spent this morning going over Hive Social the website a bunch of twitter people are jumping on to figure out what's up with it, is it a good idea, is it a cia psy-op
i have a lot of thoughts (it's not a fake honeypot, it is underthought, it just wants to be "twitter without trump and pronouns in bio yaaay", it's cringe, it has problems) but my biggest one is just
hey i really appreciate how much fucking thought staff here put into making sure they knew what sort of site they wanted to make and prepared a lot in terms of how they'd scale stuff up instead of being like "fuck it lol" because holy shit no tech company ever cares about that do they, they just go nuts and make terrible choices and land us in hell
right?
like, so, we're an ex-Google information privacy expert, a labor organizer, and an activist. after leaving our abusive alma mater (Google), we spent a couple years soul-searching and concluded that, yes, we do very much still believe in building a better world, in part, by literally building things, including new technologies.
unfortunately, that dream is ailing, and needs everyone's help to survive. it has largely been co-opted, in the industry today, into the dream of building new technologies and getting rich, which is something that, as someone who's witnessed the cycle of abuse at both personal and societal scales, we have zero interest in.
we went all-in on Cohost, even though we are concerned that it is still a hierarchical power structure and still has all the structural conflicts that society as a whole does (racism, ableism, and so on), because the staff are putting active thought into the social side of things
the world doesn't get better unless, at some point, people talk about the problems. building is important but talking is vital. nothing can possibly get better in any lasting way without talking.