Help me live

Much like everyone else under capitalism, I need money to live. Most of the stuff I do is what you might consider "socially useful" but also "generally unprofitable". If you could support me financially, it would go a long way to giving me more breathing room.

What I do for "free"

Behind the scenes of the social web

a has encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the fediverse and forward-thinking ideas for the social web in general, backed by solid technical and social grounding

Anonymous

I'm a member of the Mastodon and Pixelfed teams on Github. I'm involved in protocol discussions and proposals. Some of the ideas I'm trying to push forward:

Bringing context back into the social web. Whereas platforms like Twitter removed context and frequently lead to context collapse, older-style forums do not have these contextual issues due to the explicit grouping of posts into threads.
"Special collection proofs" for obtaining and verifying stamps of inclusion in a special collection. This allows for a natural way of, for example, showing only replies that have been stamped by the author, or only posts that have been added to a moderated conversation, without having to fetch the entire collection and validate the relationship yourself. This gives people greater control over their conversations and interactions, allowing them to set and signal boundaries that good-faith actors can respect.
Custom audiences. Similar to Instagram's "Close Friends", Twitter's former "Circle" feature, Facebook's "friend lists", diaspora*'s "Aspects" or Google+ "Circles", you should be able to define subsets of people that you can then address in your posts. The building blocks are largely there already; they just need to be put together.
Explicit collection management. Currently, the social web operates on the basis that everything is implicitly reconstructed on your "instance" based on what it receives. Hashtags, profiles, and timelines do not really exist. By having explicit collections for these, not only can you add features like excluding certain posts from your profile, or having multiple streams/collections of your own posts, but you can also follow those collections to get updates about the stuff you care about, instead of a grab-bag of everything that may or may not be relevant.

Finances overview

I currently receive around $30 per week on Liberapay. Meeting a goal of $500 per week would mean that my survival is no longer in question. But of course, anything helps!