@thisismissem Great work ! that's a long post tho you could have just told them to fuck off

@thisismissem my absolute first guess would be people in general are scared of things they don't know, and combine that with a sense of urgency and shoot first...it is incredibly valuable that what may seem opaque can be demonstrated as transparent. You stepping up and giving outsiders insight is priceless.

@thisismissem Congrats on the grant/solid income (and sorry to hear people are awful).

Bluesky may not be perfect, but it's absolutely *wild* to see people act like it's some sort of across the red line evil. On the list of companies that run social networks, it has to be well and beyond on the better end of them, and society would be better off if people moved to Bluesky than staying on where most of them are now.

I’m so glad you’re working on FedCM, Emelia. It’s a tech we’ve needed for a while, and I’m much more comfortable knowing you’ll have a hand in getting it over the line.

Too many people see *everything* as a purity test. It’s exhausting, and nobody here is perfect.

So you go spend BlueSky’s money, block the haters, and make some awesome stuff that moves the rest of us forward. 🎉

@thisismissem

I’m so glad you’re working on FedCM, Emelia. It’s a tech we’ve needed for a while, and I’m much more comfortable knowing you’ll have a hand in getting it over the line.

Too many people see *everything* as a purity test. It’s exhausting, and nobody here is perfect.

So you go spend BlueSky’s money, block the haters, and make some awesome stuff that moves the rest of us forward. 🎉

@thisismissem

Standards work is about coming together and working on reaching a shared consensus on a thing. We don't do corporate politics, or government politics, at standards meetings nor venues.

Sure, you can disagree on things outside of the standards world, but within, the only thing that matters is advancing the standards and building them right.

Like, when running the ActivityPub Trust and Safety taskforce, we had Meta employees show up to our meetings, and they were genuinely helpful (volunteering for instance to scribe the meeting, which is like one of the hardest jobs to fill at a standards meeting), and when they joined I had to repeat that golden rule of standards: we leave corporate politics and our company's at the door.

We did have one or two people mad that they were present, but luckily I didn't have to explicitly remind anyone of the W3C code of conduct which governs those meetings.

Standards work is truly a bit weird like that. It takes a lot of discipline to separate out those things severance style: an innie and an outie with regards to the standards work.

Finally, we live under capitalism, or at least the vast majority of us do (it's always interesting when someone from the CCP shows up at a standards meeting!), and living under capitalism means everything revolves around money.

W3C membership ain't cheap: membership dues start at like €2,000 and go up to like €60,000 or something.

As an Invited Expert, I'm allowed to participate without paying the W3C. However, I still need to be paid for my time, because time equals money under capitalism for 99% of us.

Bluesky stepping up to fund this work is a genuinely good thing, regardless of what you may think of bluesky as a company or social app.

There weren't really any other companies with an interest in decentralized social that could fund work at this scale. An NLNet grant probably wouldn't be workable for this, and operates at a much slower pace.

Anyway, hopefully that gives you a better idea of how standards are built and funded.

@thisismissem I'm so sorry you're having to deal with this. These people need to get some perspective. This is the very crowd that chased away the "great Twitter wave"of 2022 and I'm so tired of them. They are literally ruining the culture here.

What's so sad is that they _think_ they are defending some obscure ideal of perfection when they are actually creating a culture of harassment, one of the fundamental things Mastodon wants to avoid.

Please know that the vast majority of people here appreciate your work. My approach to these people is to drown out their negativity with support and positive messages.