#150 - Back to our roots

And an unexpected journey into thought engineering

credit: Disney - Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Around late 2021/early 2022, data twitter was a thing. A bunch of data founders, dev rel people, VCs and folks who do data roles in industry were part of it.

It’s actually where this substack originates from.

Start at the end...

Data twitter, at its height, was a fun place to be: you could learn things, debate ideas and meet people who had similar interests that you would never meet in real life. The cutting edge of data technique and tooling was discussed there. In fact, I didn’t really have another twitter - I only really followed and interacted with data people on there. It soon became apparent that, for many of the people I interacted with, who used twitter more widely, there were deep flaws that became massively worse with macro events.

Brave New "Hello World"

The acquisition of twitter proved to be like letting the inmates run the asylum. Many people weren’t willing to stay. So I tried to make a home for the data folks of data twitter: data-folks.masto.host - a Mastodon server. Data-folks is two years old next month and, while originally very vibrant, is now a fairly small community of data people who have adapted to the nuances of Mastodon as a platform¹. Mastodon is not for everyone: it feels very Web1 and many people couldn’t stick with it, but there didn’t seem to be any alternatives… till now.

At the time I set up the server, others were saying Blue Sky could also be an alternative. I also set myself up with an account there - @jayatillake.bsky.social - however, two years ago Blue Sky felt quieter than the data-folks Mastodon server, so I gave up on it.

Then, three days ago, I saw data folks on LinkedIn say that data twitter was back and on Blue Sky. After the second or third such post, I decided to reinstall the app and see for myself. Just on opening the app again, I found that over 200 people had followed me while I didn’t have the app installed, and another ~300 have followed me since I re-engaged. The point is not the acquisition of followers, but how fast the network is building. I invited someone I thought would be great for the DataSky community at 2pm yesterday and they had over 100 followers in less than 10 hours.

This speed is partly because people are adding others they know or have heard of, but also because Blue Sky has the concept of starter packs - named lists of people you can follow when you join or want to see more content on a particular topic. Blue Sky also has feeds you can subscribe to in order to help you discover content. There is a “Popular with Friends” feed which works a bit more like you would expect coming from twitter, but you can also make a feed from a list of “Quiet Posters” who share rarely but you want to hear from. You can then get posts from these feeds to show in your Following feed and splice according to what you want to see. This is already much better for discoverability than Mastodon. I wonder if there is a step of making it even easier, between this and what twitter algorithms used to do?

This time feels different to Mastodon - people are seeing and finding posts easily. Engagement with posts seems better than on twitter. Maybe we’ve finally found the rescue ship for the Asgardians of data twitter to get on after Musknarok. Apparently, this is in part down to the work of Kelsey Hightower in cultivating the community on Blue Sky. I’m not sure how he did it, but we are grateful 🫡.

If #DataSky² at the end of next month, still feels similar to how it does now, I think it probably makes sense to close down data-folks.masto.host, as we have the new home we wanted in Blue Sky. I will clearly announce this on data-folks.masto.host on November 30th and actually shut down in January, to give people time to get content they have saved off there.

Over the last couple of days, being on Blue Sky has reminded me of what I’ve been missing. I’ve been using LinkedIn as my primary social media for a long time, but at the same time have been constrained by what it’s for. LinkedIn is for selling - whether it’s your product, your company, your ideology or yourself - you’re on there to shill and if you’re not, then you’re just doing it badly. There is nothing wrong with this and as a founder and also as someone who works for a SaaS vendor now, it was the right place to try and generate commercial interest in my company and products. It’s the right place to try and find a job, although this has degenerated due to abuse of the platform.

You’re always performing on LinkedIn, and rightly so - everyone there is a customer. There is no rest, everything feels like the high of making a sale or the rejection of closed-lost. The only time you have real conversations with people there is because you know those people from real life or other communities. LinkedIn is not the right place to just be yourself and hang out with like-minded people. Right now, Blue Sky is that place - come join us!

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This week is my 150th post in this substack, marking nearly three years where I have posted every week!

When I started this substack I had one long post which

_michael

persuaded me was actually about three, and this became the first three posts and first three weeks. As I shared these posts, people were really kind and encouraged me about my writing³. This then led to more topics coming to mind. Each time I had a new topic, I would write a stub as a draft here in substack - perhaps just a title, but often with a few demented paragraphs so I would remember my thoughts.

I thought I would run out of topics for a subsequent week one day, but it’s never happened. Even though I have published 150 posts, I currently have roughly 58 topics that I have considered writing about. I say “roughly”, because some end up being duplicates and some end up being series.

However, there is a difference between having ideas in the tank and being inspired to write a full post or series about them. My passion for technological advancement and enhanced practice in data has always been my “dry powder” to fuel this substack. If I’m honest, I’ve been feeling a bit short of it in the last few weeks and I know that at some point I need to make a change.

I don’t see myself ceasing to write entirely, but, just as I changed my flexibility in writing at some point in a week rather than always publishing on Wednesday, I think I will begin to write a bit less often and perhaps a bit more often at times. I’m going to tune in to when I have something I really want to share or say.

I realised I had got to a point where I feel I have to publish something every week, but there isn’t really a specific need to do this. It has helped me up to this point to improve as a writer, and also as a thinker.

I really believe that you don’t know what you think properly until you write something down. I never used to believe this, but having done it for so long now, I’ve realised there is something special about the process of writing your thoughts that codifies, crystallises and clarifies them. Writing is a thought distillation process. This process is more like engineering than I could ever have realised, too - it’s like writing packages to solve problems and then being able to reuse them again later. The packages do get updated over time, but they are foundational. The runtime is other people’s minds.

There is an amazing effect in that, once someone has read what you’ve written, their mind has changed forever - it’s more powerful than engineering in this way. Software doesn’t usually change the computer, but thinking and reading always changes the mind.

They say you need to do something for a certain amount of time to master it - while I don’t feel I’m there yet, I do feel like I’ve used the discipline of writing every week to get to a level of competence that I can rely upon in the future.

So if you don’t see a post every week from now on, don’t worry! I’m probably taking my time to share something I really care about, and it will get there in its own time.

Once again, and I have encouraged you all to do this many times, I would emphasise how much writing this substack has enriched my life and opened opportunities I never thought possible. I never thought that I would be comfortable speaking in public, but this is now the case⁴. I never thought that I would be a keynote speaker at a conference, but this has happened. Don’t be afraid of what other people think of your writing. If it helps, just start writing for yourself, on a regular basis - at least once a month. The benefits just of writing, and not publishing, are abundant enough.

1. Mastodon is a bit strange in that it can be difficult to find what others are doing - there is no algorithm to surface trending posts and therefore nothing ever really trends. It felt good compared to the acceleration of hate that the twitter algorithms caused, but in hindsight it was going too far the other way. After all, we came to social media to be social and to find and hear each other.

2. The more popular hashtag seems to be #DataBS, but I can see why some folks may not like that one!

3. I always used to think of my writing, and communication generally, as a weak point. I much preferred writing code to speaking to people. 150 posts later I see it as a strength. I’m happy to write about pretty much any topic and in any form. I can generate content on demand if someone asks me to write about something. This was not the case 150 weeks ago!

4. This was yet another unexpected side-effect of writing - I thought competence at writing and speaking wouldn’t be connected, but it seems as though they are. My newfound confidence in speaking comes from knowing what I want to say very clearly, which comes from writing. Writing has also socially improved my speaking by giving me more opportunities to speak.