I think my philosophy when making software is that it should work for people with zero money or no bank account / credit card.
I know it's not a popular mindset to be in since money and profit is everything in the tech world.
I think it comes from growing up as a kid with no disposable income or access to anything but my shitty computer.
I'd rather support people with almost nothing than people with latest and greatest tech gizmos and spare cash for subscription services. 😅
Hot take, perhaps.
What doesn't sit right with me is perhaps the idea that trading the majority of your waking hours for money is the natural order of things, when it is really just one economic arrangement among many that got locked in and dressed up as inevitability.
Most people spend their healthiest decades doing work they would not choose, to buy back small slices of the freedom they gave away, and we call this being responsible. Layered on top of it are supporting scams that keep the machine running.
Manufactured needs sold as happiness, debt marketed as opportunity, brands worn as a status symbol, and the quiet belief that your productivity is your worth. None of these are laws of nature. They are agreements we renew every day mostly because everyone else seems to be renewing them too, and questioning them feels riskier than complying. The genius of the whole setup is that it convinced billions of people that the cage was the sky.
Corpos everywhere:
The reward for a job well done is extra work and less time to urself. Enjoy!
contentious opinion: we already have nomadic identity
I dunno, I feel like Mastodon already has nomadic identity, it's just that there's a forwarding service between instances. But it will in fact direct those with old references to your profile to a new location. There's a migration process to pull over your social graph. Depending on the platform (cough, GoToSocial) you can even bring your posts with you.
The fact that you can't keep the same identity on a host owned by someone else forever is hardly a downside, imo. What's magic, if you've never experienced it, is the day you're following someone and you see they changed their avatar, or you go to their profile and you realize that they are not on their old instance anymore, they've migrated. They did it without fanfare or announcement, and yet I never even noticed because I was still following them and receiving their posts.
It's nomadic identity in the truest decentralized fashion. You claim your identity (I'm here@here) and if it changes, you update it in places you display it and you can set up a forwarding address to your new location....
...The new place your data is hosted.
Like your data has to be hosted somewhere, and we're not sending it to a big centralized public firehose, that would be ridiculous and silly, so I don't get what else we expect here.
We have the ability to move servers and bring our followers with us, and reproduce the same exact Home feed (via our follow list) along with our blocks and mutes and bookmark imports.
We functionally already have nomadic identity.
You just don't like how it works.
🏕️ DWeb Camp 2026: Root Systems has begun!
Honestly: we are posting only now because day 1 has passed and we didn’t even realise it! ✨
🫶 We are over 500 builders, dreamers, artists, and organisers.
💫 Everyone created their button name tags, and found their people.
The opening ceremony set the tone: co-created, participatory, and very much alive.
🌳 In one sentence: “Our future is the forest.”
Ahead of us are 4 more days of protocol talks, campfire conversations, and whatever we want.
computers were invented in the *mumblties* and you had to pay to program them
then in the late 70s, you could finally program them! for free! you just had to own a microcomputer! yay
but then in the 80s and 90s you had to buy compilers, which were expensive
by with the 2000s, rapidly compilers and interpreters became free again. anyone could program, for free!
and then in the 2020s someone invented "programming but you have to pay", again.
DON'T FALL FOR THIS TRAP
like, even if the AI can do programming for you, which... is debatable.
It's not going to do it for free. They're selling you the ability to program. One of the main reasons you should learn to program is so no one can take it from you, or charge a fee for doing it.
Occult cyberpunk. Yap with me about decentralized systems, wearable computing, and biohacking.