Notices by Danilo, from the Gerentate (danilo@hachyderm.io)

@mhoye a question that’s been burbling since I read this last night:

How far outside the scope of possible is community-led development of a browser? Can the next chapter of the web have a viable, feature-complete browser for the people and by the people, or is that too complex an endeavor without a serious payroll?

@aral yw :)

When I got to San Francisco in 2010, I really wanted to do it all

Build a startup, create change through technology.

But the more I learned of the culture, the less I wanted to succeed according to its rubric. The turning point for me was Airbnb

Around 2011, Airbnb was REALLY taking off. All the benefits of a software business, none of the drawbacks of a real estate business. The best of all worlds.

Except…

The primary externality Airbnb generated was RISK

This exploded into public awareness when a host found her apartment absolutely destroyed by a guest

Which, you know, of course: a system like that is bound to fail spectacularly on occasion.

But what shocked me was how unprepared Airbnb was to make their host whole again. They were dodging accountability and only public shame, orchestrated by the host’s desperate PR campaign, could make the difference

It drove me bonkers.

These guys were getting absolutely rich off the backs of the communities that hosted them.

And they couldn’t take care of someone when things went wrong?

It was such a breach of the basic, reciprocal, implied social contract we should all adhere to.

And what I was learning was that all of Silicon Valley business culture was premised on that kind of breach. Move fast and break society if it earns you a better valuation next round

I didn’t like that at all.

Man, Steve Huffman tried to open the door for me, too.

Sometimes I look back and wonder if I fucked up. He’d invite me to hang at the beach with his YC buds.

But I just couldn’t get excited about them and their world. I couldn’t play the game the way they all expected. It wasn’t for me.

We haven’t talked in years. I got pretty mad at him and Alexis, after they returned to Reddit. I felt they had a greater responsibility to community health.

At the time, Steve… disagreed.

Today all those guys are RICH

I mean, beyond fuck-you money, this is fuck-everyone money. And powerful, in that they can do more or less what they want any given year, and have access to anyone else they need to meet or influence.

Meanwhile, I’m not rich.

It feels like I could have been, if I’d made different choices. But I couldn’t do that any more than I could have sprouted wings.

It’s one of the enduring heartbreaks of my life that I found the Valley so inimical to my values.

So now I live in the woods, almost as far from San Francisco as you can get and still be in the US.

I’ve got a fiber connection and half a prayer everything I know about software and technology strategy can still matter, can still pay some bills.

It’s hard to spend a lifetime really learning something, knowing it down to your bones, only to find the Mecca of its practice so hostile to the vision of the future you hold dear.

It’s been quite a walk through the desert.

It's telling to me that the Fediverse—which provides all the self-governance of a DAO, and all the decentralization of web3—has no interest from the VC bootlicker class.

It reveals a lot about how a plausible technological benefit evolves into a grift. web3 nonsense was never about new paradigms. It was about constructing bags and conscripting bag holders. The proof is right here. Those guys are now chasing AI, instead of viable expressions of the goals they claimed to be so invested in.