✨Ben Hamill✨ @benhamill@witches.town

I'm moving my account over to @benhamill. I don't wanna get into the details, but if you're really interested, I guess DM me over there. I'll import my follows momentarily. A bit sad to go because I love a lot of people on this instance.

#introductions

Uh. I like to kindpost, I guess. It's a new skill I'm learning, anyway. Also real bad joaks.

I try to learn about intersectional social justice and am trying to develop the habit of taking concrete, real world action about it more often.

I've got a linguistics degree that I don't use professionally (I'm in software), but I love to talk about words and things.

I think play and playfulness are super important. I enjoy roleplaying, board and video games.

I'm a mod on #WitchesTown. Ask me if you have questions (though I only speak English, do I'm not much help to our large population of French speakers).

My family afforded me a brief nap today. I dreamed I was playing a game a bit like Journey, but there was voice chat and more people playing together than 2. I fell in with a gang of unbearably cool French anarchist kids who all mostly knew each other IRL. We got to a part where you skate/boarded downhill in twilight and they were doing all sorts of awesome tricks while making up raps about the black block and shit in a mix of English and French. I was amazed they tolerated my presence, but they were so nice.

I'm pretty sure this was a dream about #WitchesTown.

Mornin', witches and wicks.

My amazing teammate, Amy, just left work for the last time. 😭 A ton of us clapped. I'm super bummed. She is possibly the best software engineer I've ever worked directly with. Ugh.

I'm learning about Open Tracing for work and getting pretty excited. I'm just getting into it, but so far, the overall design looks like the kind I like best: A few simple things that can be arranged in various different ways to reflect fairly complex situations.

Buenas días, burjas, brujos y amigxs.

The above makes me think. I've seen "Latinx" and "Latin@" used as adjectives in English (as they are in Spanish). But Spanish uses adjectives without nouns AS nouns much more often than English and without the sometimes-disparaging connotations. But IDK how to pluralize "Latinx". Like… "Latinos y Latinas" would collapse to… "Latinxs"?

Any native Spanish speakers wanna weigh in? OK to boost.

I'm not in a position where is feel like I want to, like, hide this or anything. But I don't know that I'd encourage friends I have elsewhere to follow me here. Most, anyway. They should join an instance and find their own different context.

Or something. I haven't fully thought this last bit out.

Anyway… I've been thinking about this w/r/t how I act on here and who I give this account to. I act a certain way on here because all of you are here. If I had a bunch of tech industry folks following me, it would be a bit weird for them to see me this way, I guess.

Like, before the centralization of social media, you'd go to the map nerd forum to hang out with your map nerd friend group, you'd go to IRC to hang out with your Python friend group, your go to some picture sharing site to hang out with your family, you'd go to an email list to chat with your friends from college, … you get the idea.

The interfaces and design for these tools were wildly different. Like being at different friends' houses or whatever. Subtle signals to switch personae.

Asking people to intentionally, explicitly and consciously described their social circles is a no. But also I think even if you could create them implicitly with magic, people still wouldn't use them because they need some kind of signal that they're switching contexts.

It seemed like it can be as subtle as color scheme (I have different color schemes for different social Slack rooms), but I think it's ideally even stronger than that.

I wonder what platforms or anyway software could do to encouraged this. I have no idea what it would look like. But I know it doesn't look like G+'s circles feature (a good example of how the real name thing is only indirectly related to the mono-persona thing). People hated that shit.

I think the maker failing there is that people don't want to think soi hard about which people they share which aspects of themselves with. In person they do it subconsciously.

Corporate social media can use a more complete social graph to inform ad placement and learn more about you, etc. This is a pressure that (most?) mastodon instances don't have (and things like SSB confound somewhat as well). But Mastodon doesn't really do anything to promote those stuff… it's just not actively antagonistic to it.

I think the focus on whether people are required or do use their real names is sort of beside the point in terms of what's healthy and the central mistake Zuckwad is making. Even if we all had aliases, if we also all had over account and linked up with our aunt and our boss and our best friend from elementary school, that would still be a failure.

FB and birdsite clearly have an interest in everyone having just one account and linking up with everyone they know.

So like, even leaving multiples aside, basically everyone behaves differently in different social groups and situations. I'm different when my parents are around or my friends from college or my friends from work or just colleagues or just my family outer on here.

And I never really thought about how that maps to things like birdsite or Facebook (where I have never had an account, though I'm sure they have a profile on me).

I've been thinking about that Facebook/Zuckwad thing about the social scientist and having a mono-persona. I may blather about it a bit.

I told my wife this ama joke and she was like 🙄. I said it would be funny on the internet. Thank you all for validating me. 😜

I am easily confused by the collision of three letter abbreviations. American Medical Association.

Good morning, witches and wicks. 🌇