about all her attendees. She didn’t take that we took the time to join her for granted. Gratitude doesn’t always appear authentic when it seems over the top, but I could accept it as genuine from her. Maybe it’s because she told the story about one of her friends who did this for her, and she wants to carry it into the world, making others feel recognized. There’s an interview with Tasshin Fogleman that I listened to a while ago, which helped me understand from where she’s coming.
When the salon started, Pragya asked us to think of a situation in which we were involved in a successful flirt and what words and thoughts come into our minds when we think of it. One attendee came up with the term “benevolent transgressions”, which continued to be a theme throughout the salon. Flirting is always a play with boundaries; we also described it as a “dance of small steps” or “making small bets”.
Interestingly, Pragya, who does one-on-one flirt coaching, mentioned that the number one fear of her male clients is crossing too many boundaries and, thus, appearing creepy. This fear seems primarily male-coded, whereas women worry more about leading on and sending the wrong signs. In this context, most attendees agreed that indicating interest isn’t creepy, but only when someone cannot process disinterest from the other side. The conversation reminded me of a recent tweet from Clo S., who said it’s usually the “wholesome dudes” who worry about creepiness. The problem is that you cannot fully take responsibility for another person’s feelings. Yes, nobody should be a creep, but it’s practically impossible to live a life where the amount of discomfort you trigger in other people is zero because that would mean excluding yourself from potentially positive interactions. I think this is something I still need to learn and internalize. Making people just a tiny bit uncomfortable is okay as long as you are willing to admit mistakes, back off, and move on.
We touched on various other topics, such as the distinction between general and more romantic flirting. An interesting framing was that you could start with undirected flirting and then continually make it more directed to a person if they respond. People can flirt or be the receiver of a flirtatious approach without noticing it. It’s also possible to extend the definition of flirting by including things beyond people or even ideas. You can flirt with friends, but not everybody responds well, so you need to adapt. Most people like recognition and compliments, but people with low confidence may question their motives and not always take them positively.
The primary motivation for flirting should be generosity, the desire to make other people feel good. It is where Pragya’s idea of “flirting with the world” comes from, and many attendees can relate, even if there are additional ulterior motives behind the action.
It was a delightful salon; as I mentioned before, Pragya tried to make it a wonderful experience for everyone. It was also quite emotional for me, although I’m unsure if it was the room’s topic, host, or general vibe. I hope she’ll host more Interintellect salons in the future.
When I was in Lisbon for a month in 2019, I leveraged almost every opportunity to meet new people. One of the events I attended was called High Five Friending. It was a variant of a concept known as speed dating but taken out of the dating context to support a broader range of connections. A large group got together in a rooftop bar and had to install a mobile app that would ring every ten minutes to show you the picture of a person you should find as your next conversation partner. It was the first time I had participated in something like this, and I found it very enjoyable, even though it required a lot of energy to have so many conversations in a single night. This event gave me the confidence to participate in an actual speed dating event later that year, but that’s a different story.
Events facilitating one-on-one conversations are perfect, especially if you consider yourself shy or introverted. It may sound counter-intuitive initially, but I’ve noticed that I often tend to go quiet and listen without speaking in group settings. I find it hard to assert dominance and keep up with the speed of the conversation. A few people end up dominating the group. Having the undivided attention of another person, even just for ten minutes, means you can talk more and thus get more out of the encounter. Unsurprisingly, the Effective Altruism (EA) movement emphasizes one-on-one in its community-building strategy.
Local events like “High Five Friending” help find people in your vicinity. What can you do if you want to meet friends worldwide?! Luckily, a speed-dating setup works well with video chat applications like Zoom. For the Interintellect community, mingling salons have always been part of the other, along with the topic-based salons. Community members Brian Ahuja and Katrina Dela Cruz have hosted them a few times, but lately, the events happened at hours optimized for a primarily American audience. Anna Grigoryan and I wanted to attend the last one and voiced our discomfort with the scheduling in Discord. Instead of complaining or swallowing the pill of attending in the middle of the night, we spontaneously decided to team up and host our own mingle salon.
After that long-winded introduction, all that’s left for me to say is that I would love to see you at our salon. It will occur on Sunday, September 18th, at 18:00 CET. You don’t have to be an Interintellect member to come; you can book a ticket directly through their website.
Just nine euros to travel throughout the country! It was probably the most-liked policy the German government introduced this year, designed to help with rising energy costs. A highly subsidized monthly ticket granted access to the entire public transportation network in Germany, only excluding long-distance trains. You could buy it for June, July, and August, so it is currently the last month where it’s available. In our fight against the climate crisis, changing modes of traffic is a crucial building block. There was hope that it would move some commuter traffic from individual cars to buses and trains, but the effect seems small, probably because it was a temporary measure. However, the ticket supported local tourism and granted the financially poorer members of society the ability to travel.
One of the ticket’s effects was that it rekindled the discussion about public transportation prices. There has always been this idea it should be free for all. No tickets, no restrictions. Some countries or cities have already implemented it. The German government said they couldn’t afford to prolong the policy, but they want to evaluate and look into future approaches to make public transport more accessible. Political parties, transport groups, and NGOs have come up with suggestions such as a yearly 365€ ticket (1€ per day) or a tiered system with 29€/month for regional and 49€/month for national network access.
For me, the idea of whether public transport should be free or not is one for which I found it hard to form a clear opinion. As the discussion is ongoing, I’d like to share my thoughts. First, I find it hard to argue that something is too expensive when the price doesn’t even cover the cost. Long-distance train services are usually profitable, but local transport tickets sometimes cover as little as half the service’s actual cost; the rest is tax subsidies. If we further reduce ticket prices, we will eventually reach a point where the expense of running a ticket system (vending machines, etc.) exceeds the revenue. There is still an advantage to selling tickets, such as the ability to do yield management. For example, monthly passes only valid after 9:00 are often cheaper to dedicate earlier trains and buses to commuters who have to be in them and incentivize other passengers to wait till later in the day. It shouldn’t be the only reason to make people pay, though.
I have a general belief that makes me not too fond of subsidies: if there’s a person or group X that cannot afford a product or service Y, but we believe they should, we shouldn’t ask how to make Y more affordable; we should make sure X has more money (for example, by reducing taxes, increasing social security benefits or eventually through universal basic income). The problem with lowering prices through subsidies is that we minimize transparency and disguise the actual costs from the public. It also means that the government establishes preferences about the products and services it wants its citizens to purchase. It goes against free markets, so we should use it sparingly and only for good reasons. Of course, improving traffic and its climate impact could be a perfect reason. Finally, if people can’t afford or don’t want to pay even the subsidized price, they still pay for the subsidies with their taxes without getting access to the goods.
Due to the reasons laid out in the previous paragraphs, my reasoning is mainly between two alternatives: one is the current system or an even more expensive one, and the other is entirely free, ticket-less public transport. With the first option, we’d only focus on making buses and trains more attractive to use. I presume people who can get anywhere they want without a car will do so, and it will probably still be cheaper than the total cost of ownership of an individual vehicle. The second option begets the question of who will pay for it and how we can align demand and supply.
I assume we all agree that shifting traffic from cars to buses and trains is a desirable outcome because it reduces emissions and uses less urban space. However, we also know that public transport cannot cover every use case, especially in rural areas with lower population density. We still need cars, ideally small and electric, and we need to include walkability, bike lanes, and micro-mobility (think e-scooters) in the mix. Carsharing, ridesharing, hailed shared taxis, etc., can all help people get around. Which leads to another question: if all these other forms of transport (except walking) cost money, why should buses and trains be free? It would undoubtedly express a strong preference for them over any different mode of transportation. Our primary focus should be cars, though, since they are the most problematic form of transport.
One thing about privately owned cars is that they incur mostly fixed costs: purchase price or leasing rates, taxes, insurance, and checkups. The only cost that entirely depends on kilometers driven is gas or electricity cost. Still, the average car spends over 90% of its life in a parking spot, losing resale value and only 10% on the road. As a result, car owners are incentivized to use their car as the primary option to get around, and it will be mostly the cheapest option as well, as they already paid the fixed costs. If we want to minimize the use of cars, we have to reduce car ownership or move to usage-based models like carsharing, shifting from fixed costs to flexible costs. Those should be ideal for people who don’t need a car daily. The advantage is we also have to produce fewer cars because their utilization is higher. Alternatively, we need to make other forms of transport cheaper than the car you own. When we figure in the barrier of ticket purchase, I’m sure there’s only one price that works: zero.
Alternatives to car ownership, combining micro-mobility, public transport, and carsharing when you need it, already exist for those who want to use them. If we want more people to use them, we must make car ownership and use less attractive or the alternatives more attractive. The problem with the former is that it is politically hard to do. Car lobbyists and conservative politicians will frame it as “the war on cars”. Also, it will hurt people with no alternatives available who can’t afford more expensive vehicle use. Making other options more attractive, like introducing free public transportation, will likely meet less opposition. Therefore, let’s focus on this strategy. While charging for using buses and trains is fair, considering that all other options cost money and there’s no right to free mobility, I think it’s a viable way to lead the transition.
Some concerns remain when it comes to a free, tax-funded system. First, it will be considered unfair by those who cannot use it but still have to pay for it. Second, there’s a lack of incentive to improve the availability and quality of the system. Hence, I want to suggest an alternative approach.
Local public transport will be free, and there are no tickets or other access controls. However, it won’t be taxpayer-funded. Instead, there will be a mandatory fee for households and businesses connected to the network. This type of funding is not without precedence. In Germany, every home pays a media fee, separate from taxes, to fund public TV and radio channels. It is justified because everyone benefits from the existence of these media. In other countries, a TV license is mandatory for TV ownership, independent of the consumption of publicly-funded channels. There are also schemes where homeowners must pay for street maintenance in front of their homes. Why not apply something similar to public transportation? Everyone benefits from a good network, including car owners. A national government could define tiers of services, setting expectations on the quality of service. For example, a tier one household or business would have a bus stop within 300 m, from which buses run every 15 minutes during peak hours and every 30 minutes otherwise. Upon meeting the conditions, households pay a fixed fee for access to the network, and businesses might pay a minor percentage of their revenue. Another way to frame this is that the bus stop is a perk that justifies a higher rent.
The advantage of the system I described is that it doesn’t make households outside the network pay for something they can’t use, decreasing the likelihood of opposition. On the other hand, it incentivizes local governments and transport companies to extend their services to include more households and businesses and earn more money by capturing higher tier fees from more participants. The downside, however, is that some car-heavy suburbs might lobby for exclusion from the network to save money. Those who would otherwise lobby against public transportation, in general, may be the same, so at least the damage is contained within their neighborhood.
I’m not saying my system is perfect, but I think it’s at the very least an interesting thought experiment about funding public services. Let me know what you think! I’m curious to see how the discussion continues.
The climate crisis is here, and to prevent the average temperature from rising further, we need to stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Doing so requires us to transition our energy system. In discussions about this transition in public forums like Twitter, I feel that many people don’t have a deep understanding of the topic. They might say things like “it’s impossible to produce enough electricity” for electric cars while suggesting synthetic fuels as an alternative or insist that we can’t store electricity from renewables and need a complete fossil fuel backup. I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic, but I’ve read quite a bit and will try to reproduce my understanding in a short blog article that aims to clarify some misconceptions. I may also make some mistakes along the way, so if you see any, let me know.
In a nutshell, modern civilization requires energy. We can save some of it through increased efficiency or sufficiency, but we can’t do without it. Our society uses energy in roughly two forms: fuels and electricity. For this purpose, “fuel” shall mean liquids, gases, and solids (e.g., wood and coal) that we burn. Let’s look at the origins of these two forms separately.
The vast amount of fuels is fossils, meaning we burn substances stored in the ground for a very long time. The problem: our current climate relies on their carbon remaining buried instead of released into the atmosphere. There is a consensus that we eventually need to stop burning them. The two alternatives are biofuels and synthetic fuels. Biofuels come from plants that bind CO2 from the atmosphere during growth, making them climate-neutral. We can create some of those from organic waste products, but to produce them at a large scale, we need to grow monocultures of fuel crops which take up a lot of space. Hence, experts generally consider it impossible to replace all fossil fuels with biofuels. For synthetic fuels, we use electrolysis, which requires electrical energy as its input. We’ll get back to those in a bit.
Electricity can come from three sources: we can burn fuels, we can harvest energy from nature (e.g., in the form of sunlight, wind, or streaming water), or we can split atoms. Burning fossil and organic fuels comes with the abovementioned problems, so they are no longer an option. Renewables like solar and wind aren’t reliable because their output depends on the weather. Nuclear power is climate-neutral, but it’s considered risky because of radioactive radiation in its waste products or released by accident. Outside of climate denier circles, there seem to be two groups: those who want to implement a fully renewable system and those who prefer to add nuclear power to the mix. I don’t want to argue in favor or against nuclear in this article, but I want to focus on overcoming the challenges of renewables.
Our electricity demands aren’t constant but follow a curve throughout the day and the year. Electricity production for the public grid must ensure that the production curve matches the consumption curve. If production is higher than consumption, we need to either decrease it or store the excess energy. If production is lower than consumption, we need to either increase it, release energy from storage or reduce consumption (I’ll get to that point later).
We cannot control the production curve for renewables (though we can make some predictions), and we cannot easily handle it for coal and nuclear, which only work efficiently with a steady output. However, natural gas plants can usually ramp up and down production quickly. The combination of renewables and gas works like this: renewables have immediate access to the grid. If their output isn’t enough, we switch on gas-burning plants (called “peakers”) to produce the remaining electricity demand. Our electrical system already does this. And ideally, the more renewables we add to the grid, the less fossil gas we need to burn because there will be smaller peaks to fill. Our current electrical grids already do this, which is why gas considers itself a “transition technology,” and the EU taxonomy for sustainability includes it.
Now, wait, you may now say that the argument that renewables need a fossil backup is indeed correct. However, you don’t need a full backup, and that’s for two reasons. First, renewable availability fluctuates, but not too much, especially if you combine a lot of solar and wind on a large, geographically distributed grid and include running-water and geothermal plants. The latter two provide constant output, and there’s always wind somewhere, especially offshore. So you don’t need to plan for zero. Second, this works with the assumption that we have no storage, which isn’t true. Even today, we have an extensive pump storage system. Admittedly, there is limited space to expand it, but other storage technologies exist, including, but not limited to, electrolysis and fuel production.
You may think we need to build more storage right now, but I’d argue it’s not yet the right time. We must first focus on building additional renewables and expanding the grid to bring them across vast distances from sunny and windy regions to consumers. Storing electricity is expensive and generally incurs losses, meaning you don’t get back the same amount of energy. It is always better to use it immediately, in other words, to control consumption. I understand this can invoke dystopian thoughts of power rationing and blackouts for crucial systems like medical infrastructure. Do we need to drop the idea that we can plug appliances into a power socket whenever we want?!
Control of consumption can comprise pricing strategies that make electricity cheaper when more renewables are available and expensive when there are fewer, ideally shifting loads. It’s called yield management, and it’s pretty standard in a market economy. For industrial use, it can make economic sense to implement the ability to stop production lines in exchange for cheaper electricity prices occasionally. Cars spend a lot of their time parked. They can charge whenever it is most affordable if you keep them plugged in. There are other examples, and a smart grid can manage them without inconveniencing consumers. Cars and commercial applications could probably cover it, so private households have no change (unless they want to leverage it as a discount). However, let’s get back to storage once more.
Due to the losses I’ve mentioned, storage doesn’t make much sense as long as there are fossil peaker plants on the grid. Please read that again because it’s essential. Burning fuel to produce electricity for storage requires more than if you just kept it and burned it later when needed. It’s neither economically nor ecologically sound. It also means that if you build an electrolyzer to produce green hydrogen and synthetic fuel, you should only turn it on when there’s an excess of renewable (or nuclear) energy and switch off all fossil fuel plants first. With the currently deployed renewables, this situation does occur, but it happens so rarely that it wouldn’t be viable to build electrolyzers and other storage systems for those occasions. At worst, we disconnect the electricity surplus and let it go to waste. We likely move through a phase where we have enough excess that it seems we’re wasting it but not yet enough to make it economically viable to deploy more storage. It’s the nature of transition, though, and not a flaw in the system. At some point, storage becomes more viable than fuel-burning plants, and we can dismantle the latter.
After talking so much about electricity, what about the situations where we use fuels directly? One option is synthetic fuels, but they are a form of electricity storage that incurs losses, so it seems evident that using electricity directly is the better option whenever possible. That’s why we should replace gas heaters with electric heat pumps and petrol and diesel cars with electric cars. Often this seems counterintuitive because if, on the one hand, we want to increase efficiency and save electricity whenever possible, why should we add more consumers to the electric grid?
The answer is straightforward, though. Yes, we add electric consumers, but at the same time, we reduce fuel-based energy consumption. Once we’ve accepted that fossil fuels are no longer an option and we don’t have enough biofuels to replace them, we can only choose between using electricity directly or producing fuels from electricity. In this battle, electricity wins practically all the time. Even when disconnected from the grid, such as in vehicles, batteries seem to be more efficient storage than fuels. There are exceptions where the higher energy density and lower fuel weight probably win over batteries, such as in jet fuel for airplanes. For cars and likely for trucks, the decision for batteries is clear.
In summary, to decarbonize our energy system, we need to electrify whatever we can and build a well-connected smart grid. We first must deploy as many renewables as possible on the grid to get regular excess energy. At that point, we need additional storage methods to capture the surplus and feed it back during low production. They gradually replace fossil gas peakers (if the form of storage is hydrogen or another gas, we can repurpose the same plants). The better we keep consumption aligned with production (e.g., through dynamic pricing), the less storage we need. If we decide to keep nuclear power alongside renewables, it can also provide some baseload. It doesn’t mean it solves the challenges in building the renewable-centered system because nuclear is not a peaker technology.
This post outlines my understanding of the coming energy transition. As I said in the beginning, I’m not an expert, just a curious mind. I hope it was helpful. If you find any flaws in my reasoning, please point them out.
I’m on a train to Berlin right now. Today I will make a stop on the way in Göttingen to visit a friend for her birthday. Then I’ll stay in Berlin for one night, before moving on to a small rural village approximately one hour away from Berlin. In that village, which is called Bad Belzig, there’s the Coconat Workation Retreat. The name “Coconat” stands for “coliving and concentrated work in nature”. Due to my interest in remote work and “workations” I’ve known and followed this place for a long while, but this is the first time I’m actually going there, and I’m excited how it will be like. The photos on their website and their Instagram account make it seem like beautiful spot with a very friendly community. I’ll certainly give you an update. Probably I’ll also do another day trip to Berlin from Bad Belzig mid-week. After one week of working from a different location I’ll go and see a friend who lives in another rural village outside Berlin next weekend, before coming back to my hometown. So, my time in Berlin is quite limited during this trip, but if you want to meet while I’m there I might be able to squeeze it in. Feel free to reach out.
Once in a while, you see a tweet that triggers all kinds of thoughts and deserves more than a like, retweet, or 280 characters reply. Anna Gát, the founder of Interintellect, wrote such a tweet for me lately. Here’s a quote: “I organise most of the things that exist in my life. Social, professional, intellectual events and impulses all come to me at my own effort. I’d love to be invited to other people’s parties, initiatives, idea-sharing as a guest sometimes.” Although I’m nowhere near Anna, who literally runs a community that is about organizing and hosting events for others, I felt this is relatable. Let me try and articulate my thoughts.
First, it’s a general rule of any community that most of its members are lurkers. Only a subset of the community actively participates in activities. And an even smaller group initiates anything in the first place. In fact, everything in the world exists because people are willing to take the initiative. We owe these people a lot, and it would be great to see more of them, but we can’t expect everyone to take on these roles. It takes effort and persistence, there’s always a risk involved that your thing fails, and you will face rejection and must not take it personally. On the flip side, you can be the one that makes the thing happen that you wish to exist.
Second, I feel I often enjoy initiating things more than participating in things others organize. It’s for two, probably related, reasons: One is that I like to be in control of what’s happening, and being in the lead lets you do that better. The other is that I sometimes find it hard to navigate social situations regarding roles and hierarchies and find my position in them. Being a leader or initiator gives you a predefined part, which helps. So … it’s all great, right?!
Although I’ve said that organizing things can be better than just participating, sometimes it’s nice to invest less effort into it. Also, sometimes not knowing what is happening is precisely the point. However, the sentiment of the original tweet that I can relate to isn’t about just that. It’s about being invited in the first place. Or, instead, not being invited.
When people attend events or activities you organized, you may start wondering why they showed up. Are they interested in the thing itself? Are they showing up because of you? Or are they just happy that something is happening that they can attend? It would be awkward to ask. I’d assume many people wouldn’t be fully aware of their combination of reasons anyway. But why does it matter? Someone showing up but not inviting you in return feels like rejection, just a different kind. Yes, the other person may be one who never initiates, but what if they do but not invite you? You start realizing you’re having a one-way relationship with that person, where you care about including them, but they simply don’t care about you at all, or, worse, they don’t like you. If they followed your invitation, they didn’t do so because of you, but despite you. Ouch!
The above paragraph may sound full of ego, but it’s the truth that humans, or at least most of them, are social creatures and want to be liked. Or even before they are liked, at least their existence and relevance wants acknowledgment. We want others to care about us. Some of it may seem superficial, like worrying about “likes” or follower-to-following ratio on social media. Still, these are just modern expressions of deeply human desires.
(A consolation for people who are already well-networked and lead a visible social life: others think you are already fully booked and wouldn’t accept an invitation anyway. So, they don’t receive invitations due to anticipation of rejection. If you are one of those others: don’t be afraid! Yes, these somewhat famous people receive many requests and invites and may likely turn you down, but there’s still nothing wrong with asking.)
In the past years I’ve increasingly spent time trying to build connections and participate in communities, both personally and for business (and at the intersection of both). I believe in the importance of a network of strong and weak ties to get ahead in life and work. I’ve invested some time in reaching out, following up, and building a personal CRM. Sometimes I wonder why I did this and whether these efforts pay off. Then, at some point, it hit me that one of the big reasons why I’m doing this is so I can receive the same in return. Again, this may sound shallow and self-centered, but I want to be honest. Every outbound connection is made in anticipation of an inbound connection. Every introduction creates the desire to be introduced to someone in return.
(To avoid misunderstanding, I have wishful goals for myself, and there’s nothing wrong with you having similar purposes. Still, I don’t think you should communicate these as expectations or attempt to run your social life in a tit-for-tat mode. For multiple reasons, including my first thought in this article, there will never be a perfect balance. Some people are natural givers, making others natural takers. And there can be a lot of joy in giving even if you get no return.)
A north star goal could be a life in “inbound mode”, where you stopped doing the work of reaching out and still have a pool of people who reach out to you instead. And I feel the tweet captures the sentiment for me. Yes, being invited to things is about experiencing new things and meeting new people that aren’t part of what you’re doing so far. However, it’s also about the safety of knowing that you still had an active social life even if you ceased any investments in it. The confidence of having people caring about you.
I am unsure if it’s possible or even desirable to live in “inbound mode”, because you will also receive a lot of unwanted attention and people aren’t taking rejections nicely. But it would be nice to get even part of the way there. Until then, let’s continue making the things happen that we want to happen and reach out to the people we want to include.
Scott Stevenson’s article “How To Finally Make Something” came up in a Twitter conversation that started with a tweet on problems with most productivity stuff by Sasha Chapin. In the article, Scott claims that people struggle in their creative process and their most important work because they engage in so-called fantasy games. These games seem to help us progress towards goals, but they can often be a distraction and become a method of procrastination. Scott identifies learning syndrome, tool syndrome, process syndrome, and maintenance syndrome. In a nutshell, people spend time learning (e.g., reading books, taking courses), improving their setup and toolchain, figuring out the best productivity system, and getting bogged down in small maintenance tasks (that they could probably delegate, automate, or remove). If you want to read more about them, check out Scott’s article.
I want to extend his thoughts around these fantasy games, focusing on why we engage in them. A common explanation is that they are easy, and doing the real work is hard. When the real work is creative, we’re putting ourselves out there, making us vulnerable. Our work can be a hit or fail, and unpredictability can be hard to swallow. If we’re unsure about the goals, there may be negative emotions associated with it (which was Sashas point in the original tweet). These are all great points, and I have observed them within myself. Around a year ago, I wrote about “exploration and exploitation”. I connected exploration to procrastination, communities, and the self-help industry (in a follow-up post, I talked about exploration and FOMO as a trap). Reading Scott’s article somehow gave me an epiphany and a new perspective on them.
Let’s talk about the industry first. People understand the value of education and good tooling, so it’s evident that we sell them. Authors, toolmakers, and course creators typically make profits selling their products and not through the outcomes of their buyers and students. Yes, they need success stories or testimonials, but buyers who don’t follow up on their intentions have still brought them money. And those addicted to buying tools and learning material drive down prices for everyone. There’s no criticism of anyone involved here, but we need to understand that there are economic incentives that drive these fantasy games as well. Even if you’re not in the business of selling information, if you want a visible personal brand and be known for something, the best way is to curate information. Your work doesn’t provide enough content to get started (and likely under NDA anyway).
Now let’s talk about community. Of course, commercial communities around exploration are a part of the industry. But even if we remove the profit incentive, humans are (generally speaking) social creatures who like to be part of a network of like-minded peers. Now, there’s the catch. Social connection relies on conversations, but what should the subject of these conversations be? Work is a prominent topic with people in a similar field, and you joined a professional community for that purpose.
Talking about your work to show what you’ve done and asking for feedback can be challenging and makes you vulnerable. It can also appear selfish if everybody talks about that. And now we’re back to the fantasy games. Tools and processes can provide unlimited fuel for conversation and create bonds and sub-identities, all without the discomfort that comes with revealing too much of what you do. A tech industry veteran and a recent boot camp graduate can fight or bond over whether vi or emacs is the better text editor or whether you should indent code with tabs or spaces. If you’re not in tech, I think you can find plenty of examples in your industry or creative field. As I already said earlier, your work doesn’t provide enough talking points, and you don’t want to appear full of yourself, so it’s essential to consume a lot of stuff not just for its own sake but also so you have things to talk about that others may know as well.
Now here’s the flip side of the coin. If you want to build community and bond with peers in your field, it can be instrumental to geek out over tools and processes. The minimal investment you need to make in these areas to do your work may not be sufficient for contributing to a community that rewards knowledgeable members and opinionated takes. Of course, you don’t need to be a top community contributor. You can be happy and productive toiling for yourself and not care about status games and peer recognition, but I believe it makes it harder to socialize. It’s a trade-off.
This realization (which makes sense, I hope) is vital for me. I think I am not very prone to these fantasy games. Sometimes I feel that I should learn more stuff, but I quickly understand that it won’t help me with my goals because I need to put what I already know into action. I also realize that the tools aren’t what is holding me back. If anything is stopping me, it’s perfectionism or lack of resources (due to trying to do too much). I feel I’m now on the other extreme, and sometimes investing a little more into processes and maintenance could be beneficial, but that’s a topic for another day.
For now, I’m getting at the following: I feel I’m not good at socializing and connecting with peers because I’m focused too much on myself and my work and don’t pay enough attention to the talk of the town. Yes, this talk might be just gossip that’s distracting me, but I still feel I want to join the conversation. However, doing so would demand making myself more dependent and connected to what others do and think, something I generally avoid and that would feel inauthentic to me.
I wish I could offer a conclusion to this blog post, but I don’t have any yet. It’s just a point that has gotten clearer to me, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Unit testing is mainly used to test smaller parts of your code, like a single class or function. But you can repurpose unit testing frameworks into API testing frameworks with libraries that combine an HTTP client with assertion functions that cover things you typically expect from an API response, such as status codes and headers. Apiritif is one such library for the Python language. My latest guest post for BlazeMeter is a quick tutorial that shows you how to build an API test with Python, nose, and Apiritif. Check it out on the BlazeMeter blog. You can also find a small code snippet on thiscodeWorks.
Disclosure: This work was paid for by BlazeMeter.
Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the Signal messaging app, wrote a widely shared piece called “My first impressions of web3”. The article explains how many things around blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs aren’t as decentralized as people think. Running blockchain nodes requires computation power, so crypto wallets and “dApps” need an intermediary that provides a traditional client-server API between them and the blockchain. According to Moxies observations, the ecosystem is highly centralized around just a few of these intermediaries. They have the power to moderate and censor the ecosystem, such as blocking access to NFTs that still exist somewhere on the blockchain.
He starts the blog post with two statements. The first is that people don’t want to run servers, and the second is that platforms move faster than protocols.
I want to address the second statement first. It reiterates a previous post in which Moxie justifies that Signal is centralized. Being centralized allows them to move fast, while open-source and cryptography provide the necessary trust and insight in the platform and guarantee privacy. Apart from end-to-end encrypted messengers like Signal and Threema, Keybase is an excellent example of this model. I agree with him, and I disagree with decentralization purists who believe decentralized systems are always better. Not to be mistaken, I like distributed and federated systems and would love to see more for reasons I’ll get into soon. Still, centralization isn’t evil by definition and can sometimes work well, especially when there are measures to ensure that the interests of all stakeholders are aligned.
Going back to the first statement, I think Moxie makes the common mistake of a false dichotomy. It’s not a choice between everyone running a server or participating in a centralized platform. There’s a lot of middle ground. Think of managed hosting for open-source software—hundreds of companies of all sizes offer this. Smaller SaaS providers that interoperate with each other don’t even need to be open-source to interact with other small SaaS; open protocols are enough. Yes, protocols make change harder, but there’s still potential to innovate at the edge as Hey.com did with email. An intermediary between the end-user and a somewhat messy distributed protocol can do excellent business. It’s a level playing field for different companies competing at the edge without suffering from network effects that let consumers stick with incumbents due to lock-in. It’s my idea of an actual free-market economy.
In other words, it’s not wrong or hurting the decentralization of public blockchains to interact with them through a mediator. Problems start when one of these mediators becomes a monopoly or so strong that it could also be a centralized service. According to Moxie, this is what happens, but web3 proponents generally dismiss the concern because, in theory, there are other mediators. So, why are we seeing so few competitors? And why does the entirety of managed hosting services and micro-SaaS look like a dwarf compared to large cloud computing infrastructures or productivity suites from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon?
Any price for a product on the market contains the R&D and marginal costs for each piece. For software, marginal costs are minimal, even for SaaS, because hosting has gotten cheap. The more you sell, the fewer R&D costs each copy includes. And because dominating a market is both possible and rewarding, venture capitalists are willing to fund unsustainable free products that outcompete bootstrappers trying to build sustainable businesses. Hosting has similar scale effects. Running a website for a few hundred visitors is easy because you only need a single server. Once traffic grows, you need to think about separating web and database instances, vertical and horizontal scaling, and other deployment and operations issues. Getting from a hundred to a million visitors is challenging. However, going to ten million is easier because you probably already have the necessary systems in place. You only need to deploy more instances. Neither markets nor technology rewards beings medium-sized, even though that could be the healthiest option.
Moxie ends his piece with two suggestions on improving our relationship with technology. The first is finding more ways to distribute trust without distributing infrastructure, effectively pushing the Signal/Keybase model. The second is making it easier to build. He claims that creating software has become harder in recent years and that distributed systems could accelerate the trend. I don’t think creating software has become harder per se or continues to do so. It could become even more accessible with better (AI-assisted) developer tools and the proliferation of no-code and low-code platforms that help people become citizen developers. Better technical writing for developer content can also lead people on this journey. In my opinion, one reason building software feels harder is that there are increasingly more tech stacks to choose from, which leads to analysis paralysis. There’s also a tendency to overengineer, such as believing you need to build a React app when static HTML with two lines of jQuery also does the trick. And not every app needs a sophisticated build and deployment pipeline. Finally, our expectations for good software have risen.
APIs are essential for (no-code) creators as they can be an abstraction layer for complexity, whether from underlying protocols and distributed systems or advanced algorithms like machine learning. The crucial question that we need to address is how we can make sure that not everyone relies on the same API and makes the API provider the gatekeeper it shouldn’t be. We need to determine how to build resilience into the API ecosystem by making it easier for upstarts to provide APIs and harder for incumbents to outcompete everyone and dominate the market. I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but a healthy API ecosystem needs to find them eventually.
Moxies piece is valuable because it helps people understand how the crypto and blockchain world works. It’s also refreshing to see more nuanced takes that go beyond uncritical web3 cheerleading on one side and complete naysaying or dismissing it as a scam on the other side.