It’s finally getting a little more autumnal, and especially colder. Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to take a nice autumn picture yet this year, so I have to help myself to some canned material for this post. The working week was once again packed so that I had little time for the private topics that this post is mostly about. But it was still enough to follow the goings-on in Silicon Valley in amazement.
€8 for a blue checkmark
On Twitter, people spend €8 to get a blue tick, so they can get the coolness factor of the people who used to get a blue tick because they were either really cool and important, or just thought they had to prove their coolnessauthenticity. Probably the previous recipients of this award were so excited about it that they made a racket on Twitter, where the grey tick and the note “Official” was then unceremoniously invented. Maintaining Elon Musk’s current management style, the grey tick was removed again shortly afterwards.
Even before, I found the greed for the blue tick strange. I remember when it was introduced, every journalist around me tried to get one. At least back then, it was a real verification of the owner of the account. But the commercialization of the checkmark is typical of Elon Musk’s thinking and of a clientele that draws its self-esteem from paid memberships in supposedly elite clubs.
It’s all so sad.
Funny, on the other hand, are the people who buy a blue checkmark and then create parodies of Elon Musk, established brands and co. There’s no better way to document the nonsense of the concept.
What also delighted me was a post by Marcus Schwarze. Just like me, he visited Twitter headquarters as part of an editor-in-chief tour from Medium magazine and shot a short video of it. Apparently, we were both in the same meeting room at Twitter. (Or they only have the one for visitors?).
#TwitterTakeOver
I don’t want to comment on Elon Musk’s completely erratic behaviour. It merely confirms for me my opinion of him – he is a completely overrated and incompetent executive.
I feel sorry for the people who are suffering directly as a result of this behaviour – the employees he has fired and the employees who are staying because they currently have no other opportunity. I initially said that I would quit immediately in this situation. But I didn’t consider a peculiarity of the American system: for foreign employees in particular, their residence permit is often attached to their job. Simply throwing in the towel doesn’t work in that case, you just have to persevere and hold out until you get a new job. But persevering is difficult in such a toxic environment, where the CEO no longer adheres to home office agreements and demands at least 40 hours of presence in the office.
€16 for a healthy social media account
On the third try, it clicked for me and I got into Mastodon. I deactivated the cross poster between Twitter and Mastodon. I only use Twitter sporadically now. I am active in Fediverse with two accounts: @oliver@2pxnl.de and @oliverandrich@fosstodon.org. Everything feels relatively rounded. A logical reason to contribute myself so that this platform develops and continues to bring me fun.
- €11 per month as sponsor for Mastodon
- €1,50 as a contribution to fosstodon.org
- €4 for the own server 2pxnl.de at Weingärtner-IT (Currently, my small offer is no longer available there.)
€16,50, which is better invested than many a subscription to Netflix, Disney, Prime, Spotify etc.
Postodon
To finish off these Week notes, here’s a little teaser – I’m currently building my own Mastodon client, as I don’t like any of the available ones. In each one I find something that, I think, is great, and in each one I am missing something else.
The whole thing is based on Expo and react-native, as I am familiar with these technologies. I briefly thought about SwiftUI, but that was too much effort for me. Besides, I thought it would be quite charming to have a client for iOS and Android.
Next week I’ll hopefully be able to post some screenshots once the design has stabilized.
Links of the week
- Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? – Interesting consideration by Aral of why mass accounts might be a technical problem for Mastodon. The blogpost identifies a part of Mastodon that needs to be optimized in the future.
- Mastodon is just blogs – Simon’s analysis on Mastodon is great and refreshing, as it makes a point that Mastodon is in the end just a revival of the blogosphere with better networking.
- Timeboxing – Currently I’m trying to organize my days better, and I am trying my hand at timeboxing as well as bullet journaling.
- 10 Things You Should Know About Mastodon – An excellent article about Mastodon that highlights a few key points in a compact way.