lhl (@leonard) • Hey
public goods enjoyer
Publications
- It's been a while since I've been back here, but I like the improvements I've seen so far. With Twitter (sorry, X *snigger)'s continued self-immolation, some thoughts on some of the other things I've been using:
* X - well, the past year or so, I've been pretty deep in AI/LLM-land, so actually, I spend most of my social media reading time in my curated list (for those interested: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1633321011394510848 ), but I don't post there anymore and generally I think it's worse on every single metric (in some ways, much more than others) than before the Muskocalypse
* Fediverse - I spend most of my time posting here, mostly as a continuation of my blogging. I run a personal Akkoma instance and often post longer pieces there. For me, the audience is small, so the writing is primarily focused around the act of writing, and that's fine by me. The Fediverse at large continues to not have much of an inherent sustainability strategy.
* Warpcast/Farcaster - I have a small presence there and occasionally post some crypto-related stuff there, but I find the length restrictions to be somehow a bit too restrictive (not doing url-shortening I think is the big problem there). It's been interesting to watch it being built up and I think the team has been doing a great job there. The mobile+desktop integration is slick, I approve of the recent changes thinking about pricing/sustainability.
* Threads - a lot of my old normie friends are here and it's actually pretty active and friendly, and the media heavy (Instagram-derived) bent on my algo-stream actually is pretty engaging, but I've been too busy to let myself get sucked in (YouTube is still my biggest media time-suck). I'm interested to see if they follow through on their original announcements on joining the Fediverse/ActivityPub. I guess we'll see.
* Bluesky - I haven't found myself even opening the app recently unless I force myself to so I don't have much to say about it.
* Debank - an interesting look at how *not* to build a crypto-based social network I think. They have a leaderboard, assign a literal $-value for "engagement"/drive behaviors. As you can imagine, this leads to awful SNR and overall behavior and the stream is basically trash, even w/ very low # of users. To me it's sad to watch what was a very nice portfolio analysis tool (which I've been slowly replacing) turn into a big trash fire, and a warning about conflating economics with social interaction. It's one of the reasons I think that friendtech and the like, well, maybe they aren't dead-ends from a product-market fit perspective, are objectively bad (for people). I *do* think there's a future for gating, community tokens, etc. but not in a way that intrinsically monetizes/unaligns social activities.
- The dispatcher is great btw - having to manually sign everything interaction was a huge PITA.
- With the potential Twitterpocalypse coming, it felt like a good time to revisit all the alternatives and see how they're doing.
Besides https://twitter.com/lhl I'm now set up on Mastodon at https://fosstodon.org/@lhl
So far, it looks like
I'll be looking again at https://www.farcaster.xyz/ , https://www.planetary.social/ and anything else out there as well...
- hello world