#occultist — Public Fediverse posts

@cloudskater wrote:

Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.

Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932

FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.

The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.

↬bark.lgbt/@cloudskater/116080965694723006

@cloudskater wrote:

Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.

Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932

FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.

The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.

↬bark.lgbt/@cloudskater/116080965694723006

@cloudskater wrote:

Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.

Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932

FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.

The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.

↬bark.lgbt/@cloudskater/116080965694723006

@cloudskater wrote:

Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.

Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932

FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.

The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.

↬bark.lgbt/@cloudskater/116080965694723006

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.

As a brief recap of the problem:

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.

An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.

The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.

GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.

JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.

Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.

These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.

The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.

Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.

As a brief recap of the problem:

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.

An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.

The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.

GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.

JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.

Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.

These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.

The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.

Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.

As a brief recap of the problem:

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.

An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.

The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.

GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.

JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.

Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.

These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.

The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.

Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.

As a brief recap of the problem:

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.

An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.

The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.

GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.

JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.

Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.

These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.

The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.

Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation

It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.

As a brief recap of the problem:

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.

An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.

The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.

GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.

JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.

Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.

These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.

The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.

Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.

The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.

Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.

That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work

So, I took a look at this:

This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.

In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers

https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/

TL;DR: It won’t work.

The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.

Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.

The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.

Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.

Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.

The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.

Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.

The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.

The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.

The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.

Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.

No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.

I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790

This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work

So, I took a look at this:

This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.

In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers

https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/

TL;DR: It won’t work.

The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.

Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.

The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.

Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.

Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.

The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.

Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.

The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.

The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.

The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.

Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.

No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.

I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790

This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work

So, I took a look at this:

This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.

In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.

FEP-171b: Conversation Containers

https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/

TL;DR: It won’t work.

The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.

Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.

The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.

Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.

Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.

The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.

Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.

The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.

The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.

The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.

Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.

No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.

I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:

https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790

This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!

So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:

https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611

All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.

That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.

ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.

The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.

For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.

Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:

“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”

What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:

“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”

They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.

ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.

Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.

This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.

The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.

Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.

ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.

In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.

In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.

So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.

Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:

@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]

The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.

I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?

Edit:

What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.

I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.

Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.

In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.

What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.

Edit again:

Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.

So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:

https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611

All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.

That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.

ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.

The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.

For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.

Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:

“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”

What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:

“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”

They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.

ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.

Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.

This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.

The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.

Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.

ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.

In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.

In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.

So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.

Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:

@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]

The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.

I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?

Edit:

What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.

I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.

Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.

In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.

What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.

Edit again:

Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.

So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:

https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611

All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.

So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.

That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.

ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.

The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.

For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.

Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:

“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”

What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:

“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”

They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.

ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.

Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.

This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.

The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.

Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.

ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.

In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.

In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.

So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.

Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:

@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]

The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.

I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?

Edit:

What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.

I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.

Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.

In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.

What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.

Edit again:

Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

Can We Stop With The Dadaist Memes, Please?

Spamming Dadaist cut-up techniques into memes doesn’t make you look edgy at 50. It just makes you look like someone who never outgrew 4chan. I’m browsing through a Bluesky network of chaotes going through a 50-year-old crisis, and it’s pretty much nothing but cut-up Dadaist-style memes, shitposts, and chan-style board posts—in the year of our lord 2026.

I kid you not, I just read a long thread about someone lamenting the death of bulletin boards except for 4chan. This is why. 4chan culture is able to survive because it keeps getting spread memetically. You can’t, on one hand, curse 4chan culture and then, on the other, participate in it.

Can We Stop With The Dadaist Memes, Please?

Spamming Dadaist cut-up techniques into memes doesn’t make you look edgy at 50. It just makes you look like someone who never outgrew 4chan. I’m browsing through a Bluesky network of chaotes going through a 50-year-old crisis, and it’s pretty much nothing but cut-up Dadaist-style memes, shitposts, and chan-style board posts—in the year of our lord 2026.

I kid you not, I just read a long thread about someone lamenting the death of bulletin boards except for 4chan. This is why. 4chan culture is able to survive because it keeps getting spread memetically. You can’t, on one hand, curse 4chan culture and then, on the other, participate in it.

Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

Who Gets to Speak On Discord, Who Gets Banned, and Why That’s Always Political in Spaces with No Politics Rules

So, a thing I find very interesting about the fragility of the esteem among chronic Discord users is that it’s common for admins and moderators to ban or make fun of people who leave. Essentially, they’re responding to being rejected or not chosen, so they think it’s reasonable to retaliate

A Discord server I am lurking in has a “no politics” rule and is a religious, esoteric, and philosophical server. What I find very funny about this is that politics is:

“Politics is who gets what, when, and how.”

— Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936)

I find it very funny that the most minimal form of being “not political” in a virtual community is a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). I was part of an IRC chaos magick channel when I was a teenager, and I submitted to a zine under my old handle (which is not Rayn) when I was 20. No, I’m not going to reveal the name I wrote under, which was published in chaos magick zines back in the day, because I’ve had a bucket of crazies following me around since 2008, with the insane network of anarchists circa 2020 being the latest instance.

ChanServ was a bot used on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to manage channel operations such as bans, who got voiced, and permissions. Think of it as an early, early moderation bot. In an IRC TAZ, everyone who entered got all the permissions from Chanserv, so anyone could ban, voice, unban, deop, or op anyone else. No one had more power than anyone else, so there was minimal negotiation over channel resources. A TAZ is still an inherently political construct; however, it is a minimal political construct because there is minimal negotiation of resources and an equal, random, and chaotic authority structure. That’s not Discord, though.

Discord inherently has a hierarchical system defined by roles, a TOS, and members are expected to abide by the rules of that server. So, when you say there is a no-politics rule on Discord, you are inherently contradicting yourself because Discord is structurally political in how you, as a moderator, interact with others. How people negotiate conversations and interact with each other to access the resources of your Discord server is inherently political.

Discord’s structure makes any “no-politics” rule itself a political act. Moderators exercise power by granting, restricting, or revoking permissions, and that distribution of power is the very politics the rule tries to avoid. So while the intention is to keep discussions “apolitical,” it creates local Discord politics by determining who gets to speak and who gets silenced (e.g., banned, timed out, kicked, or limited to certain channels). A “no politics” rule shifts political dynamics into moderation decisions rather than eliminating them.

What prompted this was me observing a typical pragmatic versus moral realism argument that you’d see in any philosophy course or forum. I’m an academic and a computational scientist, but I don’t try to shut down any arguments with that, because that’s an explicit fallacy and a dishonest, bad-faith tactic.

Technically, I am a biologist. Yes, I have a biology degree and a biotech degree. I also have philosophy, mathematics, and computer science and engineering degrees under my belt. I have to work with people like this on a daily basis, and I find them insufferable, so the last thing I want to do in my free time after looking at stacks of dumbass papers is argue with people on Reddit or Discord when I could be fucking, getting fucked, or spending time with my husband. But, alas, they have no life. Keep in mind, as a computational biologist that reviews a lot of shit, I get paid to argue. These idiots are arguing on the Internet for free! The reason why Redditors, Reddit moderators, and Discord moderators get shat on so much is that all of their labor is unpaid! People with lives don’t take it that seriously!

On to the convo:

A new person in the community defined morals as: morals = {a, b, c} exhaustively. An established member of that community responded that, for them, morals are either {x, y, z…}, non-exhaustive and polymorphic, or not inherently defined by the tradition itself but supplied externally by the individual. The new person replied, effectively, “According to my definition of a, b, c, that still constitutes a moral framework.” An established member who is also a scientist pushed back as if no definition of morals had been proposed at all, when in actuality they were disagreeing with the scope and applicability of the given definition, not the act of defining itself.

By the way, the symbolic way I’m defining this is ambiguous. You have no clue what anything is; however, it is ontologically defined, and the logic makes sense. That is the problem. An ontological definition was given, so arguing that no definition was proposed—simply because they disagreed with it—is in bad faith. Personally, I am a constructivist, poststructuralist, pragmatist, instrumentalist, and anti-realist, so I don’t care too much about the realism of the ontological propositions and expressions. I am pointing out logical mistakes.

This is especially egregious when individuals rely on their authority in a domain where their degree is not pertinent. A well-known issue with scientists is that their curiosity can outstrip their morality. Essentially, an ethics board composed mostly of scientists without degrees in ethics, law, or philosophy will make poor decisions and saturate the political sphere they occupy with advocates and lobbyists to bend laws to their interests. Therefore, a board with no philosophers is pretty sinister.

Morals and ethics are philosophical problems. To my knowledge, many people who sit on ethics boards that seriously address ethical issues have philosophy, and not just astronomy, degrees. Relevant degrees include psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, etc. For example, I have a philosophy degree, so I am technically qualified and credentialed by a university to have these discussions. An astronomy degree alone does not make someone qualified to discuss ethics—maybe if they also had a theology degree?

The thing I find really funny about this group is that they avoid dilemmas. Morals and ethics are developed through ethical dilemmas. Their response to any type of dilemma is to exert their local authority and exclude, deny, or shut down conversations.

The difference between science and philosophy is that science is a little less messy and more defined. We can all see something and agree on what we see, right? The difference with philosophical questions and moral dilemmas is that they are relatively open-ended and ambiguous. It’s really amusing to me how those who try to argue philosophy are uncomfortable with indefinite answers that are open to interpretation.

It’s just funny how they tacitly assume that they are the only academics in their field in existence and that their opinion on things is the consensus, especially on metaphysical issues where there is no consensus. No human knows what the right thing to do is all the time. It’s great to know that they have somehow achieved a level of inhuman perfection.

Nags quick start reading list for the #secular #occultist

I'm Nagaram and I'm an #Atheist Occultist. I believe there is power in all sorts of magic, but its more practical than super natural.

Magic, gods, and the occult is a good psychological tool to help us navigate life both in a material and mental way.

The basis for my understanding of Secular Occultism is with

"Atomic Habits" -James Clear

This is the foundational text in my pseudo religion because it explains the psychological aspect of habit building and how this let's us slowly build to a better self. Importantly I'm tying the concept of affirmations to the magical conception of it and even intentions. I'm also looking at Habit Catalysts as Magic Rituals in that ritual magic helps us stay on task with our grander plans by being an easy habit we can build into a proper habit stack that ultimately culminates in our magic working.

From here I see the reading list as a choose your own adventure. So long as you understand that nearly all magic you will ever learn about is simply an affirmation with an aesthetic, there really isn't a wrong choice.

But for me I know what influenced me down this path.

"Pathways to Bliss" -The Joseph Campbell foundation

Another secular read. This book was about myth and legends as tools for self help. Characters to emulate and foils to avoid. It helps me maintain the mindset that truth in myth is less important than moral lessons. We can still use these stories from ancient oral traditions to the new testament, to the flying spaghetti monster as our new gods. As long as they symbolize something important to you then you can and should use them in your practice.

"Grimoire for the apprentice wizard" -Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Oberon is a character, but important. I said earlier that secular occultism is affirmations with an aesthetic. Oberon is a wealth of aesthetic and easily approachable rituals with which you should try (other than the invisibility spell. I'm pretty sure he says you can use that to be naked in public and I don't recommend that.)

Nags quick start reading list for the #secular #occultist

I'm Nagaram and I'm an #Atheist Occultist. I believe there is power in all sorts of magic, but its more practical than super natural.

Magic, gods, and the occult is a good psychological tool to help us navigate life both in a material and mental way.

The basis for my understanding of Secular Occultism is with

"Atomic Habits" -James Clear

This is the foundational text in my pseudo religion because it explains the psychological aspect of habit building and how this let's us slowly build to a better self. Importantly I'm tying the concept of affirmations to the magical conception of it and even intentions. I'm also looking at Habit Catalysts as Magic Rituals in that ritual magic helps us stay on task with our grander plans by being an easy habit we can build into a proper habit stack that ultimately culminates in our magic working.

From here I see the reading list as a choose your own adventure. So long as you understand that nearly all magic you will ever learn about is simply an affirmation with an aesthetic, there really isn't a wrong choice.

But for me I know what influenced me down this path.

"Pathways to Bliss" -The Joseph Campbell foundation

Another secular read. This book was about myth and legends as tools for self help. Characters to emulate and foils to avoid. It helps me maintain the mindset that truth in myth is less important than moral lessons. We can still use these stories from ancient oral traditions to the new testament, to the flying spaghetti monster as our new gods. As long as they symbolize something important to you then you can and should use them in your practice.

"Grimoire for the apprentice wizard" -Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Oberon is a character, but important. I said earlier that secular occultism is affirmations with an aesthetic. Oberon is a wealth of aesthetic and easily approachable rituals with which you should try (other than the invisibility spell. I'm pretty sure he says you can use that to be naked in public and I don't recommend that.)

Nags quick start reading list for the #secular #occultist

I'm Nagaram and I'm an #Atheist Occultist. I believe there is power in all sorts of magic, but its more practical than super natural.

Magic, gods, and the occult is a good psychological tool to help us navigate life both in a material and mental way.

The basis for my understanding of Secular Occultism is with

"Atomic Habits" -James Clear

This is the foundational text in my pseudo religion because it explains the psychological aspect of habit building and how this let's us slowly build to a better self. Importantly I'm tying the concept of affirmations to the magical conception of it and even intentions. I'm also looking at Habit Catalysts as Magic Rituals in that ritual magic helps us stay on task with our grander plans by being an easy habit we can build into a proper habit stack that ultimately culminates in our magic working.

From here I see the reading list as a choose your own adventure. So long as you understand that nearly all magic you will ever learn about is simply an affirmation with an aesthetic, there really isn't a wrong choice.

But for me I know what influenced me down this path.

"Pathways to Bliss" -The Joseph Campbell foundation

Another secular read. This book was about myth and legends as tools for self help. Characters to emulate and foils to avoid. It helps me maintain the mindset that truth in myth is less important than moral lessons. We can still use these stories from ancient oral traditions to the new testament, to the flying spaghetti monster as our new gods. As long as they symbolize something important to you then you can and should use them in your practice.

"Grimoire for the apprentice wizard" -Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Oberon is a character, but important. I said earlier that secular occultism is affirmations with an aesthetic. Oberon is a wealth of aesthetic and easily approachable rituals with which you should try (other than the invisibility spell. I'm pretty sure he says you can use that to be naked in public and I don't recommend that.)

Nags quick start reading list for the #secular #occultist

I'm Nagaram and I'm an #Atheist Occultist. I believe there is power in all sorts of magic, but its more practical than super natural.

Magic, gods, and the occult is a good psychological tool to help us navigate life both in a material and mental way.

The basis for my understanding of Secular Occultism is with

"Atomic Habits" -James Clear

This is the foundational text in my pseudo religion because it explains the psychological aspect of habit building and how this let's us slowly build to a better self. Importantly I'm tying the concept of affirmations to the magical conception of it and even intentions. I'm also looking at Habit Catalysts as Magic Rituals in that ritual magic helps us stay on task with our grander plans by being an easy habit we can build into a proper habit stack that ultimately culminates in our magic working.

From here I see the reading list as a choose your own adventure. So long as you understand that nearly all magic you will ever learn about is simply an affirmation with an aesthetic, there really isn't a wrong choice.

But for me I know what influenced me down this path.

"Pathways to Bliss" -The Joseph Campbell foundation

Another secular read. This book was about myth and legends as tools for self help. Characters to emulate and foils to avoid. It helps me maintain the mindset that truth in myth is less important than moral lessons. We can still use these stories from ancient oral traditions to the new testament, to the flying spaghetti monster as our new gods. As long as they symbolize something important to you then you can and should use them in your practice.

"Grimoire for the apprentice wizard" -Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Oberon is a character, but important. I said earlier that secular occultism is affirmations with an aesthetic. Oberon is a wealth of aesthetic and easily approachable rituals with which you should try (other than the invisibility spell. I'm pretty sure he says you can use that to be naked in public and I don't recommend that.)

Nags quick start reading list for the #secular #occultist

I'm Nagaram and I'm an #Atheist Occultist. I believe there is power in all sorts of magic, but its more practical than super natural.

Magic, gods, and the occult is a good psychological tool to help us navigate life both in a material and mental way.

The basis for my understanding of Secular Occultism is with

"Atomic Habits" -James Clear

This is the foundational text in my pseudo religion because it explains the psychological aspect of habit building and how this let's us slowly build to a better self. Importantly I'm tying the concept of affirmations to the magical conception of it and even intentions. I'm also looking at Habit Catalysts as Magic Rituals in that ritual magic helps us stay on task with our grander plans by being an easy habit we can build into a proper habit stack that ultimately culminates in our magic working.

From here I see the reading list as a choose your own adventure. So long as you understand that nearly all magic you will ever learn about is simply an affirmation with an aesthetic, there really isn't a wrong choice.

But for me I know what influenced me down this path.

"Pathways to Bliss" -The Joseph Campbell foundation

Another secular read. This book was about myth and legends as tools for self help. Characters to emulate and foils to avoid. It helps me maintain the mindset that truth in myth is less important than moral lessons. We can still use these stories from ancient oral traditions to the new testament, to the flying spaghetti monster as our new gods. As long as they symbolize something important to you then you can and should use them in your practice.

"Grimoire for the apprentice wizard" -Oberon Zell-Ravenheart

Oberon is a character, but important. I said earlier that secular occultism is affirmations with an aesthetic. Oberon is a wealth of aesthetic and easily approachable rituals with which you should try (other than the invisibility spell. I'm pretty sure he says you can use that to be naked in public and I don't recommend that.)

Top ten posts in October 2025

https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/11/01/top-ten-posts-in-october-2025/

#account #achieve #AdamHassan #AdamHulse #AdeptusExemptus #AdeptusMajor #AdeptusMinor #adopted #alchemicalInquiry #aleisterCrowley #AlexanderSaxton #AliMaloney #allBeings #AmandaBlake #amongMany #amusement #AmyBoucher #Anat #ancientGods #ancientIsrael #AngelikaMay #Anglican #anthology #archivalMaterials #artists #Asherah #astarte #astralDeities #AtlanticOcean #AtlantisBookshop #Baal #BarneyMuldoon #bbc #BBCRadio #belief #BernhardBeyer #bestPosts #bestRemembered #bestTen #biblicalMagi #Blondie #BobbyCampbell #BookOfTheLaw #buddhism #CJSubko #California #Canaan #CanaanitePolytheism #CanaaniteReligionAndMythology #CatholicSuperstition #celebrated #charlatan #CharlesMocenigo #ChristianIdiom #ChristianKabbalah #ChristianNonDuality #churchRitual #churches #ChymicalWedding #cleansing #commonMetaphysicalTemplate #comparativeFramework #ConfessioFraternitatis #conspiracies #conspiracy #contemplativePractice #cosmic #counterculturalBookshops #counterculturalIcon #cultOfYahweh #curiosity #dangerousManipulator #DanteBonutto #darkArts #DavidMitchell #deliverance #deliveranceMinistry #demanding #demonology #dismissed #distinctlySeparate #divineFeminine #DivineUnity #DoWhatThouWiltShallBeTheWholeOfTheLaw #Doctrinal #doctrineOfRéintégration #Doinel #drugTaking #dues #DutchSchulz #earlyHistory #EdgarBroughton #EdwardianEccentric #ÉgliseGnostique #El #EleanorGraydon #eliphasLevi #ElizabethRMcClellan #ÉlusCoëns #emanation #encounters #esotericChristianity #esotericCurrent #esotericKnowledge #esotericMysteries #EucharisticVision #evangelicalExcess #evilSpirits #evolved #exile #exorcism #expulsion #FUCKUP_ #faith #FamaFraternitatis #fascination #fear #feast #feminineEros #feminineWisdom #figure #finDeSiècle #fire #FissionChips #flamboyantShowman #FlorenceSusanneReppert #folk #Foreign #France #FrancisYoung #fraudster #freemasonry #FrenchEsotericism #FrenchTradition #fullyDefined #GaryLachman #genius #GeorgeDorn #GeraldineBeskin #GérardEncausse #gnosis #GnosticLiturgy #Gnosticism #god #goddeses #gods #greatGoddesses #greaterFeast #greaterMysteries #HagbardCeline #hardRock #HarryCoin #heavyMetal #HebrewBible #HermeticSymbolism #hermeticism #historicallyGrounded #history #historyOfIdeas #horrors #HowardTheDolphin #IanHGladwin #identity #illuminatedTreeOfLife #Illuminatus #ineffableOne #initiated #initiaticOrders #initiatoryCodification #institutionalDiversity #integralSpirituality #integrate #interiorPath #invoked #JDMYoder #JamesFoster #JannHaworth #JazColemanmKillingJoke #jimmyPage #JohnDay #JohnDillinger #JonathanHart #journals #JulesDoinel #Juniorus #keySource #LauraCathcart #leadingGods #LeeIrwin #lesserMysteries #Levi #LindaBromilow #lineage #lodgeRooms #lodges #Logos #louisClaudeDeSaintMartin #lucidDreamers #lucifer #LydiaWaites #madMan #magickalOrder #Magister #magus #MarkSSmith #MartinèsDePasqually #MaryLouServix #masculinePrinciple #masonic #master #metalMusicians #modernEurope #MoggMorgan #Molech #monotheism #monotheisticFaith #moon #Mot #mountaineer #MrCrowley #Musicians #mysteries #mysteriesOfNature #mysticalInsight #nativeChristianNonDuality #NeoplatonicMetaphysics #neoplatonism #newGeneration #nineGrades #occultChurches #occultReligion #occultist #October2025 #OldTestament #OllyPearson #openInvitation #OrderOfTheGoldenAndRosyCross #otherDeities #outrightRejection #OzzyOsbourne #paganGods #pansentience #Papus #PatrickDMiller #PaulMorley #pedagogiesOfUnity #pervert #Philosophus #pioneeringThinker #plymouthBrethren #poet #popularCulture #Power #practicalWisdom #Practicus #primaryDeity #progressiveEstablishment #prophet #provocation #psychedelia #public #publicForm #RLoftiss #realities #rediscover #Reincarnation #reintegration #religion #religiousHorror #religiousTrauma #remarkableTransformation #remarkablyCoherent #Rephaim #Resheph #return #rigorous #riteOfExorcism #ritual #ritualForms #robertAntonWilson #RobertPearson #RobertShea #rockStars #rosicrucian #RosicrucianManifestos #rosicrucianSociety #rosicrucianism #RyanDay #sacredMarriage #SaintMartin #SaintYvesDAlveydre #SashaRavitch #SaulGoodman #scandal #scandalous #selfMythology #seven #SgtPepper #SimonMoon #soleGod #sophia #spiritualEntities #spiritualOutlook #spiritualSignificance #StephenHoward #summary #summaryOfTheMonth #sun #symbol #symbolicSynthesis #syncreticCuriosity #taoism #thaumaturgicalHeritage #TheAMA #TheBeatles #TheGreatBeast #TheOneirocriticalSociety #theWickedestManInTheWorld #theWorldSOldest #theoreticalFoundations #Theoreticus #theurgy #ToddPurse #topPosts #topTen #underworldDeities #unity #unwaveringDevotion #VanessaSantos #Vedanta #vision #westernEsotericism #wholeness #WieboGrobler #worlds #wreckedLives #yahweh

I'm liking my feed so far but ngl I need more occult/esoteric/witchy accounts to follow. Feel free to give me @ suggestions in the replies or boost if you post stuff like that!

#occult #occultism #occultist #esoteric #esotericsm #witch #witchcraft #witchy #magic #magick #druid #druids #spells #mystic #mysticism #astrology #astrologycommunity #tarot #TarotCards #TarotReading #oracle #oraclecards #medium #mediumship #spirit #spirituality #spiritual #spirits #spiritualgrowth #spiritualawakening #occulture #modernwitch

I'm liking my feed so far but ngl I need more occult/esoteric/witchy accounts to follow. Feel free to give me @ suggestions in the replies or boost if you post stuff like that!

#occult #occultism #occultist #esoteric #esotericsm #witch #witchcraft #witchy #magic #magick #druid #druids #spells #mystic #mysticism #astrology #astrologycommunity #tarot #TarotCards #TarotReading #oracle #oraclecards #medium #mediumship #spirit #spirituality #spiritual #spirits #spiritualgrowth #spiritualawakening #occulture #modernwitch

I'm liking my feed so far but ngl I need more occult/esoteric/witchy accounts to follow. Feel free to give me @ suggestions in the replies or boost if you post stuff like that!

#occult #occultism #occultist #esoteric #esotericsm #witch #witchcraft #witchy #magic #magick #druid #druids #spells #mystic #mysticism #astrology #astrologycommunity #tarot #TarotCards #TarotReading #oracle #oraclecards #medium #mediumship #spirit #spirituality #spiritual #spirits #spiritualgrowth #spiritualawakening #occulture #modernwitch

I'm liking my feed so far but ngl I need more occult/esoteric/witchy accounts to follow. Feel free to give me @ suggestions in the replies or boost if you post stuff like that!

#occult #occultism #occultist #esoteric #esotericsm #witch #witchcraft #witchy #magic #magick #druid #druids #spells #mystic #mysticism #astrology #astrologycommunity #tarot #TarotCards #TarotReading #oracle #oraclecards #medium #mediumship #spirit #spirituality #spiritual #spirits #spiritualgrowth #spiritualawakening #occulture #modernwitch

Hail Freya! Here's my 89th #FridayPaganPoll!

I consider there to be 4 broad categories of Pagans:

*Witch- Eclectic, Wicca, Wheel of the Year, folk magick, god-worship is optional.
*Polytheist- Devotional, religious studies, deity and pantheon worship, prayers and offerings, magick is optional.
*Occultist- Thelema, alchemy, ceremonial magick, trances, summonings, experiments.
*Animist- Nature-worship, seasonal celebration, meditation, spending time outdoors, minimal magick or god-worship.

For this poll, I'm asking, which do you lean most towards? I know, I know, it's difficult, but if you had to pick just one?

#Pagan #Witch #Polytheist #Occultist #Animist

Hail Freya! Here's my 89th #FridayPaganPoll!

I consider there to be 4 broad categories of Pagans:

*Witch- Eclectic, Wicca, Wheel of the Year, folk magick, god-worship is optional.
*Polytheist- Devotional, religious studies, deity and pantheon worship, prayers and offerings, magick is optional.
*Occultist- Thelema, alchemy, ceremonial magick, trances, summonings, experiments.
*Animist- Nature-worship, seasonal celebration, meditation, spending time outdoors, minimal magick or god-worship.

For this poll, I'm asking, which do you lean most towards? I know, I know, it's difficult, but if you had to pick just one?

#Pagan #Witch #Polytheist #Occultist #Animist

Hail Freya! Here's my 89th #FridayPaganPoll!

I consider there to be 4 broad categories of Pagans:

*Witch- Eclectic, Wicca, Wheel of the Year, folk magick, god-worship is optional.
*Polytheist- Devotional, religious studies, deity and pantheon worship, prayers and offerings, magick is optional.
*Occultist- Thelema, alchemy, ceremonial magick, trances, summonings, experiments.
*Animist- Nature-worship, seasonal celebration, meditation, spending time outdoors, minimal magick or god-worship.

For this poll, I'm asking, which do you lean most towards? I know, I know, it's difficult, but if you had to pick just one?

#Pagan #Witch #Polytheist #Occultist #Animist

Hail Freya! Here's my 89th #FridayPaganPoll!

I consider there to be 4 broad categories of Pagans:

*Witch- Eclectic, Wicca, Wheel of the Year, folk magick, god-worship is optional.
*Polytheist- Devotional, religious studies, deity and pantheon worship, prayers and offerings, magick is optional.
*Occultist- Thelema, alchemy, ceremonial magick, trances, summonings, experiments.
*Animist- Nature-worship, seasonal celebration, meditation, spending time outdoors, minimal magick or god-worship.

For this poll, I'm asking, which do you lean most towards? I know, I know, it's difficult, but if you had to pick just one?

#Pagan #Witch #Polytheist #Occultist #Animist

Hail Freya! Here's my 89th #FridayPaganPoll!

I consider there to be 4 broad categories of Pagans:

*Witch- Eclectic, Wicca, Wheel of the Year, folk magick, god-worship is optional.
*Polytheist- Devotional, religious studies, deity and pantheon worship, prayers and offerings, magick is optional.
*Occultist- Thelema, alchemy, ceremonial magick, trances, summonings, experiments.
*Animist- Nature-worship, seasonal celebration, meditation, spending time outdoors, minimal magick or god-worship.

For this poll, I'm asking, which do you lean most towards? I know, I know, it's difficult, but if you had to pick just one?

#Pagan #Witch #Polytheist #Occultist #Animist

redoing my #introduction, spring cleaning my profile

i am a total shitposter. i work in infosec (blue team), but don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't.

i like weird people... the communists and anarchists. the black sheep. the loners, outcasts, wallflowers, bizarros, rejects, outsiders, odd ducks, and the eccentric ones.

the broken. the lost. the lonely. the people who look in the mirror and can't see a beautiful person looking back.

the freaks, geeks, weirdos, goths, emos, punks, lovers with aching hearts, poets who don't know it, the elder gods/goddesses/others/cubes, nerds who love assembly, nerds who love obscure CSS, people who used to be carnies, people who want to be carnies, clown school dropouts, quiet librarians, midnight philosophers, chaotic good bartenders, D&D forever-DMs, speedrunners of life, cursed doll collectors, people who unironically love dial-up sounds, cassette tape hoarders, writers of unsent letters, DIY necromancers, time travelers stuck in the wrong timeline, indie game devs with imposter syndrome, hopeless romantics with a cynical streak, travelers of the astral plane, meme historians, collectors of lost media, aesthetic hoarders, souls lost in liminal spaces, thrift store treasure hunters, broken synthesizer enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists who know too much, introverts who overshare online, VHS romantics, late-night train station wanderers, noise music aficionados, digital ghost hunters, hopeless maximalists, cursed artifact restorers, wandering bards, and rogue rouge enthusiasts (people who dabble in makeup with chaotic flair, applying blush with the reckless abandon of a true artist).

And not least, the people who never quite fit in anywhere, but somehow fit in everywhere.

...you know, my people. 🖤

i'm looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but do rarely dabble in the dark art of being fun. follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't.

you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content plz.

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

redoing my #introduction, spring cleaning my profile

i am a total shitposter. i work in infosec (blue team), but don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't.

i like weird people... the communists and anarchists. the black sheep. the loners, outcasts, wallflowers, bizarros, rejects, outsiders, odd ducks, and the eccentric ones.

the broken. the lost. the lonely. the people who look in the mirror and can't see a beautiful person looking back.

the freaks, geeks, weirdos, goths, emos, punks, lovers with aching hearts, poets who don't know it, the elder gods/goddesses/others/cubes, nerds who love assembly, nerds who love obscure CSS, people who used to be carnies, people who want to be carnies, clown school dropouts, quiet librarians, midnight philosophers, chaotic good bartenders, D&D forever-DMs, speedrunners of life, cursed doll collectors, people who unironically love dial-up sounds, cassette tape hoarders, writers of unsent letters, DIY necromancers, time travelers stuck in the wrong timeline, indie game devs with imposter syndrome, hopeless romantics with a cynical streak, travelers of the astral plane, meme historians, collectors of lost media, aesthetic hoarders, souls lost in liminal spaces, thrift store treasure hunters, broken synthesizer enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists who know too much, introverts who overshare online, VHS romantics, late-night train station wanderers, noise music aficionados, digital ghost hunters, hopeless maximalists, cursed artifact restorers, wandering bards, and rogue rouge enthusiasts (people who dabble in makeup with chaotic flair, applying blush with the reckless abandon of a true artist).

And not least, the people who never quite fit in anywhere, but somehow fit in everywhere.

...you know, my people. 🖤

i'm looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but do rarely dabble in the dark art of being fun. follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't.

you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content plz.

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

redoing my #introduction, spring cleaning my profile

i am a total shitposter. i work in infosec (blue team), but don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't.

i like weird people... the communists and anarchists. the black sheep. the loners, outcasts, wallflowers, bizarros, rejects, outsiders, odd ducks, and the eccentric ones.

the broken. the lost. the lonely. the people who look in the mirror and can't see a beautiful person looking back.

the freaks, geeks, weirdos, goths, emos, punks, lovers with aching hearts, poets who don't know it, the elder gods/goddesses/others/cubes, nerds who love assembly, nerds who love obscure CSS, people who used to be carnies, people who want to be carnies, clown school dropouts, quiet librarians, midnight philosophers, chaotic good bartenders, D&D forever-DMs, speedrunners of life, cursed doll collectors, people who unironically love dial-up sounds, cassette tape hoarders, writers of unsent letters, DIY necromancers, time travelers stuck in the wrong timeline, indie game devs with imposter syndrome, hopeless romantics with a cynical streak, travelers of the astral plane, meme historians, collectors of lost media, aesthetic hoarders, souls lost in liminal spaces, thrift store treasure hunters, broken synthesizer enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists who know too much, introverts who overshare online, VHS romantics, late-night train station wanderers, noise music aficionados, digital ghost hunters, hopeless maximalists, cursed artifact restorers, wandering bards, and rogue rouge enthusiasts (people who dabble in makeup with chaotic flair, applying blush with the reckless abandon of a true artist).

And not least, the people who never quite fit in anywhere, but somehow fit in everywhere.

...you know, my people. 🖤

i'm looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but do rarely dabble in the dark art of being fun. follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't.

you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content plz.

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

redoing my #introduction, spring cleaning my profile

i am a total shitposter. i work in infosec (blue team), but don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't.

i like weird people... the communists and anarchists. the black sheep. the loners, outcasts, wallflowers, bizarros, rejects, outsiders, odd ducks, and the eccentric ones.

the broken. the lost. the lonely. the people who look in the mirror and can't see a beautiful person looking back.

the freaks, geeks, weirdos, goths, emos, punks, lovers with aching hearts, poets who don't know it, the elder gods/goddesses/others/cubes, nerds who love assembly, nerds who love obscure CSS, people who used to be carnies, people who want to be carnies, clown school dropouts, quiet librarians, midnight philosophers, chaotic good bartenders, D&D forever-DMs, speedrunners of life, cursed doll collectors, people who unironically love dial-up sounds, cassette tape hoarders, writers of unsent letters, DIY necromancers, time travelers stuck in the wrong timeline, indie game devs with imposter syndrome, hopeless romantics with a cynical streak, travelers of the astral plane, meme historians, collectors of lost media, aesthetic hoarders, souls lost in liminal spaces, thrift store treasure hunters, broken synthesizer enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists who know too much, introverts who overshare online, VHS romantics, late-night train station wanderers, noise music aficionados, digital ghost hunters, hopeless maximalists, cursed artifact restorers, wandering bards, and rogue rouge enthusiasts (people who dabble in makeup with chaotic flair, applying blush with the reckless abandon of a true artist).

And not least, the people who never quite fit in anywhere, but somehow fit in everywhere.

...you know, my people. 🖤

i'm looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but do rarely dabble in the dark art of being fun. follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't.

you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content plz.

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

redoing my #introduction, spring cleaning my profile

i am a total shitposter. i work in infosec (blue team), but don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't.

i like weird people... the communists and anarchists. the black sheep. the loners, outcasts, wallflowers, bizarros, rejects, outsiders, odd ducks, and the eccentric ones.

the broken. the lost. the lonely. the people who look in the mirror and can't see a beautiful person looking back.

the freaks, geeks, weirdos, goths, emos, punks, lovers with aching hearts, poets who don't know it, the elder gods/goddesses/others/cubes, nerds who love assembly, nerds who love obscure CSS, people who used to be carnies, people who want to be carnies, clown school dropouts, quiet librarians, midnight philosophers, chaotic good bartenders, D&D forever-DMs, speedrunners of life, cursed doll collectors, people who unironically love dial-up sounds, cassette tape hoarders, writers of unsent letters, DIY necromancers, time travelers stuck in the wrong timeline, indie game devs with imposter syndrome, hopeless romantics with a cynical streak, travelers of the astral plane, meme historians, collectors of lost media, aesthetic hoarders, souls lost in liminal spaces, thrift store treasure hunters, broken synthesizer enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists who know too much, introverts who overshare online, VHS romantics, late-night train station wanderers, noise music aficionados, digital ghost hunters, hopeless maximalists, cursed artifact restorers, wandering bards, and rogue rouge enthusiasts (people who dabble in makeup with chaotic flair, applying blush with the reckless abandon of a true artist).

And not least, the people who never quite fit in anywhere, but somehow fit in everywhere.

...you know, my people. 🖤

i'm looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but do rarely dabble in the dark art of being fun. follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't.

you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content plz.

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

re-re-doing my #introduction, for..... uh... reasons

i am a total shitposter, i work in #infosec, and am generally family focused when i'm not working or online.

i blue team, i love the SIEM space, love the automation space, and deal with the IR space.

don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't. my socmedia is more to blow off steam, scream at the cloud, and be chill.

i am a good listener, deeply atheistic #satanist (then contradicting myself as a #ChaosWitch), a dirtbag anarcho #socialist, gun nut who can't own guns (curious kids), and fanatically #LGBTQIA+

looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but sometimes (rarely) i dabble in the dark art of being fun.

follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't. you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content ;)

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

re-re-doing my #introduction, for..... uh... reasons

i am a total shitposter, i work in #infosec, and am generally family focused when i'm not working or online.

i blue team, i love the SIEM space, love the automation space, and deal with the IR space.

don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't. my socmedia is more to blow off steam, scream at the cloud, and be chill.

i am a good listener, deeply atheistic #satanist (then contradicting myself as a #ChaosWitch), a dirtbag anarcho #socialist, gun nut who can't own guns (curious kids), and fanatically #LGBTQIA+

looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but sometimes (rarely) i dabble in the dark art of being fun.

follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't. you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content ;)

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

re-re-doing my #introduction, for..... uh... reasons

i am a total shitposter, i work in #infosec, and am generally family focused when i'm not working or online.

i blue team, i love the SIEM space, love the automation space, and deal with the IR space.

don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't. my socmedia is more to blow off steam, scream at the cloud, and be chill.

i am a good listener, deeply atheistic #satanist (then contradicting myself as a #ChaosWitch), a dirtbag anarcho #socialist, gun nut who can't own guns (curious kids), and fanatically #LGBTQIA+

looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but sometimes (rarely) i dabble in the dark art of being fun.

follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't. you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content ;)

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

re-re-doing my #introduction, for..... uh... reasons

i am a total shitposter, i work in #infosec, and am generally family focused when i'm not working or online.

i blue team, i love the SIEM space, love the automation space, and deal with the IR space.

don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't. my socmedia is more to blow off steam, scream at the cloud, and be chill.

i am a good listener, deeply atheistic #satanist (then contradicting myself as a #ChaosWitch), a dirtbag anarcho #socialist, gun nut who can't own guns (curious kids), and fanatically #LGBTQIA+

looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but sometimes (rarely) i dabble in the dark art of being fun.

follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't. you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content ;)

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

re-re-doing my #introduction, for..... uh... reasons

i am a total shitposter, i work in #infosec, and am generally family focused when i'm not working or online.

i blue team, i love the SIEM space, love the automation space, and deal with the IR space.

don't follow me for good infosec information. just don't. my socmedia is more to blow off steam, scream at the cloud, and be chill.

i am a good listener, deeply atheistic #satanist (then contradicting myself as a #ChaosWitch), a dirtbag anarcho #socialist, gun nut who can't own guns (curious kids), and fanatically #LGBTQIA+

looking for people that are cool with sharing misery most of the time, but sometimes (rarely) i dabble in the dark art of being fun.

follow me if that's the case, or you know, don't. you do you.

i do usually follow active accounts back, but if you don't post original posts... i don't typically follow. give me content ;)

#InfoSec #Nerd 🕵 (SIEM-SOAR-IR-RE)
#AnCom :ancom:
#Luciferian / #Satanist zealot (Not CoS or TST) 🜏
#LeftHandPath #ChaosWitch #Occultist ⛧
#HRT DIYer (EEn) 💉
#BDSM freak :blacker_heart_outline:​
#LGBT 🏳️‍🌈 / #Trans militant 🏳️‍⚧️
#BLM always ✊🏿
#Accessibility is key ​♿
#Manjaro fanatic :manjaro:
#KDE nut :kde:
#Python lover :python:
#Piracy hoarder 🏴‍☠️​
#Cyberpunk crank :lain: :heart_cyber:​
#Music of many stripes, mostly #Techno and #HeavyMetal 🎶

I’m seeking an expert in geomancy, ley lines, and occult practices involving the land to speak at an online event on 15 June. Anyone you’d suggest? Can be skeptic or believer, as long as they can explain the concept! It’s a paid gig, and the audience is mainly writers.

It's for my next Writing the Occult, which is about connections to the land - so if you have other suggestions that fit that theme, I’d also love to hear them.

#occult #folklore #occultpractices #occultist #leylines #geomancy

I’m seeking an expert in geomancy, ley lines, and occult practices involving the land to speak at an online event on 15 June. Anyone you’d suggest? Can be skeptic or believer, as long as they can explain the concept! It’s a paid gig, and the audience is mainly writers.

It's for my next Writing the Occult, which is about connections to the land - so if you have other suggestions that fit that theme, I’d also love to hear them.

#occult #folklore #occultpractices #occultist #leylines #geomancy

I’m seeking an expert in geomancy, ley lines, and occult practices involving the land to speak at an online event on 15 June. Anyone you’d suggest? Can be skeptic or believer, as long as they can explain the concept! It’s a paid gig, and the audience is mainly writers.

It's for my next Writing the Occult, which is about connections to the land - so if you have other suggestions that fit that theme, I’d also love to hear them.

#occult #folklore #occultpractices #occultist #leylines #geomancy

I’m seeking an expert in geomancy, ley lines, and occult practices involving the land to speak at an online event on 15 June. Anyone you’d suggest? Can be skeptic or believer, as long as they can explain the concept! It’s a paid gig, and the audience is mainly writers.

It's for my next Writing the Occult, which is about connections to the land - so if you have other suggestions that fit that theme, I’d also love to hear them.

#occult #folklore #occultpractices #occultist #leylines #geomancy

I’m seeking an expert in geomancy, ley lines, and occult practices involving the land to speak at an online event on 15 June. Anyone you’d suggest? Can be skeptic or believer, as long as they can explain the concept! It’s a paid gig, and the audience is mainly writers.

It's for my next Writing the Occult, which is about connections to the land - so if you have other suggestions that fit that theme, I’d also love to hear them.

#occult #folklore #occultpractices #occultist #leylines #geomancy

Yes, yes, my previous post was about this blog being defunct; however, I don’t want to post or talk about this stuff from my main blog, so here we go.

I have issues with tarot cards. To be completely honest, my issues are exacerbated by people doubting my authenticity because I am not obsessed with occult symbols or talk endlessly about things like tarot cards, astrology, or grimoires. I wish I were kidding, but I’ve had little cabals, guilds, and cliques of people following me around the Internet for over 16 years at this point trying to prove I’m not legitimate. From what I can tell, it is because I refuse to join any occult cults or use systems that came from cult leaders. They find the idea of magic without an occult or religious system absolutely threatening or harmful to their self-esteem. I think it’s a weird manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy in that many of them have spent a lot of money, at the very least, if not large portions of their lives on these things. But, I digress.

One, tarot cards are overly complex and superfluous for no reason. Two, people who use them aren’t actually interested in whether the predictions are true. You can implement something like tarot cards without tarot cards. Personally, I like playing cards over tarot cards, and I’ve known some people to use Magic The Gathering Cards. In any case, we can treat denotations of magical paradigms as ontologies and ontological statements or expressions. As such, we can regard them as languages. A way to think about it is that I can store demons, angels, tarot cards, correspondences, etc. into a database, such as the MySQL database of this site. What does that imply? That implies that we can model magical entities as a mathematical set of tuples, i.e., an alphabet. The ability to store entities from a grimoire in a database.

Keep in mind that this site is powered by PHP and MySQL. If a person were to create a table in their database schema for demons, your ability to see that on the site would be an empirical case for the ability to do encode that information as tuples. The point is that we can treat the properties of these entities and the entity itself as an alphabet and words, respectively. That means that magical entities and correspondences are components of a tuple joined by operators to create relationships and rules. We can call that a language. As such, expressions and statements – such as the magical entity itself, can be expressed via a base 2 system, i.e., binary. An empirical case for this is the ability to store magical entities in a database, on a high level, which is digitally encoded as bytes sent across the Internet which you read through a CMS powered by SQL.

An example of a base 2 system is an ensemble of coins where each coin has two possible states. Conventionally, we can think of them as yes or no. Anything that you can store digitally is binary. Even an image. So, you are not necessarily restricted to yes or no questions, for you can abstract those. You can abstract different lengths and frequencies of yes and no into any pattern that you want. The point is that any person can create any prototypical pattern that they want, that’s a high-level abstraction of binary states. There’s no particular reason to use tarot cards or an occult divination system at all.

Here’s the other thing we know about how psychic and magical phenomena work: It’s based on subjective meaning. There’s a stronger connection if something has meaning to you, and it is subjective. There’s a larger dissonance between the prototypical patterns of a magical system and gestalt patterns and prototypical patterns of your behavior that emerge from your subjective experience. There’s a technique called a soul mirror in Hermetic schools of thought. Looking at your experience through a Hermetic magical system and language reflects back to you a version of yourself through the eyes of a Hermetic system; however, ChatGPT can actually be used as a type of mirror, too. One thing that I have been experimenting with is having ChatGPT analyze my journal entries and identify prototypical patterns that can be used in lieu of typical archetypes that show up in occultism. Again, you can treat the attributes of these patterns as tuples and reduce it down to a binary system that can be paired with coin divination practices.

It’s not just an aesthetic issue, it is an epistemological issue. When you are trying to scientifically prove something, you don’t actually prove it. What was drilled into my head is that science does not prove anything, because science is inductive and not deductive; therefore, nothing can be 100% in science. Instead, science supports hypotheses and theories. In addition to that, you aim to debunk your own hypothesis. This means, if the hypothesis is that the cards have a message in them, we should be able to disprove this. Since this is purely a statistical problem, this makes it falsifiable where a lay person can easily do Null Hypothesis Significance testing.

Randomness isn’t chaos. Randomness is when there is an equal probability of something happening. If there is a pool of events and all the events have the same probability of happening, that is an example of randomness. Information is an inverse property to randomness, where there is some type of sequence and correlation among pairs, i.e., a joint probability. Information is an ordered sequence of the joint probability of two things joined by an operator that denotes a correlation. So, that means if we are testing for the presence of information and a message in a spread of cards, we are looking for correlations, patterns, and redundancy above chance.

Say that a tarot card reader is able to reject the null hypothesis and show that there is a message in the cards. Does this mean that it was the tarot cards after all? No. What is actually happening? When someone with precognition senses the future, what is happening is that the information is being written to their brain and body. Biological systems are very noisy, and they are stochastic and chaotic. There is a lot of randomness. Similar to how random events are altered outside a person’s body through magic, precognition orders random events inside a person’s body.

The synaptic transmission of neurons—whether a neuron fires or not—is inherently stochastic. For example, the exact timing and number of vesicles released in response to each action potential can vary due to stochastic factors. These factors may include random fluctuations in the concentration of calcium ions or variations in the availability of vesicles for release. In addition, the probability of a neurotransmitter molecule binding to a receptor depends on factors such as the concentration of neurotransmitter in the synaptic cleft, the affinity of the neurotransmitter for its receptor, and the presence of other molecules that may compete for receptor binding. By manipulating stochastic, noisy, and probabilistic factors such as these, precognitive information is written to the person’s brain through the activation of neural pathways.

Because of this, probability manipulation can be used to influence a person’s thoughts. By manipulating the probability of them making a particular decision, you can influence processes such as synaptic transmission and the firing of neural pathways. For obvious ethical reasons, I do not use this technique often and I do not teach it. In this political climate, who knows what people would do. I can compel people with that technique, but it requires one enter into a head space where you are okay with total domination of another person, and that persona is hard to shake off.

This means that when we can reject the null hypothesis in a tarot card reading regarding whether the cards convey a message or not, the power isn’t coming from the tarot cards or any magical system. Rather, a person is using precognition to sense the future. They are correlating that with entropic systems to encode information in an external source. Similar to how noise gets ordered in their brain, the entropic system becomes ordered to encode information. That implies there isn’t anything special about tarot cards. Instead, it is a combination of psychokinesis and precognition. Of course that implies a level of psychokinesis and precognition is necessary, though, a particular system is not.

For example, my husband is a diviner. He has precognitive abilities, empathic abilities, and small forms of psychokinesis, which manifest through his use of cards as a tool. The cards that frequently come up when we’ve been able to reject the null hypothesis for me are:

• King of Hearts
• Queen of Spades
• King of Diamonds
• Queen of Clubs
• King of Clubs

These cards frequently come up when my husband does a reading in a controlled experiment. We have an automatic card shuffler to eliminate any bias introduced from how we may shuffle the cards. My husband calls them the Five Monarchs, and he says that they represent five different personas that I have. He is correlating his empathic abilities with an ensemble that has entropy to encode information about my subconscious mind. These cards come up frequently beyond chance. Many occultists who have run into me are probably familiar with who is my Queen of Spades aspect that exemplifies the Evil Queen archetype.

While we are on the topic, formats like JPG and Computer Vision (CV) use Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to convert blocks of pixel data from the spatial domain (the original image) into the frequency domain (represented by coefficients). It does this by decomposing the image into a sum of cosine functions of different frequencies. The DCT represents the image data as a set of coefficients corresponding to different frequencies. Lower frequencies represent smooth variations in color and intensity, while higher frequencies represent rapid changes, such as edges or fine details. This means that any occult image that can be encoded as a JPEG is composed of sines and cosines, indicating that the image possesses harmonics. This means that any sigil or magical seal encoded in a JPG format is an image composed of sines and cosines that can be minimally represented with n modulo 2. If you encode the magical texts or magical seals into a digital image, it has a harmonic and binary representation.

I’ve been experimenting with the interplay of harmonics, entropy, and image formats to manipulate Johnson–Nyquist noise or randomness from beam splitters and laser pointers, with the aim of conjuring digital images and sigils directly through magic. My endeavors have involved extensive research and experimentation. However, regrettably, given the increasing radicalization within occult and paranormal communities, it’s too dangerous, irresponsible, and unethical to allow this knowledge to fall into their hands.

Entropy is not necessarily randomness, either, although they are often used interchangeably. Randomness and entropy become interchangeable when entropy is maximized. Entropy is a measurement of an ensemble and the permutations of that ensemble. A system that can be configured differently is thus an entropic system; however, that doesn’t necessarily imply randomness. Randomness implies one configuration being just as likely as another one. Having different permutations doesn’t imply all permutations are equally likely. Factorials can be used to calculate the number of possible arrangements or configurations of a system, which is closely related to its entropy. A maximally entropic system would be random; however, a random system is not necessary for there to a psychic influence, for there just needs to be enough degrees of freedom and entropy.

I think tarot cards denote a particular culture. It’s a signifier of cultural membership. It signals to everyone that you are into occultism and tarot card readers act as guides, so it denotes a particular level of spiritual authority. Tarot card readers would thus be equivalent to an evangelical that does intercessory prayer. Seeing a tarot card reader would be like a Christian seeking a pastor.

We don’t call Music Physics. We call Music Music, and we classify it as an art. To me, magic is the part of the underlying metaphysical aspects. The problem that I have is occultists’ belief that they have a dominance on magic such that people are starting to believe you cannot practice magic without occultism. Honestly, occultism is going down really, really dark paths, and I don’t believe you can spiritually progress while practicing occultism, so, for me, it is imperative to unlink magic and occultism.

A tarot card reader that claims they rely on intuition is a fake. If there were a message encoded in the cards, we could measure the frequencies of particular cards to see if they were random without the interpretation of the tarot card reader, regardless of whether we knew what the message meant. The patterns would be there.

It’s an aesthetic and a token of cultural membership.

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