Would you like to submit an inquiry to Ruby Central on the incredibly important and nuanced difference between a fireside chat and a keynote?

You seem to focus on what matters, after all.

(muting and ending all contact with you)

Ufuk is a board member of Ruby Central and an employee of Shopify.

DHH is on the board of Shopify.

Aaron is a Shopify employee.

Shopify is Ruby Central's primary sponsor.

Shopify is the second largest publicly traded company in Canada.

Shopify holds a net worth close to $200 billion.

I suppose in your mind things must be one but not the other.

There were two co-chairs. One of the two is a Shopify employee and Ruby Central board member.

The program committee was not involved in this decision.

So... even if the idea of unity was the underlying *intent* -- there's an inherent conflict of interest and no, it wasn't a consensus decision.

Sharing this for context.

I've submitted a relevant question to Ruby Central and hope they give an official reply.

Of note is that DHH is a Shopify board member which is an infinitely larger leverage point.

I would like to see evidence one way or another that resolves this question but any time I see DHH's name now I see it as a Shopify relationship, not (just) Basecamp

(The Bluesky/atproto stack has unique tech advantages + a different purpose which I sure hope stays alive in a way I could support but I did expect the overall state of Mastodon to be *much* more rough than what it is... and apart from some UX hiccups it seems like a nice place to be)

And if you're wary of all this, give Mastodon a try.

I sort of wrote it off a couple years ago and either it improved a lot, the social graph got better, or it's just a shift in perspective to favor values-oriented projects that follow through on their claims... but it feels, not bad over there.

I'm going to keep an eye out for each of those things and if I see good faith efforts on them I'll be back here and first to acknowledge that this team is getting things right.

I'm just a drop in the ocean here and I very much know that, but if you agree, ask for this stuff too.

... but even then, I've done my best to throw out some models of risks + mitigations and have shared a lot more in private with Why to give the sort of analysis I'd typically be charging silly amounts of money for.

And with that... I'm truly out now. :)

... so I have taken the engineers at good faith in their effort to do that, but have also thrown up this giant red flag that as a business analyst who has done a lot of advisory work / exec coaching, I'm seeing a very rocky road ahead and an alarming lack of transparency...

My take is that regardless of how the sausage gets made, if this team manages to stand up atproto as a surviving and truly open protocol (i.e. two more microblogging platforms living atop it with different + sustainable business models), then it doesn't matter to me what Bluesky becomes...

... that said there are people on here who are more actively in a role of analyzing / critiquing social media and maybe someone like @cybercultural.com might be worth talking to for you?

...

Here's my writeup which reflects the landing point after public and private convos of where I stand on things.

notes.skillstopractice.com/updates/2025...

I'm not looking to turn over every stone personally because I've heard enough to know I need to step away for a while...

Vaguely remember that one.

Subscriptions alone definitely isn't a complete model for a large scale platform.

We spoke about this privately and cleared up some misunderstandings and my writeup reflects what I took away from that conversation, which I will revise if we missed each other.

This has been civil and productive for 24 hours with mutual respect despite where it started.

bsky.app/profile/why....