Post · bonfire.cafe

It's really funny to get messages from strangers who sound like they're nervous like they're messaging some big shot celebrity or whatever.

Like, yeah, I get it. Anxiety's a bitch. But I'm just a guy with weird hobbies; a nerd who likes to make sense of the world and share his notes.

But when it comes to social status, I'm also kind of a loser?

I'm definitely too lame to get a boyfriend, and the local queer/furry scene treats me like a ghost whenever I try to organize an activity (even if I'm offering to pay for everyone's way).

And unless you're very interested in the same technical topics I write about frequently, well, my fursona is a forgettable blue canid, like the tends of thousands other blue canids. I'm basically background noise.

So it gives me a lot of proverbial whiplash to be treated that way >.>

Soatok Dreamseeker

@soatok@furry.engineer · 3 hours ago

To put things in perspective: The most interesting thing I've done in the past few years is boring, unglamorous infrastructure design that is only fully comprehensible to someone with deep cryptography expertise, but comes in a simple enough package to vaguely understand and hopefully work with: https://publickey.directory

This isn't the kind of thing that's going to get 10 million views on TikTok tomorrow.

At best, when the Fediverse goes all in on end-to-end encryption, it'll solve one of the hard problems that most people who decide to bolt encryption onto their messaging app inevitably punt because of its difficulty.

But the thing that most people will actually give a shit about is "zomg mastodon has end-to-end encryption now!!!" and maybe have one less reason to avoid it.

And the Fedi folks can still ship E2EE without key transparency.

It would be a terrible idea, but not one without precedent or forthcoming disaster.

Public Key Directory - Key Transparency for the Fediverse

Soatok Dreamseeker

@soatok@furry.engineer · 3 hours ago

I'm not going to win a Turing Award or Levchin prize for any of this, because it's not really groundbreaking or innovative in any meaningful way.

But it is useful.

Soatok Dreamseeker

@soatok@furry.engineer · 3 hours ago

The funniest thing about the Internet (but mostly the Fediverse these days, in my experience) is how often you'll cross paths with someone who's done something meaningful and impressive and could cash in their nerd cred to pwn you in an argument but instead they're just like, "I have a funny story about that," and then omit the part where they did crazy/cool shit.

Soatok Dreamseeker

@soatok@furry.engineer · 3 hours ago

Let me put it another way:

I hate hierarchies. Social status is a hierarchy.

(Social status insecurity is also a big part of the right-wing pipeline that drives people towards fascist violence.)

We don't need hierarchies!

If you admire anything about me or anything I've done, just use that as evidence to tell yourself, "If Soatok can do it, there's no reason that I can't also succeed" when you're pursuing your own passions.

Do not ever tell yourself that anyone else is better than anyone else. That's so narrow-minded.

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