There's so much I haven't said about the making of the fediverse, ActivityPub, this moment. And so much of all of this feels really emotional for me *personally*. How we got here. The making of the spec. The huge role transphobia is playing in Twitter falling apart paralleling the huge role that trans people played building the fediverse. What I am trying my damnedest to build for the future of decentralized social networks.

There's so much I'd like to say, but talking about it feels dangerous, forbidden, selfish.

Sometimes I do kinda feel written out of all this history, but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's for the best.

I didn't realize how fucked up that is until the other day when I commented out loud that I was "lucky" that I didn't get BlueSky because, given what's happening with Twitter, I'd almost certainly be getting a ton of transphobic attention right now. And a friend pointed out how terrible it was that I was even put in a position to *think* that.

Heck, up until pointing that, that's a thing I never even mentioned publicly. There you go, now you know: I was, I believe, second in the running to run BlueSky. It's not a shock they gave it to Jay Graber, I think she's great. But... (cotd ...)

But that's a thing I haven't really talked about, because talking about it felt weirdly forbidden: I was close enough that I had direct calls with Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. I had a direct one on one call with Parag where I thought they were going to announce I got BlueSky and instead they told me they were giving it to someone else, but maybe if the person and I got along, I could be the tech lead or something. I guess it's not surprising that I didn't get it: I decided to use my presentations as a test, and I told them exactly what I thought we should do in my usual, excited, but completely direct self... and intentionally not filtering any of that, including about what I thought the mistakes Twitter, Facebook, etc had made. So I guess it's not surprising I gave the impression that I wasn't the right person to be the public lead. That experience did lead me to decide to co-found the Spritely Institute with Randy Farmer instead.

I *will* say that I was surprised that the people who were most cool, of all the top exec folks at Twitter, of having me tell them *exactly* what I thought were Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. They seemed entertained and were nodding along enthusiastically. A lot of the other top people seemed stunned to have this nonbinary weirdo saying all this stuff to them that was so *direct*. Or that's the read I got.

I did get the impression that both Jack and Parag genuinely cared about building BlueSky btw, that it wasn't some scheme as I think a lot of us feared. But maybe I just felt that way because they were willing to listen to me, and that they were listening at all, seemingly in earnest, was a surprise.

But it was a blessing in disguise, ultimately, because not getting BlueSky meant starting the Spritely Institute doing *exactly* what I thought we should be doing.

Damn, woulda been nice to start with all that money though. A lot less stress. Probably.

But then again, I'd probably have all the transphobes knocking down my door. The eye of Elon himself would probably be upon me. Guess I'm "lucky". Which is fucked up itself, to even think that.