Hi. I’m a writer, researcher, and community lead working toward better networks for human sociability and collective survival.

Maybe you’d like to get started by…

• Checking out the freshly published findings on governance in the fediverse, based on in-depth research with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers. (It's juicier than it sounds.)
• Reading one or more chunks of a feature-length dive into what Facebook/Meta did and didn’t do in Myanmar and how it relates to the genocide of the Rohingya people (spoiler: it wasn't just shoddy content moderation).
• Getting really into ghostly frequencies in an after-hours medical equipment lab and our haunted internet with a side of one of Susan Cooper’s lesser-known books from the Dark Is Rising sequence.
• Find out who I am and what I do, and why.

Some recent posts:

Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’tA very informal inquiry into why some people on the Bluesky network didn't have a great time when they tried using Mastodon in the period leading up to the summer of 2023. 28 July 2023

Notes From a Mastodon MigrationHere's what I've learned by migrating from one Mastodon server to another, including what I wish I'd known in advance and what I hope the makers of federated systems will change. 26 July 2023

The Affordance LoopOn the social internet, people who have used the biggest platforms and networks enter new ones expecting to find ~standard affordances *and* expecting that familiar interface cues will map to familiar affordances. When newer systems and tools confound those expectations, people get, *at best*, confused. At worst, they try to walk across a solid-looking but sink-into-able surface and get stuck in a bog. 20 July 2023

Qualities of LifeIn an unfortunately fascinating 1963 collection of essays on computer-simulated personality, Silvan Tomkins, the founder of affect theory, wrote 19 June 2023

All This Unmobilized LoveStraight out of undergrad, I applied to a bookselling job and didn’t get it, so I started working in tech. By the end of my first year there, I was 8 June 2023