Non-Microblogging Software Design on ActivityPub (FOSDEM 2025)

I had the pleasure of giving a talk in the Social Web room at FOSDEM 2025. It was suggested during the call for submissions that I talk about my project Postmarks, but I had a feeling while working on my pitch that I had something a little more complicated to talk about. Below is what I ended up writing and delivering to the room.

Apologies in advance for all the unnecessary punctuation; they were speed bumps put in place for my too-fast speaking. (They didn't work.)

Thanks so much to Gretchen, Mandy, Nozlee, my whole team at Glitch/Fastly, and my Monday night Coalhouse crew for helping me with the drafts and prep for the talk.

Non-Microblogging Software Design on ActivityPub: On the Inherent Tradeoffs of Interoperability #

Or: The Social Web Is a Flattened Web #

A Personal History of the Web #

Hi, I'm Casey. I live in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. I'm the developer of a small Fediverse experiment called Postmarks, but for the purposes of this discussion, I need to go back a little bit further in my time on the internet.

I was introduced to the open web as an adolescent in the early 90s, I watched the birth of blogging and the explosion of opportunity that was "Web 2.0" as a teenager, learned how to code so I could make my own websites, and in the 2000s went to Purdue University to get a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I treated it as a trade school, for better or worse—I wanted to learn what I needed so I could start building the web.

Now, in the 2020s, I'm an engineer working on Glitch, a website that aims to make it possible for "everyone [to build] the web." It's a platform where people who want to can learn how to make web sites and other apps that live on the open web, whether that means going in and changing a few lines of text on a webpage and some colors in a CSS file, or building your own websocket-based WebXR game from scratch. Whatever you make, we'll provide hosting for it, and a community where you can share what you've built.

In my free time, among my other hobbies, I've worked with APIs like Twitter, Discord, and Mastodon to build generative bots that make art or jokes. I've built CMSes to host blog posts and creative writing that I've done. (My first ever PHP app, built in 2001, was a link blog, because I was obsessed with sites like kottke.org and Memepool.) As a user I've spent countless hours in IRC, Slack, and Discord channels, on phpBB forums, on microblogging networks like Twitter and Mastodon, on unique platforms like Google Reader and Cohost—many sites that I hear myself and others use to explain how we've spent time on the web. But one thing I think that goes too often unsaid is how much time I and my friends have spent exploring the fullness of what happens off of those platforms, following hyperlinks in a web browser and seeing the full potential of the technologies that give us this world online.

So it's been good for me to remember that the thing I love most about the web is the breadth of experiences it enables. I've certainly read my fair share of blogs, dating back to meeting someone and reading their entire Livejournal, in order. But the web makes it possible to host multimedia; interactive games; and weird, explorable websites that unfold in unexpected ways as you search their corners for secrets. That variety, when it's present, makes being online feel, to me: vital, diverse, exciting, and engaging. We're able to find not just a variety of content, but a variety of experience.

What I'm here to talk about today is the result of reflecting on that breadth of design and experience that the web can provide in the face of what I've realized I've spent so much of my free time actually doing, and with the project that brought me here, how I've missed out on taking part.

Postmarks and a Social Bookmarking Lineage #

Near the end of 2023 I released the first versions of a platform I built called Postmarks. Postmarks is a social bookmarking platform that lives on the open web. You probably know what a bookmark is, but for the sake of completeness, what we're talking about here is basically a URL along with some metadata that lets you attach excerpts, describe the contents, and categorize it in relation to other bookmarks you have. By default, bookmarks you create are visible to anyone looking at your Postmarks site on the web, but those bookmarks are also broadcast to other interested servers via the ActivityPub protocol, which makes Postmarks not just a social bookmarking app, but a Fediverse-enabled bookmarking app.

Social bookmarking is hardly a new idea! I built it intentionally with many similarities to the first social bookmarking app on the web, Delicious.

Delicious was a tool that grew out of a group linkblogging site I was mildly obsessed with called Memepool. It helped its founder, Joshua Schachter, organize URLs that he wanted to store and categorize. Delicious may not have been a platform that became a household name, but as an example of its influence, the way we use the word "tags" to refer to keyword metadata? That comes from Delicious. I was a Delicious user; it was great to use as someone who was in college and was using more than one computer for the first time (my own desktop computer and computers in computer labs all over campus) to be able to store my bookmarks online instead of in my browser. Knowing other people on the site and browsing tags to see other people’s bookmarks meant there was a light social component as well, but for me it was first and foremost a form of external memory, "synced to the cloud" in a way that before then wasn’t really a way most of us talked about this stuff.

Delicious had a sort of tortured history as it got acquired and re-sold multiple times to different parent corporations. In 2009 another developer looked at Delicious and thought "I could make that" and the result was Pinboard, a very similar website, but one that came with slow-growth ideals that seemed to promise it would stay available as a sustainable business. I moved to Pinboard shortly after its launch and used it happily for years.

When it comes to the Fediverse, I've used Mastodon both publicly and privately since 2017, but first tried developing with the ActivityPub protocol in 2022, thanks to Darius Kazemi's ActivityPub Server tutorial and the great information available at activitypub.rocks. I ended up making a demo of what would eventually become Postmarks just before Christmas 2022, kept hacking on it in my free time throughout the months that followed, and eventually shared news that I was releasing an initial version in September of 2023.

The response was bigger than I was expecting, and in the months that followed I took in a number of great contributions from friends and new acquaintances that fixed ActivityPub-related bugs, added full-text search, and all kinds of other cool stuff. Unlike many of my software projects, my goals for Postmarks are actually pretty concrete; I know what I want its end state to look like, and in 2025 I'm hoping to finish off what I see as the original vision of the project so I can decide what to do next.

Postmarks Development Principles #

There are three core ideas that I decided early on were the most important things to the project: things that would define what kept it useful to the kind of user I had in mind, what would keep me moving forward in developing it, and what would get people (including me) excited about using it over any other bookmarking alternatives. After going over the list, I'll explain each one of them in more detail, and the impacts that one in particular had on the project as whole.

The first is single-user instances. Unlike most ActivityPub apps, Postmarks is a platform where a given "instance" (or server) is home to one "actor" (or user). That is to say, if you want to use Postmarks, you either need to set it up yourself, or find someone who will set it up just for you. The setup process is pretty simple, and using the Glitch platform, there are literally 4 required steps: two random values to generate and enter into a .env file, a username to enter into a JSON file, and then you rename a file to signal to the server that you've configured everything and are ready to go. With Glitch, you can remix the base project and do all of this in your web browser in less than 5 minutes.

We will also talk just a bit about how I decided while working on Postmarks that, despite the fact that for career reasons I have learned how to make "single-page applications" that use client-side JavaScript to offer slick auto-updating websites, I was going to use "old" techniques. This was less of a principled decision than it was a practical one, but either way I'm still convinced it was the right choice.

Lastly, it occurred to me that using ActivityPub meant I should look into how I could "interoperate" with Mastodon and other similar microblogging software. It would be possible, even unintentionally, to architect the whole platform in a way that led to activity on Postmarks, despite using the same protocol, being basically invisible to Mastodon users even if they successfully "followed" a Postmarks account. But "interop" seemed to have a number of advantages. In a way, interoperability ended up being the thing that kept development moving forward quickly, but it's also led to some of the most difficult challenges I've faced in making this. But first, let's step back to the first principle.

Principle #1: Single-User Instances #

If you have any opinions about Mastodon, some of them are probably related to its decentralized model and the concept of "instances". On Mastodon and most software that works with ActivityPub, instances are most easily represented by the domain name that makes up the "second half of your username", but the actual impact goes further than that. An instance is a collection of users who store their data on the same server, who abide by some set of rules, who are subject to administration by the instance's leadership, and who (in most cases) are seen as belonging to a group of some kind, whether it's a clearly-stated shared interest or identity group or a sort of reputation/attitude. Instances are homes to communities.

Like most communities, instances experience growth and decay; they go through good times and bad. They also are subject to political action among the other communities they are in contact with. Sometimes this leads to situations where instances shut down, or get isolated from other parts of the "fediverse". The way most ActivityPub apps work right now, these events can have real impacts on individual people who never saw it coming. On Mastodon today, moving your network is accomplishable (and the process for doing it has seen improvements over time) but moving your content is currently not. Some of this is due to difficulties that are specific to Mastodon, but some of it is due to ActivityPub itself. This isn’t for lack of care: there are efforts to improve this problem, and I look forward to seeing the results.

Web-based bookmarking, while having a social component dating all the way back to Delicious, has first and foremost been an activity I do for myself. In my private bookmarking account that I use as an authoritative source, I have about twenty thousand bookmarks accumulated over the last 20 years as I've moved from platform to platform. I use my recent bookmarks every day to track things I want to read across devices, and I search my full archive not quite daily, but pretty close. If I want to have a place to put bookmarks, I need to know it's not going anywhere, and I suspect most people who would install their own self-hosted bookmarking app feel similarly.

While Mastodon and many of the other popular ActivityPub platforms are very reasonably designed to be large, heavyweight (or medium-weight) platforms with live databases and search indexes and things that help them scale to hundreds and thousands of users and even more people's data cached from other instances, there have been some projects like Gotosocial that focus on a minimal footprint for a small number of users.

With Postmarks, I decided to take that a step further: one instance, one user. While this decision doesn't come without its own complications, it has done its job for me in keeping the project simple, manageable, and adding a constraint that says the software has to balance the utility it provides to its own user with the complication of its install & hosting process, instead of amortizing it across its large population.

Principle #2: "Old Web" Architecture #

Moving along, we turn to its "old web" architecture. I decided when starting this project to build this app as a web server that generates HTML on the server-side, delivers that to the browser, accepts some HTTP requests via HTML forms, and uses minimal javascript on the frontend to improve the user experience a bit. The app has predictable, readable URLs that a motivated user could build themselves when typing in the browser or when trying to make scripts or tools that would link to or query their bookmarks. I used SQLite databases persisted to disk to store everything so there’s no extra services you need to set up or pay a SaaS provider for. And yes, I promise I'm old enough to see a certain irony in referring to a node.js app as being part of the "old web".

All of this was in part related to my own tendencies and philosophies of software architecture, but it was mostly to force myself to stay moving forward on the actual functionality of the project. I'm not a UX expert and while I know some modern frontend techniques that make use of heavy client-side javascript to create an "app-like" experience, I knew I risked getting bogged down in learning new patterns and adding new dependencies. Sticking with things I already knew how to do in as many areas as possible meant I had time to learn the ActivityPub-related things I needed to learn to make this project happen.

The general philosophy of keeping things simple also let me build Postmarks on Glitch, which helped avoid a common problem when developing software for ActivityPub. To make something that talks to other ActivityPub servers, you need to host it somewhere that has a publicly-addressable URL. There are ways to do this while developing locally on your computer, using a full-on reverse proxy pointing to a static IP you provision, or using tools like ngrok.

But by developing on Glitch, I can spin up any number of copies of my app across any number of subdomain hostnames essentially instantly. Glitch doesn't offer the ability to build a network of services like a Postgres database and an Elasticsearch cluster out of the box, so sticking to configuration in static files and a database that's persisted to disk made it easy to host, and Glitch's "remix" feature meant I could fork the project and pursue other ideas while looking at a live, working copy of a previous checkpoint of my work at the same time.

Principle #3: Maximum Interoperability #

The last principle was a sense of desire to interoperate with Mastodon and its microblogging peers. There were a number of motivations for this: to ease development and testing, to improve demonstration and onboarding, and ultimately to rebuild a feature of Delicious and Pinboard that to me was never my most-used feature, but seemed like it had some interesting potential for Postmarks.

The testing and development benefits came pretty much from the very first demo I gave to my coworkers in 2022. With the way I had written the first prototype, an instance was capable of registering that other Fediverse actors had "followed" it and broadcasting out activity to them, but I didn't write any UI or protocol-level support for following anyone else from within Postmarks. I didn't need to! I could test my instance out by following it from my Mastodon account, seeing the posts show up in my timeline, replying to them to add comments, and so forth. I didn't add the ability to follow other Postmarks users (or anyone else) until the day after I announced the project in September of 2023, because it hadn't hit me yet what the purpose of that would even be. But Mastodon proved a very useful smoke-testing tool for my ActivityPub work. After launching, via members of the development community, I discovered other tools that would be similarly beneficial: FediDB gave me some idea that other people were using Postmarks and more recently the amazing Feditest project was gracious enough to run their test suite against Postmarks as part of their initial launch, which has given me a better idea of how well we comply with the ActivityPub spec (not perfectly, but not terribly!)

The first use of adding the ability to follow people from within Postmarks, it turned out, would be to add a prototype of what Delicious called the "Network" page, which was sort of a proto-feed (before Facebook had its News Feed or FriendFeed existed) of bookmarks that people you knew were creating. Postmarks' "Network" page, in its finished form, will show bookmarks from other Postmarks users that you follow but also should reformat URLs shared on platforms like Mastodon and make them easy to add to your own bookmarks. In that way it's also similar to the Twitter API app Nuzzel which was a private email newsletter of just the links that were shared on your Twitter timeline or any number of Mastodon-related apps that have come since then that do similar things, like Sill.

Finally, interoperability provides visibility for your project. It's an extra avenue for sharing the platform for people who get excited about it and an extra way to dip your toe in the water as an observer from established platforms like Mastodon. If one person loves Postmarks and starts using it, they may be encouraged to post about that on Mastodon. Rather than telling people to go look at a website elsewhere, they can link to what looks just like a Mastodon user by specifying their @username@postmarks-instance.org. If someone who sees their post clicks through, they stay within the context of Mastodon. They're invited to "follow" that feed right in their Mastodon client. They'll start to see the bookmarks, and maybe once they're following a few of those, they'll notice the similarities and wonder how they can get their own. They reply to a post and that shows up as a comment on the Postmarks user's instance. In doing so, they've (hopefully) made the Postmarks instance more valuable for the person who's bookmarking on it. Over time, the result is that Postmarks becomes a useful tool to those who want it, and makes itself known organically to those who may realize they want it later.

Interoperability: Painful Realities #

Interoperability, unfortunately, turned out to be the most challenging of the three principles I kept in mind while developing Postmarks. Everything I've said about its benefits so far is true—but it's almost more complicated than that.

While using Mastodon to test the output from Postmarks was helpful, it also sometimes added complexity. There are things that I was doing with ActivityPub that I'm still convinced were technically compliant with the spec, but that resulted in posts that were broken or not doing what I wanted on Mastodon. Little details like having bookmarks' tags show up as hashtags that could be clicked in Mastodon posts to take you to a search in your Mastodon client for posts with that hashtag required extra work. It wasn't always clear to me if I was doing something wrong from the perspective of the protocol, or not just understanding a detail of how Mastodon expected data to be structured for the purposes of its own product decisions. Suddenly on top of reading the spec I'm looking at the source code for Mastodon, third-party clients, similar platforms like Misskey, and so on.

The biggest difficulty I faced when handling interoperability, though, ends up being more philosophical. It relates to what I said earlier about what’s great about the web that captured my attention in the first place—or rather, what's missing from that today.

Mastodon and many of its Fediverse and broader social web kin were heavily inspired by Twitter. In general, they are designed to reproduce a specific core experience: a timeline of posts made by a selection of users that you have chosen to "follow". To break down what a "post" is on these platforms, we can say that it's a block of text and/or a collection of media "attachments". Some text, like a username or a hashtag, can create useful hyperlinks; a single URL in the post can be given a visual "card", but no other programmable content or even significant structured display can be added.

What this means is that Postmarks activity, in order to interoperate, has to find some way to fit within that box, a box that is essentially a "Note", as ActivityPub sees it. As a result, when you see a Postmarks bookmark on Mastodon, your experience of it is as a Mastodon post that follows a certain template that makes sense for a "bookmark": link at the top, description in the middle, tags at the bottom. Postmarks "Comments", which have a distinct secondary importance to the actual bookmark itself are presented in Mastodon with equal visual importance, because they're just Notes that are "replies" to the original Note. But in doing so, it creates a different social context by which the activity is observed depending on which platform you’re observing it from.

As a sort of cynical flipside to the organic growth opportunity I outlined earlier, it also raises the question for me: what's the point? Why bother with Postmarks when you could instead write a Mastodon client that formats posts like a linkblog and submits them to a Mastodon instance? You could search your posts with some kind of combination of operators like from:@me https AND #bandcamp to find all the bandcamp pages you've "bookmarked". So why build a whole platform just to feed it back into this "flattened" web?

This isn't Mastodon's "fault", to be clear. It's only natural that in an ecosystem with one dominant player, its product decisions will influence platforms that seek to interoperate. But I do think we should be aware of, and have better ways to discuss, the influence it has on what we do, in the same way that I've started to see good discussion about other topics that reveal the status quo not as neutral, but a result of real cultural conditions that have impacts on how we live.

After seeing how this plays out with Postmarks and the current Fediverse ecosystem, I've come to start thinking about the result of all of these posts having to fit in this one place as not just a social web, but a "flattened web".

The Flattened Web #

It may sound harsh to speak of a "flattened web" but I don't say this as an outsider. I feel confident that I've read more posts on a flat timeline than most of the population of the world, having been very heavily invested in communities on these platforms for almost as long as they've existed. And up until recently, I wouldn't say I regret it! It's hard to escape these kinds of experiences today once you have friends online, because this kind of social space is where lots of smart, funny, wonderful people congregate and share really interesting and great stuff. Right now I consider it inescapable for the social circles I find myself drawn to. In 2025, choosing not to be on a flattened web makes me feel more alone.

In the case of a microblog timeline, something as respectful of my attention as Mastodon at least limits itself to stuff from the people I've chosen to follow. But short of some small innovations I've seen in apps like Phanpy, it's still a flattened timeline. Everything is condensed into this same rectangle, whether it's an amazing announcement, a funny joke, news of a tragedy, a friend looking for help or even just validation, or a fresh Postmarks bookmark saved. The best chances we have to set context feel like band-aids to me: content warnings, obsessive list-curating, multi-account switching. Otherwise, you’re left to absorb whatever shows up that represents the fullness of the people you follow.

Maybe when I was younger I was better at "surfing" from vibe to vibe, but there's something that's made it harder for me recently to want to subject myself to contextless chronological information, columnized and compressed to a dozen second's worth of attention, repeated hundreds of times in a row. It's not pure rejection, because some days I do love it, or find it useful, or just feel like I have to submit to it because... I'm wondering what's happening, or maybe I'm just feeling alone and want to feel connected to others.

I'm now at the point where I have friends online that I've known for 30 years, and there are people I've known for 6 months that I hope will be in my life 30 years from now. But right now, and maybe because of the moment that we're in, I keep wishing the way I related to them didn't involve this flattened timeline.

So it took the realization that no matter what I did with Postmarks to make it interoperate, I had made an important component of it something that fed into other people's flattened experience of the web... it's made it difficult to be excited about doing more. Seeing that other people actually cared about Postmarks felt like a responsibility, and contributing to an experience that I'm feeling so ambivalent about feels like a betrayal.

What To Do? #

I still haven't really figured out what to do with these feelings. Postmarks has been fairly neglected, as open source projects are, I suppose. I'm trying to find ways to structure my 2025 in a way that I'll have more time to devote to working on some of the lingering bugs and missing pieces in the project, but at this point it's more out of a desire for closure than it is excitement.

I've pondered two drastic actions: ripping ActivityPub out entirely and focusing on making a self-hostable bookmarking app, or continuing to use ActivityPub, but in order to focus on building a network of Postmarks instances, using structured data in ways that won't necessarily work with other ActivityPub software. But neither feels right to me, even though they would be "easier" in some ways.

To be clear, none of this makes me think ActivityPub itself is less good or interesting, and all of it comes down to a personal feeling that I just can't keep going the way I have been. At some point last decade, I threw myself deep into the flattened web, and it's taken me some time to realize recently that there's nothing about it that says it's the absolute end-state of relating to other people online.

So instead I'm looking to understand: how do I seek interoperability in a way that I can feel good about? How do I build a product that serves a specific purpose but also benefits from the opportunities that are created through something as open-ended and cool as ActivityPub? Are there ways for the platform itself to receive the new data as a flattened queue, but to make the experience of using it feel relaxing, exploratory, or even joyous?

After over 20 years of making things with software, I'm a firm believer that very few choices can provide purely positive effects. Advancements in software are built on layer after layer of tradeoffs, and in this case something that has given me a lot of benefit in the course of building this project also resulted in some questions that I'm forced to reckon with. After struggling for a while to ignore them, to push through and keep doing what I've been doing, I think instead I'd like to try to find an alternate path. If any of this resonates with you, I'd love for you to get in touch and try to move forward together; to turn the social web into something that feel less flattened.

Cohost Imported

They're all tagged here

I don't think this will be a viable solution for anyone any time soon, but I rigged up something messy that involved using cohost.py to download all my (non-share) posts and then did a bunch of munging to get them into the right markdown format for 11ty?

There are still a couple of things to fix, including the way I generate linkable titles for posts that don't have any (it's weird to have an "Archive page" for blogging that might not have a title... but it's a kind of low-res search index as well)

I also purposefully did not spam the feeds by including these new posts in them-- you're welcome, RSS readers 😁

Eternal December

Hahaha hello oh no #

This is in fact "my XOXO 2024 blog post", but it turned into a lot more than that as I was thinking about it on the bus to my allergy shots this month, and then even more less than a week later. So bear with me, I guess. Because I feel surrounded by endings right now.

Two weeks ago I attended the final XOXO here in Portland, the place I moved to in 2016, just short of 3 years after first visiting it because of XOXO. Between the lack of yearly meet-ups and the fragmentation of social media platforms, I'm not used to the feeling of isolation that comes from leaving an event like that!

It used to be you'd follow everyone you met on Twitter and excitedly chat with them in the days that follow. I have been checking platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon a little more often after kind of backing away from a lot of social media, but I don't feel that rush quite the same way. The platform I've been posting on most regularly is probably Cohost, and after I drafted this post, and tried to decide over a long weekend with houseguests visiting if the post was too long, too self-involved, too vulnerable... Cohost announced on Monday they'd be shifting to read-only mode in October, and shutting down entirely sometime before the end of the year. So before I talk about XOXO, a quick diversion.

Mourning Cohost #

I signed up for Cohost in its private beta period. I started with a pseudonymous page name but I think I may have had my first name attached to it for a good while. I found that useful for bootstrapping a bit, making it clear to people who might not have picked up immediately who I was that we knew each other. Before things went public, though, I did something I haven't really done before-- I set up a named page and for the first time in a long time made that not my primary presence. I posted to it for some things-- music posts that I thought might eventually serve as a jumping off point for a music blog I was planning on making under my real name (which has probably been discouraged for even longer due to the launch of Record Club, which I will admit I am enjoying quite a bit-- that's one bright light that's been in my life the last couple weeks); sharing creative projects that had my name on it or that I knew I would promote elsewhere like Mastodon or my personal website. That sort of thing. But the majority of the socializing and the "shitposting" (I still hate labeling things that–I feel like it removes a lot of the power of the posts) I did under my pseudonym.

I didn't do a lot of work to "disguise" the account. I've used that name elsewhere, people would refer to me as Casey, and so many other little things here and there. I'm sure that for some people who know who I am it was totally obvious... though I'll admit it occasionally made me feel weird or sad or bad to think that someone else might not know. But if you know me well enough to care, you probably figured it out, and if not, oh well, right?

All that goes to say that it made me feel weird sometimes, and especially today, when I talked up Cohost in a big way, and anyone who went to look at the Cohost page with "my username" had like... 3 posts in the last month or whatever, and if they were on Cohost themselves, they wouldn't have seen me repost most of the good posts, like or comment on almost any of their posts, etc.

I'm still feeling weird about this strategy. I've known people who have done similar things and never felt weird about them doing it, but it has felt strange. Was it a deception? Is it a natural coping strategy to years of social media churn and burnout? I honestly tried not to think about it, and the impending shutdown and trying to reconcile this double-life-but-really-that's-melodramatic has been a little bit weird.

Struggling with XOXO #

I struggled with a lot of the messaging at XOXO this year. Everyone's in a different place; 50% of the audience was brand new to the community, so maybe it was good for people to be on stage telling us to make things and share them. I found myself flinching, though. I do make things. I do share them. For what?

None of those helped stop so many of us, myself included, from poisoning our brains and lining the pockets of terrible people, for so much of the last 20 years. Where are the things I'm "just making" going, who will remember them, why do I let these obsessions stick in my brain and bother me for not completing them, not iterating on them, not polishing them to a shine? Is my "lottery" having a decent job, because someone with hiring power saw a... toy I made linked in a newsletter, on a blog, in a Slack channel I advertised it in? What does that say about who I am?

Witnessing the end of the "ZIRP" era #

If you work in tech or know people who do, you may also be familiar with the state of the industry, where money isn't quite as free as it used to be, large investors are chasing dangerous trends that I have no desire to go near, and even the most profitable companies in the world are laying off workers because blah blah blah who cares. I'm not Matt Levine. The result is this: many people I know feel less motivated by their work. It's not just that we've gotten better at turning a keen eye to the impact of our work (though many of us have), the actual conditions under which we're being told to work are worse.

Obviously I have to couch all of this in the grandest of acknowledgments. People like me have lived privilege lives, had privileged jobs. I've become accustomed to a relatively large amount of influence and recognition and wealth compared to many of my friends who work in other fields. Still, what are given is somehow not as much as our labor affords the people who sit at the top, but I recognize that we have opportunities and conditions many are rightfully jealous of.

Still: teams are smaller, deadlines are tighter, layoffs are always lurking around the corner. People hold onto jobs they don't like longer because they don't know what else there is to do. We read and re-read articles about burnout and impostor syndrome and the overlap between the two and wonder: are we whiners, or are we falling apart?

And somehow despite the end of this era, there are people who are still at the top, who are the ones shuffling the money on to the next thing, or the ones who are "taking responsibility" for layoffs despite the fact that their jobs are intact, and they will still be there to announce the next layoffs, and the ones after that.

The vibes are bad. I'm left wondering how much of that is turbulence and how much of it is... an adjustment. I've been lucky so far. I like my team a lot. I want to do good work on the problem in front of me, despite the odds. A lot of my friends and my peers can't say the same, and I hate that.

Over the hill #

I turned 40 this summer. I'm not really afraid of my 40s? But I still feel like the loose ends of what I started in my 30s, in terms of figuring myself out and what I want, are like a kind of make-up work that I still have sitting in front of me. People I know have disconnected from toxic behaviors. They've picked up peaceful offline hobbies full of plants and hand tools. Some of them transitioned, some of them got diagnoses, and sometimes it feels like everyone else found a way to enter a new understanding of themselves, one that comes with peace.

I don't feel that way. I know I grew a lot in my 30s but I still feel in an awkward phase. I know that who I was when I was 35 is not who I am now, but I don't really know who I am now. I know I'm more confident in my career and my politics than I ever have been, but I don't know how to harness that in a way that isn't annoying, abrasive, or even hurtful. My 30s are over but also they're still sitting in my todo list with all the other crap I need to do.

Moving #

We also moved homes this summer. We wanted to shorten Gretchen's commute; we wanted a second bathroom. This "ending" is maybe the silliest on its face, but as happy as I am with our move, I am coming to realize that I am grieving the home we left and the neighborhood it's in. We lived in one house for 7 years. That's a longer time for me living in one place than I've experienced since we moved houses in 1996. I built habits, we welcomed a new pet and said goodbye to our first, we got to know the neighbors and the neighborhood, and we didn't leave it because we no longer liked it–it just wasn't the right place for us any more. It was easier to say that of places that didn't have quite so many memories.

You can't stay here~ #

Semisonic's Closing Time came out in 1998, just a couple months before I graduated from 8th grade and entered high school. If you were tapped into pop culture at that time and the years following it you can maybe understand that this song haunted me, a teenager who would go on to hear it at every end-of-school-year, end-of-camp, end-of-anything event that needed a soundtrack, on top of the countless references, both sincere and ironic, for basically all of my teenage years. I don't really like this song and there's a certain effect to which I want to deny any profundity to lyrics that have been forced upon me so many times. The song, as you may know, contains the line "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end". ugh. duh. Yes, we know that. But I could not help thinking of these stupid words while trying to decide what all these endings I'm feeling really mean for what lies ahead.

Some of the beginnings that come from these ends are clear:

• I live in a new neighborhood! It's easier to get to a lot of parts of town I like to go to by bus. There are new restaurants for us to explore, our home has a lot to offer... and a lot it needs from us to make it even better, Gretchen spends less time in the car, and hopefully by next year we'll feel like things are set up enough for us to have people over more regularly, which is something I really like to do.
• I'm in my 40s! I get to buy a red sports car, or something. I dunno. I'll figure it out.

But the first few: my career, how I'll spend time online, and what it means to make things any more... I don't have as clear an answer on those. Will people I know find more job security? Will I get to keep my current job? Will there ever be exciting new places to work, or even places that aren't chasing trends, furthering surveillance, enclosing the commons, obscuring abusive labor practices? In the case of watching some dear coworkers depart over the course of this year (both voluntarily and involuntarily) they're the ones with the new beginnings, and I'm excited and hopeful for them, but to be blunt I'm in a place and time where jobs don't get backfilled and there aren't new coworkers coming in with fresh ideas. The "new" here at work is new responsibilities without new hours in the day to accomplish them. New tasks piling up while I try to find the motivation to finish old ones. A feeling not unlike the 30s/40s transition that I'm falling behind.

Back into the dark forest #

...so what about Cohost. Now that I've admitted a bit more, in my own name, about what it meant to me, how do I honor the time spent on the platform, the affordances and the hosting that its staff provided to me? How do I carry forward the relationships from it, both old and new, that are important to me? To whom do I need to reach out and grab a hand and make sure they know that I don't want to lose them wherever we each go next, and whom can I trust to just... have the same values, the same wants, the same sense of what's cool and fun and good?

And then there's XOXO. What's new with my unfortunate desire to have too many ideas and realize a fraction of them to an unsatisfying degree with the decreasing energy I have to actually accomplish them? What's new with conferences, now that basically every conference I've ever felt like I belonged at (XOXO, !!con, Deconstruct, Eyeo, even Strange Loop–which I never made it to in-person, but always meant to) has ended? I have no idea. I think I realized about halfway through the festival talks that I was hoping that one of the speakers would give me the answer to these questions, and maybe more of the ones above, at the same time that I realized that none of them were going to. It's not their fault–it was never their job. But I guess it means that I'm stuck figuring it out.