Many of my colleagues were very shaken by the DEI "secret police" deputization that went out to a bunch of federal branches. If you hadn't seen it:

I am ashamed. I saw real fear in peoples' eyes. Do you expect them to work well in this environment? (no, actually, because again, the terror is mostly the point). I am also fucking angry. Obviously, there is nothing to do but use my protected class status against this bullshit. I was very, very much already working on it, but this does bump up the timelines.

Resistance will become effectively illegal in the near to very near future. It doesn't really matter if it's via legislation, lawsuits/courts, or if an executive order declares all political organization against Trump as "terrorism", it should now be very clear that we're headed there.

Planning for this is difficult. Obfuscating ones digital footprint when the tech giants are in bed with Hitler2 is rough. Peer-to-peer will become increasingly crucial. I thought about Tin-Can. Yes, we need innovation at the protocol level, but imho bluetooth is too limited in distance, even so much so that it's very easy to triangulate a transmitter's location. But the telecom companies are subpoenable, the AppStore and Google's android store are certainly bottlenecks, and are also vulnerable to legal threats. I dunno, I'm thinking about these things. I'm certainly thinking about how much of a fucking pain it'll be to produce content where I'm wearing a mask and sunglasses in every video, with voice modulation, new social media accounts, VPNs (for starters..), using a VM instance when posting, etc. etc. But anyway... Signal may be good for messaging, and Bluesky may be semi-distributed in structure, but any redundancy or especially innovation is nothing but a good thing. Maybe there is something between the two, an encrypted p2p/distributed social network that could go through WiFi to do a meshnet with a different protocol than Bluetooth? I will be spending some compute time on it. The market needs are changing.

If hubski goes private then I can just link to either my other pseudonymous accounts or even my real ID accounts after we root out all of serial killers.

p.s. that bimbo Janet Petro seems like a real DEI hire, I'm going to tell my boss to look into that