The first three weeks of this year was more or less just a lot of SSDD for me. A cold took me out for a week; my first week back to work after 3 weeks off was an uneventful week of being on-call; and yet another mostly uneventful week followed. But then: event after event, as if they were trying to make up for the boring first ~20 days of the year.

Follow-up: The Solaris news cycle

After over two long months, the latest funding round for Solaris sees to have come to an agreement that will turn Solaris into a subsidiary of SBI Holdings. It’s still contingent of regulatory procedures, but it’s probably safe to assume that it will go through.

As for what that means for everyone involved: I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know more than what SBI had to make public to comply with Tokyo Stock Exchange regulations, and I’m unfortunately not smart enough to confidently predict the future from here.

I’d be lying if I said that the current events didn’t affect me mentally.

“Once You’re Laid Off, You’ll Never Be the Same Again”

Part of that is due to my past layoff at Shopify, I think. Mert Bulan wrote down his experiences leading up to and after his layoff; I share many of those sentiments, and then some more. I’ll probably try to put my thoughts on this topic into words, but just like Mert, I find this subject laden with disappointment and sadness, which doesn’t really make it enjoyable to write. Maybe the second anniversary of my layoff is a good deadline for that piece…

It doesn’t help that up to that layoff at Shopify, my entire professional life was following a simple rule.

If you’ve performed well and the company is financially stable, your job is secure.

At least in larger companies, that rule seems to no longer be true – if it has ever been true, at all –; and the way most small companies are run these days, financial stability is no longer a given, either, especially once they’re facing economically difficult times. The reality I have to face and accept now probably is one where job security just doesn’t exist anymore.

That’s a drastic departure from where my mental space was at 4 years ago, maybe even 2 years ago. It’s not an enjoyable change for sure.

Work has become purely transactional; hasn’t it?

I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about how my attitude towards work have changed since my Shopify layoff in a future piece. Viewing work as purely transactional or at least much more transactional than I did may have opened me up for potential jobs I wouldn’t really have considered before. If it is about giving and taking at the end of the day, why not do something I don’t necessarily love, if I’m compensated well and properly for that job.

Fun fact: My phone translates “Schmerzensgeld” (damages for pain and suffering) to “compensation”, which corroborates my take.

That doesn’t mean that I’ll pick up jobs that’d go against my values, of course. I still won’t work in Crypto™; for Axel Springer & friends; or as a hitman. But I’m a lot more open to people management; maintaining or adding to code bases full of cruft and bad practice; or even JavaScript in a sustainable, accessible frontend than I was even last year.

Being allowed to do something I loved was a huge privilege I was allowed to enjoy for years and years. I’d still feel heavily privileged, if I were to trade that for doing something I don’t love as much whilst still being compensated well enough to maybe cut off a year or two of work towards the end of my professional life.

The Fediverse, Bluesky, and Openvibe

When I first gave Openvibe a try, I was somewhat optimistic that being able to consume content from and post content to different social networks in one single app might be a game changer and eventually replace Ivory as my Fediverse client. A bit over one month in, Openvibe has devolved to being just a Bluesky client for me, and I’m still Fediverse-ing on Ivory.

Openvibe does a decent job building the illusion that it’s ultimately one single thing I’m interacting with. Reality however is vastly different from that illusion: It’s two different social networks with clear boundaries for who can interact with whom. Openvibe’s tag line

currently feels utopian, especially without network-level bridging enabled by default to allow cross-network communication.

I am aware of Bridgy Fed. The opt-in nature of it doesn’t help with overcoming those boundaries on a large scale; it’s just punching individual holes here and there. I think there are some similarities to how the Fediverse and Threads – basically an isolated ActivityPub instance – interact with each other: Individuals can choose to opt into cross-platform communication, but there’s so much friction in many common use cases that I’d consider that kind of bridging… not that useful.

Those old enough amongst you readers might remember Trillian, Pidgin et al. They allowed you to chat with your friends on different messaging services in one single client. That worked perfectly fine for 1:1 conversations; but it couldn’t make group chats happen, unless all participants were on the same service. Someone on MSN Messenger couldn’t chat with someone on AIM couldn’t chat with someone on ICQ. No third-party client could do the lifting work to make that happen in an “It just works” way.

Social networks are pretty much just gigantic messaging services with a lot of group chats. Openvibe can aggregate and show all of those group chats to you – it would even allow you to post in each of those group chats separately –, but it cannot create connections between them.

To be fair to Openvibe though: It does most of what it claims to do.

The one claim it falls short though: their tagline.

As is, Openvibe actually is a significantly worse Bluesky client than the first-party app – and worse than Ivory for the Fediverse –, because Openvibe does not remember your current timeline position. If the app has been evicted from memory, you will end up at the top of your timeline. Always.

When/if that changes, I might full-time Openvibe. For now, I’ll keep both Ivory and Openvibe on my phone; and I’ll use Openvibe instead of the first-party Bluesky app, because I’d be too lazy to keep checking if Openvibe remembers timeline positions periodically.