 Let's see Nostar Nope, I don't know where I have to put it into my notes. Um But I Thought that was interesting. Of course, there's a lot of people leaving reddit to go to Various activity pub alternatives, which I think is really interesting. It's kind of interesting. Yeah And There's a Lenny and a couple other things that are sort of like activity pub compliant Mastodon extending something something something something something. I'm not sure I understand at all what they do, but that seems to be happening, too Yeah, I mean right any activity pub system can theoretically talk to each other so you can use Matt your mastodon account and system to subscribe to Lenny or The other one, which is Lenny, right? Yeah Lemmy and I think I don't go it's some something Cabin, that's the other one that I've seen a lot of people maybe I am Yeah I Think even the social a reddit like content aggregator. Well, how about that? Cabin feels a lot more like a Metafilter than reddit whereas lemmy is like very directly Attempting to be reddit I mean, I think they're both Potentially valuable. Cabin's the less stable of the two for sure It's just gonna open Real quick for us Keep thinking it's next month. Thank God quite yet So Yeah, I mean, I am generally like very excited about you know activity pub stuff happening It just doesn't seem to ever maintain momentum Yeah, I'm not sure I think part of it is just like the nature of activity pubs Decentralization It's very difficult to gather people and give them a consistent experience and connect them with each other and have them re Acquire their networks So the very architecture of activity pub makes Get building critical mass or having a common experience challenging Yeah Well, I don't think it's I don't think it's like that it is self challenging on the platform I think it's that it's challenging to get to the point where it occurs Like once you are on the platform and you've ported a chunk of your community Like it feels It feels like good with that community, but it's never going to be Like it's just not at the same level as the other stuff Sorry At least you're not in a submersible Yeah, that's bad Actually, no, no go ahead. It turns out we know one of the people who's on board Wow Yeah Shazada Dawood is a young global leader and so is my wife April so we've met him at a couple of events ygl events and and and I Wound up scrolling down going I read about some, you know Pakistani businessman. I'm like, nah, couldn't be him and Sure as hell, it's him. It's him and his son are two of the passengers. Oh, he's the one who's kid is on that That is terrible. Yep. Yeah, I hope they find it It's an interesting to see the reaction for sure I Understand people's frustration. It's very difficult to see Like the immediate context of Refugee ships versus what's happening here and not have a negative reaction Mm-hmm Yeah, yeah, so I distracted you you were finding where did you put out the fire you had I? Put the right person to put the fire out Yeah, I Think that it's yeah I mean so I wrote something about it. I put it into our notes. I'll put it into the chat, too Uh Which is like very frustrated about being stuck on Twitter still It's the it's the network problem, right the community's still on Twitter So like there's a section of my community that's moved fully to That's moved fully to To mastodon to mastodon yeah, and like That's great, but like there's a whole subset of like me that's still just on Twitter and the same thing happens with reddit, right like You can even port the stuff over all of the content over but if you can't get the community to move over it's very difficult to make a switch and That sucks. I don't know what to do about that like I don't have a good answer for how to fix it It's too bad And I don't think like Any social networks necessarily solves that problem right like blue hose. It's not blue Blue sky Yeah, blue sky post the rest of them right like these are all sufficient Like social networks from a technical perspective the but it's just very difficult to get a community to move It's you know the joke goes you can build Twitter in a weekend, but you're not going to make Twitter Right Yeah Yeah, there is it with is that just a phenomenon of the moment when Twitter launched and a bunch of people jumped in and it's Really hard to get them to move is it just that so it's an artifact of history Or is there something else that that's about the about the critical mass of social groups In general, or is there something else about the fact that other tools just don't create the same Sense of flow and connection as Twitter does even though they have way fewer people than Twitter I mean, I was surprised at how few humans are actually on Twitter compared to Facebook Like oh, yeah Twitter is just a we a we bump on a we bump on the road for Facebook Facebook is like more humans than the populations of India and China combined and Twitter is what 800 million or some Probably down now. Yeah, it's very small, but the thing is right like and I write right about that in the piece. It's like Twitter was never about massive option 450 right now Yeah, Twitter was never about massive adoption so much as it is about Being a particularly effective tool for amplification Uh-huh, right like when Twitter succeeds it doesn't actually succeed on Twitter so much right there I couldn't find the link I wanted to put it in there But like BuzzFeed orchestrated a study or reported on a study like five or six seven years ago now, maybe that was basically like Links do not really go widely viral on Twitter that much But Twitter is the origin point from which they go viral on other platforms interesting and Yeah, and I think it's just I don't know I think there's something unique about or there was something unique about Twitter I'm not sure it still is the case or if it is it's failing right, but there was something unique about Twitter In its format or tools or mechanism I mean I always felt like there's something unique about Twitter and nobody knows what it is and that's why for many many years Right, they didn't change anything Right Facebook changed it all the time and like in the amount of time that Twitter was Like basically static and not making changes Facebook like rebooted its UI like three times Right, so they they only tried to plug things into Twitter. They never tried to change Twitter And I think that's because there's something in Twitter That makes it work that nobody has yet identified And they correctly assumed that it would be very easy to break the thing that you have not identified what it works Interesting I was really bummed when they killed off all the other clients like I was using Other clients and was enjoying that and I didn't see any reason for them to nuke, you know Competitive clients that seems stupid As we see it reddit, that's the hot thing now I have another thing I want to write about that actually which is like The problem is that like the type of people who run social media companies see API consumers as Costs and not opportunities There's like it would be very easy and most people who are extending the API Right like for all of these places your model is advertising It would be very easy to set up rev-shared deals with clients as part of a condition Of doing an API or even or even not rev-shared. Just be like you if you want to use the API You have to have our ads very easy to test very easy to determine Right. I mean I think the reality of the situation is the free web is powered by ads so if you're going to Provide a tool like Twitter or provide a tool like reddit and you're going to make your money off of the ads Which is what you have to do at that scale you have to Approach how you do that monetization in a way that supports You know API because API is an important part of what makes these sites go big It's it's just very Like they just thrown out a lot all of the social media sites are right my Despite the fact that it's completely unproven That whatever Twitter is doing is going to work. In fact, it certainly looks like it's not going to Everyone's following in their footsteps It's it's weird because there's not been a good Twitter substitute Also, my Twitter feed is still useful. Like I'm still got Twitter open in a tab now Basically tweet deck in a tab is what I'm down to I'm still in there. I still look every day It's it's still my early warning system for news. I haven't found a better one A lot of the people I care about or follow are still there doing interesting things So if I curate my you know who I follow Still get good stuff, which is weird even though I think that so my inference of musk's actions Is that he is actively trying to destroy Twitter is that that he he is doing enough Enough enough asinine thing that he must intend to just destroy it and see if he can't take down democracy in the process Yeah, yeah I mean, baby, I don't know it seems insane to me, but I guess it's very possible. It's just I Mean, I think really what it is is like Twitter's value and how it works is so undefined That we don't They're like even if he did have something he wanted to do with it He doesn't know how to do it because he doesn't know how Twitter works. Nobody knows how Twitter works So If you look at one screen of Twitter, and then you compare it to one screen of Facebook There is a lot more going on on Facebook than there is on Twitter Twitter is like one little thing repeated over and over again in in in cues, right? And then there's some algorithms that are behind the scenes that are determining which of everybody's cues that you follow You actually see in which ones you don't which ought to be more visible and manipulable in different ways that would be kind of cool But what there isn't and then there's an ad engine that tries to slip things in the stream that that's it That's your that's your Twitter thing and Facebook. There's if you look at one screen full of Facebook There are 10 things that are at least that complicated going on simultaneously Which is yeah, very weird Yeah, I don't know I don't know. I don't know it sucks because it's definitely failing right like one of the things that I do is I have like my Notification stream and and the morning I can pull you know go to the bottom and then Go to the yesterday evening, right? Which cover stuff that I missed it doesn't work anymore I can't go past today in that screen on my app anymore like search is Consistently broken Like one of the major things I used to do is like I I use Twitter is like a search of my own background Tweeted Wow Because I put a lot of stuff on there, and I don't delete anything Yeah, and so like I get a lot of value out of searching from at chronotope User name and then some keyword and then going to the latest tab to sort it by time and like half the time I do that. It doesn't work. I'm probably more than half now. Yeah And lists also are having trouble like going backwards more than a day It's clearly breaking And it sucks because yeah, I don't know. I don't know why nothing else Works as well. Mm-hmm. It's a strange mystery Yeah, I Don't know it truly baffles me because I would love to write like I said It's very easy to make Twitter from a code perspective. It's just expensive to scale it up, but like I Don't know I don't know what makes it work and why none of these other things have worked and why Like community it's very interesting to me I do think there is some level of first mover but not in like the effectiveness of the platform so much as the centrality of multiple communities I think the thing about the interesting thing about Twitter is right like a lot of different communities ended up interacting in ways They wouldn't otherwise have right because they would gone to isolated places But Twitter was just early enough to capture them all before something could like think through that concept right like probably what we conceive of is like black Twitter Would prefer to have would have preferred to have been on its own platform that someone could have built I know it was too late. Twitter got there first. Yeah, right like And with one of the founders of net noir back in the day which dates back to like 98 at least and It's like there were attempts to do Black portals other you know other portals all kinds of different things just that they didn't stick and then maybe yeah Maybe come in mingling these communities is one of those sort of signs of health Yeah, maybe maybe that's the case and maybe that's why Like some of these things are failing so badly because the different communities are going to different places right like Blue sky has a very different set of people than Any given mastodon server? I mean the only the only one of my communities that has successfully ported to anywhere is mastodon and like the Weird website builders crew right people who enjoy making websites and like They're not indicative of anything because they're the type of people who would love mastodon for things that normal users don't care about right Which is a shame mastodon like I don't I don't know I don't know It's very difficult to find out What exactly makes it work because I genuinely think nobody who worked at Twitter ever understood what made Twitter work Because if they did they would have tried to build on it in some way and they never tried to do that. It's never been It's never been successfully replicated. It's never been successfully expanded Like that's why trying to tack Twitter to growth was always a bad idea because Twitter's at like the number of people that make it Makes it work Which is it's like Twitter is Like an influencer platform, but for text. Do you think that if Twitter has three X Do you think if Twitter had three X its current number of users and healthy management that that would be too many users for the platform And it would lose its magic I don't I don't know. I don't know. It's very strange to consider because I it's always grown without that being a problem in the past Like maybe there is some maximum growth number That Twitter has I this gets back to like what makes Twitter work. Yeah, who knows Maybe it is that there's a it's under a certain number of people for that is the secret to an online community Yeah, I really could not like there's a lot of things my theory of what Twitter is I think it's very solid Twitter is a place to hold parties around content Specifically around text content. Hmm. That's that is what Twitter is. It is a place where we celebrate text content specifically But like And why it works, I don't know. I really do not know why Twitter works and I don't think anyone ever did or does Which is pretty wild to think about like it's like if our entire like phone system Was based on some property that we did not understand So maybe what's missing? Maybe what's missing is a simple mass move over to a different sim a different platform Back when Mao ran the four pest campaign They decided that sparrows were one of the pests and so they had all the citizens of China go out and scare the Sparrows into the air and not let the sparrows roost until the sparrows drop from the sky dead and They so successfully limited sparrows that all of the creatures that the sparrows had been eating turned into a major pest campaign a whole new one and there was famine that killed like 20 million Chinese Because they had killed off one of the predators in the ecosystem But they managed to do that by getting all the citizens to go up and go outside and do this one thing at the same time, right? So what if we do a everybody stand up and move over to that platform thing? What if magically we could get everybody to sort of synchronize that way and just can pick up their conversations on the next platform? Hey, maybe it would work. I mean, that's basically what happened with dig right like one day it dig was the top of the Upvoting websites and then everybody decided no, thank you and move to reddit and Yeah, I and maybe it'll happen with credit now But it seems to be much more difficult Somehow right I think like these companies have achieved capture much more effectively now than they had then It would probably be much harder to leave dig Today than it was back when it actually happened same thing happened for source forage to github Except I can point to The dynamics of github as being much more functional than the dynamics baked into source forage So there was to me there was a reason why github won that race Yeah, I mean mate, maybe Twitter will finally score itself enough that everyone will fly Yeah, somewhere else. Yeah, but I think like ironically the This all of these alternatives makes it very unlikely that everyone is going to just move over to a single one other place Right, maybe that's for the best. I don't know it, but I think the there was a Twitter era in which Twitter was in a very fundamentally way in control of discourse on the internet and Well, even if it was very in direct control Was it it was it control or was it just that they were the venue, but they couldn't control what was going on in the venue? Well, I think I don't I mean like Twitter the people on Twitter. Yeah, that's what are the company Okay, and I think Twitter the people on Twitter were in control of it both on and off platform in that it set made and pushed forward the agendas of these different communities yeah, and Maybe that time has passed and maybe that's for the best you could argue that like the mechanisms of that that Were great that caused things like the Arab string, right? Yeah, are also the mechanisms that got Trump elected, right? So like it is it certainly a neutral power in the sense that it could be used for good or evil So maybe it will be better if we did not have it anymore Yeah, maybe that's for the best I would miss twitter if it didn't exist. That's for sure. It's an important part of my Keeping in touch routine Yeah, me too, but like the flip side is we said the same thing about There were plenty of people who said the same thing about dig there were plenty of people who said the same thing about previous iterations But I do agree that there is something that once again like it's indescribable that there is something about twitter in particular That is special that I don't understand Right because I was very active on facebook at one point like Extremely active like running a small news organization by myself level of active I'm getting a corresponding level of traffic. Yeah, but like Literally one day I was like, this is not worth it and I left and I never thought I never gave it a second thought. Yeah But like twitter I can't leave Right, there's something else going on there. There's some other Thing that is making it difficult in no matter all of the and like there are lots of people who are making very big Efforts to be like let's set up a discord. Let's go with the blue sky. Let's have a yeah, you know A tumbler because tumblers back now. It's just But it's none of it works like twitter and I don't know why I have no idea I feel like I'm saying that a lot, but it really is just like twitter Had some magic that it is in the process of demolishing. Yeah, which is insane to me like even if even for even from someone like musk's perspective like And this is why I said maybe it's better off that it is demolished because clearly he has leveraged it to do bad shit Very successfully and he's destroying his own tool for that right like Wood musk have been as successful without twitter probably not Will he be as successful if he destroys twitter? I mean probably not I mean hard to measure because he will have demolished billions and billions of his own dollars If he demolishes twitter. So that's another reason why not but still I mean aside from practically from severely them crippling twitter the company He's also managed kind of single-handedly self-inflicted to damage his own reputation immeasurably like before he before his Mad dash to buy the the twitter and do everything he's done to it He was the genius who had stood up like four major companies like The largest automaker in the u.s. Was tesla like everybody else was busy getting into the su you know staying in suvs But getting out of cars Everybody was going to stop making sedans. It was like a thing of the past and all of a sudden Here comes this company that in a couple years gets bigger market valuation than than some of the major automakers and becomes the lead maker of cars I'm like, holy shit. How'd you how'd you do that? And then starts putting rockets in space and and lets us watch the failures. Oops, this one didn't make it Oops, this one didn't want didn't make it but but then all of a sudden. Hey, look, we got that We got astronauts up there. We got satellites up there. Oh, wait a minute. We're putting a satellite constellation up there Which I hate can't stand star like Um, uh, there's a couple uses for it that I like like in ukraine But man the the idea of flooding space with these constellations makes me ill But but here's one guy Who didn't single-handedly do it but who is the nexus the hub the spark for all these things going on I wonder tony stark is modeled after him Yeah, I mean, it's you know, it's He has the most money and he chose to invest it well and then But the the thing that made it work more than anything else. I think is Um Like it's his reality distortion field and I think that was powered by twitter It was powered by two things it was powered by twitter is one thing Which is part of the reason why he's having problems because twitter is failing But also because by taking control of twitter It shifts his what he can do on it, right? But the other reason is There was a really good tweet that went viral when he first bought it Which is like so much of musk's reality distortion field came out of his fans And so many of his fans were like Looking at him as somebody who accomplished science fiction stuff without understanding what he was accomplishing Which was part of the charm, right, but like A lot of those sane people do understand engineering web engineering And understand what he's doing that's extremely dumb, right? So then I think the tweet was something like You know He bought tesla and I thought it what he was doing was great because I didn't understand how to build a car He bought space x and I thought what he was doing was great because I don't understand how to build a rocket He bought twitter and I understand how to build a website. So now I thinking this guy's sort of a moron Yeah, I remember that I remember that. Yeah, so like that's a big piece of it Which I think is like itself sort of a power of twitter thing, right? Like I don't know. I so may there has been a lot of good that has come out of the capacity for people to build reality distortion fields around them in a way that was sort of like Unprecedented unless you were royalty. Yep. I think like that's basically the only time that Or a kennedy, right? Those are the only times that it has been possible to so unanimously And successfully create a reality distortion field around yourself and with twitter It became very Easy to do if you had the right approach and the right numbers and the right sort of fan base And that's super powerful And it's it's shame because it's probably not great to return it to the return our society to the previous state either I don't know right like TikTok isn't doing it Mastodon isn't doing it. Yep. Nope. So who Who is going to empower you to yell at? like They really like simple examples, right like You could yell at american airlines on twitter and get a refund right that you would not have otherwise gotten Right, and that's not going to happen anywhere else Because now american airlines notes better Um, and there's just not enough density on any of the other platforms to shame them right like I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. It's It's worrying so I kind of lost hope that there was a when when musk first took over twitter there wasn't Sorry Oh, okay When I first when musk first took over twitter There was a play of people saying hey, we're just going to wait until he just so destroys twitter that its value will go to zero Can you hear me? Did your connection connection break check check? Oh good. Yeah Um, I was just saying that when musk first took over twitter There were a bunch of people who said we're going to wait until he drives the value of twitter down so low That we can do a you know, basically an exit to community and buy him out Uh, I just don't see how that works or how that pans up. But wouldn't that be cool? like Yeah, maybe it would be cool, but he would just I think he'd rather burn it than let it go entirely possible um Yeah, I don't know so So we don't talk about like why twitter is irreplaceable for the whole time. Um, what positive things are on your on your horizon. What do you? What do you look at? Oh, yeah, uh I uh Maybe blue I've been doing more experimentation with blue sky stuff. I think they're building interesting things. Um And uh I think there's been like Yeah, um I think there's been some interesting progress For me on getting my notes site, um, sort of up and running effectively. Um I I know nothing about rust. So this is all new Code building for me, but it's working quite well. Um, or rather I am progressing quite well It's not working yet. Right. So that's uh, that's exciting and This uh, what else has been popping up? I don't know Let's see. How about you? What have you been working on lately that's got you thinking? Um, so I'm trying to get in better shape Uh, uh Presentation of speech I'd like to give a paid speech. I'd like to give in more places about Being a cyborg and what does it mean to be a good cyborg our our cyborg future of work? Which I think is like looming large right in front of us Um, so I'm trying to figure out what are the right words Uh that will resonate for people who buy speeches and who need to you know Train up their their staffs on these topics or and so forth and then as part of all that a thing that's causing me to Both waste time and think creatively about what this could look like Is it seems like a community of cyborgs would be a really useful thing to build around that concept um Maybe this is too extreme an example But there's millions and millions of programmers in the world who never took an ethics course or sat down and had conversations together about what What you know, hey, what's good and what's bad about programming who've been asked by managers to go write stuff That's in many cases unethical or like Unhuman or whatever And wouldn't it be cool if the body of programmers were part of a guild like the engineer's guild in canada Where there was some understanding of this is how we work and this is what we stand for So i'm trying to think of like If I stood up a community like that what platform should it be on and what to call it? What would be in it although all those kinds of things? Yeah, I think that's interesting. I mean, I know, um, I think we've mentioned this in one of the previous conversations They are really interested in hyla um Is like community coordination software H. Y. L. L. Um H. Y. L. A. L. A. Oh, I I know H. Y. L. L. H I think it's H. Y. L. A. I don't maybe I've mistyped it in my own notes. Very interesting. Yeah, I don't know a hyla No, you're right. It's hyla That's weird why why do I have it the wrong way in my notes? And I know some people that are using hylo And they got bought by holo the people or The company hylo and far as I as far as I know holo acquired hylo, which is kind of funny Yeah, I think like they're the holo chain. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah I've had people pitch me a couple of times about holo chain stuff and it seems Like an interesting idea, but it's just one of those things where it's like My capacity to Engage at its level of complexity is low right now. So it's not my to-do list to read up moron And I have I have to get back to like the medic of person because I want to understand that better too, but like I just do not have the time this is It sort of amazes me. I don't know what it is about the cultural differences, but I've noticed that like folks on the west coast seem to have a lot more time To engage in these types of things On the east coast. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if there's like a cultural I don't know some sort of like Not said but understood version of um What is it called that they do in spain where they take a nap in the middle of the day Yeah, like a siesta for learning stuff on the west coast that's just understood at a corporate level Yeah, but it is not I don't know it is not Or maybe it's just like the weather's nice or longer and the sun's up longer or something like that. I don't know That's funny. But yeah, I had I had to notice the trend but I but I do notice often that like my New york friends tend to be Busy or more of the time than my other friends um, yeah, it's It's definitely some sort of east coast cultural thing Versus some sort of west coast cultural thing. Um, is it like busyness or It's less less about busiest right because like going to these things clearly takes time going to talks Going to various events getting attending lectures, etc. I think it's more just Like focused lock-in Mm-hmm And that's Yeah, I could treat you another thing that I can observe but not understand So yeah, it's all my to-do list to eventually get out to Reading all of the stuff about hollow chain and metagov and all of those things But neither seem to have a straightforward entry point at this at this time High low though does seem to be straightforward. Yeah. Yeah Um, I know only a little bit about metagov not a lot Uh, and I'm I'm connected to some of the founders of a hollow chain But hollow chain has now gone on long enough and had enough Ups and downs and twists and turns that the story is a little Hard to like grasp. It's like oh wait. What worked. What didn't work? Where are you now? Yeah It's hard. It's hard to figure out what the current state is. I just so wish that More entities had a here's what's up page That was a really easy way to come up to speed With where the community is like what they solved what their what their barriers are Etc etc Yeah, I like that idea. I mean that somebody had like what is it the What i'm working on page or something. Yeah, well, I have a slash now page Um, so here's a link to it and if I send you an email you'll see that my signature It's nothing but slash now, which is a link to this page And I don't I don't edit this page nearly often enough because that's what i'm focused on changes Pretty dynamically, but this is an attempt at an individual level to say hey Here's what i'm working on what i'm interested in here's how to get a hold of me a few things like that So what if what if organizations had a now page? Yeah, that's a good idea. I wish more I'm curious to on a total tangent for like compensated speaking stuff. Do you have a speaking agent? So People manage that. Yeah, but they haven't brought me a lot of business. So part of my problem is I'm not a published author And I think when you've written the book, that's a better thing to wave around Um, and then I'm I'm weird in that I don't have one thing I have like five things I like to talk about but I've been represented by the same company That represents april my wife um a little less time than she has but it's been like six seven years and Last year was april's best speaking year ever because she's got a fresh book And she really went to it and she put in she put in the work all over the place And I have have had way too few speeches and the one I just did came to me out of the blue And I just I passed it to my to the agent at uh at our agency Who then kind of completed the whole thing turned it into a contract and Brought it back to me saying here. It's ready to go sort of thing But but I'm trying to figure out I'm really torn because I I have some experience now with agencies and april just switched from being exclusive with this one agency hwa Do not being exclusive and to having like five other agencies represent her all of which happened like that when she when she sort of Cleared the air and had the conversation with hwa And she had been bumping into other agents in other places who were basically hands off because she was exclusive And they were not trying to poach at all And the moment she said hey, I am now no longer exclusive a bunch of them are like awesome. Let's talk And that that turned into a lot more representation, which is slowly starting to turn into some new speeches Um, so yes, that's great. So so this morning I gave a talk But yesterday morning she gave a talk, which was her first talk booked by one of the new agencies Um, so that's good Yeah, but I'm trying to figure out how to do a self-serve as much as possible like I And I just may be being naive and I was thinking about this this morning as I was showering Um On the one hand I would love for my website about how to be a good cyborg to have a little matrix at the bottom That says hey, do you want virtual or in person small medium large? Here's what that means click here and um You can make a deposit and then we can figure out what you know, uh, basically do the whole thing Self-serve as opposed to let me introduce you to my agent and then they they hold the curtain and go negotiate stuff Um But I I have no idea if this is going to work or not. So I kind of have a foot in both camps It would be nice. I think like It's sort of weird right because in some cases like it's not like with books right with books You need an agent because like that's the mechanism by which People who publish books engage with authors whereas with speaking there are probably some people who do exclusively um Like only interact with agents so it'd probably be good to have one but it probably would be much easier to um Sort of like do it yourself. Yeah now with books as far as I can tell there are Agents who help you find a publisher and and sort of guide you through that whole thing But they don't do a lot of publicity what you need then is a book publicist, which is a whole separate thing And April that didn't always used to be the case. Yeah, right Yeah, but also we had you we had fewer avenues for publicity. There was less of a it was less of a thing even right um And so april did that she she worked with a publicist as well After her book launch and that actually I think paid off really well because because her Exposure was multiplied a whole bunch Coming out of the shoots I just want to write something that's so viral so contagious that it makes its own way across the world, but that is a quite just a dream Yeah, I mean even that I feel like it's You have to be able to act on it in a specific way and be prepared Yeah, act on it in that way and some people do and some people don't I don't know it was interesting to me because Many years back. I had a very viral speaking of twitter a very viral tweet thread um and like it fascinates me because Especially with twitter down Frequently, I use um search. I search for stuff that I've tweeted. Yeah using google unrelated to that particular thread and Keep seeing new things popping up likey it and when I see it I'm like I probably could have had something in place to really Act on that right successfully um As opposed to right now where I do not Uh or didn't then I guess I'm trying to get more of something now. Yeah And it was it was I think maybe in my attempt to get more of something in place I have been somewhat more successful because I had a Viral thread on the new Cards they're trying to push out for the mta metro north mta the subway in new york city And that did get turned into an ft not ft Inc no Some magazine why why am I blanking on the magazine course it got it got turned into no not fords. Yeah Um Yeah, someone who would actually pay me. Yeah, um, where did I put it? Uh If you only yeah, it got turned into an actual article that I got paid for to write Uh, which is good. It seems like a step in the right direction Um Ironically though the site got hacked like the literal next day. Oh, seriously And the whole whole magazine site went down for like seven days. Oh, that's horrible So it did not get all as they say in journalism a lot of legs. Yeah. Yeah Fast company that was the oh, I remember them Yeah, yeah So that was good. I think, uh, Add that to my Yeah, um But yeah, it's you know, it's Definitely another thing like virality and action and community and how these things interact or don't interact automatically The the sense that these things take Generally realizing these things take a lot of work. Mm-hmm Oh, I think it is already on my linkedin. I did remember to do that. I could just check my linkedin. I'm adding I'm adding it to my Um Yeah, oh Uh Who's the other thing like I? That's in my brain and I lost it. I saw a new uh, I saw a new um Like forum tool like a php bb alternative called node bb uh Which is built on top of node which seemed cool, but like Boy, I don't know They're they're pricing It was interesting because like I looked at what their pricing was from like the home site And I was their smallest tier is 250 a month a month Yeah, and I'm like what this is what this is telling me is that this software is probably not very technically efficient Right, and so there's some overages on server cost. I wouldn't want to deal with right That you're you would pay for as their customer instead of them figuring it out Lesson, excuse me. Yeah, um, exactly, but like the flip side is I have like a one of my many hobby projects, which is to try and set up like a little raspberry pi with like a little home server Not that's broadcasting the web, but I could take a round with me plug into a battery and then people can like Interact with it like a community in the moment. Cool And uh, I imagine it would be good for that Because I this point I'd probably build that mostly in node anyway, and then I don't have to worry about Trying to figure out how to put Apache on there properly right right and all of that fun stuff It's interesting You're mentioning this and you mentioned high low a moment ago because I was I was looking for what platforms Would be maybe good to start a community for cyborgs and I ended up sort of back on mighty networks Which the friend recommended and I've kind of forgotten that forgotten they even existed still But there's a couple interesting successful communities on mighty networks like I'll pf runs a run some things on mighty 80 networks Interesting They were found as mighty bell Back in 2010 Gina Bianchini is one of the principles and founders Oh, okay When did she found it 2010? Oh, so she's probably not associated with it currently don't know. I would have to go look at her linkedin And I haven't kept up on what she did, but I know she's done a couple of things that way. Yeah She was the one who built that really talking about like social media stuff that really cool Like social media archiving orchestration software that I ran for a couple of years So she's the author of a book titled purpose design a community and change your life Which is interesting didn't know that And then she owned founder of mighty networks through the president, so she's still doing that Oh, okay So as I thought that she was Doing something else. Yeah Yeah, cool Very interesting That to my brain I'd recorded a podcast I did talk this morning and then I recorded a podcast with a friend It was just really fun to do because She was the the topic was the pursuit of ideas. That was just her topic I was like, what a great topic that what what a friendly topic to just think out loud about the kind of stuff that we talk about here and other kinds of places and Um A piece of our conversation was a little bit about what you're talking about about east coasters having less slack than west coasters um, and she and I were talking about how Very few too few people have the time to look up And catch some context and do something that's just very different from the normal thing Broaden their horizons, whatever else it might be. It's just it's just not a lot of room to go do that We kind of need more of it Yeah I it's interesting to see like it's There seems to be less of it all the time right like Companies are less likely to give you the 20 time or whatever. Yeah And these companies are doing all they can to get rid of fte's so Yeah, I don't think there's a bright shiny future for fte's. I think fte's are a thing of the last uh The last century not the next century Yeah, I think that Yeah, I think that you're right Alas, um, unfortunately Well, the problem is that our educational system and our expectations are all tied to um To the fte thing Yeah, so there's a lot of societal level problems with how labor works in america. Yeah That is for sure Okay, oh, I did find something that I thought um Folks here might like including yourself. Uh, let's find the link I found, uh A friend introduced me to this monthly uh Essentially computer plus poetry type project. Oh, interesting. Uh, that's been happening since like 2014 and oh, wow, I just have never heard of it until now. It's called word hack Other stuff is online, which is cool Um, there's a link. Thank you taught me I don't have them in my brain. Yeah You have them in your brain. All right. No, no, no Okay, I was like that'd be interesting. I'd love to know how if you did Very cool, but that was really interesting they had a talk one of the people who talked was um a researcher who's like research project is trying to understand the history of um, like how we collected the rocks that became the silicon for computing