I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit. I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community. I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either. I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s. It’s profoundly lonely. But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon. Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them. We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit. My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes. So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s. It has been, once again, quite lonely. Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on. Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller. I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself. Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position. So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon. My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes. I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country). That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else. I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you. Everyone deserves to be part of a community. And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.

For the first half of my childhood in suburban Ohio, we lived next to Bob. Bob and his wife were a kind, reserved older couple who decorated their home mostly with crucifixes and talked about Jesus a lot. Bob helped my mom with a lot of common household tasks after my dad died. When she woke up to a small fire on our deck, she didn’t call the fire department — she called Bob.1 I never learned any of Bob’s political views, though I can make some guesses in retrospect. They never mattered. He was just our neighbor. We later moved, and hit the neighbor jackpot with Van. Van was deeply kind, generous, and friendly — the sort of neighbor everyone wishes for. In my lazy teenage years, he’d often mow our lawn or shovel our snow for us before I even woke up. As his mobility later declined, I was honored to return the favor. Van and his delightful wife passed away years ago, before I learned how either of them felt on any political issue. If they were my neighbors today, how likely would that be? *     *     * If I learn today that my neighbors have political views that my “side” considers unacceptable and unforgivable, should I be able to have dinner at their house, shovel their snow, or even greet them outside? Should I be condemned for supporting or associating with them in non-political contexts? Should I be condemned for not publicly condemning them myself? While privilege and power dynamics play a complex and unavoidable role in this, I don’t want to associate with any community that would insist on either of those.2 And I can’t help but feel that maybe we were better off before we knew everyone’s hot takes on everything. The town coffee shop was just a coffee shop. We weren’t publicly shamed for going there because one of the owners was an ass. It was just a place to hang out with our friends. Our casual work friends were just casual work friends. We didn’t expect them to take positions on the world’s most complicated conflicts. We could just talk about weather and TV shows, and maybe sometimes get a beer after work. And our neighbors were just our neighbors. That was the day I learned the word “SHIT!” ↩︎ Somewhere on Bob’s wall might’ve been a relevant statement from an influential political dissident about casting the first stone. ↩︎

As Apple celebrates its fiftieth birthday, we celebrate the spirit of its formation, when people who loved computers started making great computers to inspire more people to love computers. That spirit is difficult to find in the tech business today. Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Apple still has this spirit, and I believe you do, too. But it’s not infinite or invincible. It’s under constant pressure, including from Apple itself. It seems likely that you’ll soon be leading Apple, which will place unfathomable responsibility on your shoulders. As you grow into the leader that we know you can be, I urge you, on behalf of everyone who loves computers as much as we do, to protect and cultivate this spirit of Apple’s founders as the company’s top priority: We love computers. We don’t hide that — we celebrate it! We use computers to enhance our minds, lives, and abilities — not to be controlled, restricted, tricked, placated, angered, or surveilled. Our computers work for us, with the utmost respect for our time, attention, money, data, and privacy. We are customers and owners — not resources to be harvested, annoyed, or badgered into ever more services and upsells. Apple leads the industry in these values, but leading doesn’t always mean excelling. Remaining true to these values requires constant diligence, honest evaluation, introspection, and the audacity and courage to effect change. Apple doesn’t settle for fine, functional, or good enough in its hardware (and thanks for your incredible work on that). We love making and using products that aren’t just great, but greater than they need to be, always raising the bar of greatness for its own sake. Software, services, revenue sources, and world impact need to be held to that same standard. Focus on making great computers with great user experiences above all else, and you can trust that every other major goal will follow: profit, market share, expansion, impact, and benefit to the world. Making great computers must remain Apple’s top responsibility, because if you don’t do it, nobody will.

Ten years ago, Apple’s Phil Schiller surprised Apple enthusiasts and developers by walking out on stage at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live WWDC event and giving an open, human, honest interview to a somewhat jaded community. I wrote this in response: Both Apple and Phil Schiller himself took a huge risk in doing this. That they agreed at all is a noteworthy gift to this community of long-time enthusiasts, many of whom have felt under-appreciated as the company has grown. […] Phil’s appearance on the show was warm, genuine, informative, and entertaining. It was human. And humanizing the company and its decisions, especially to developers — remember, developer relations is all under Phil — might be worth the PR risk. This started a ten-year run of interviews by Apple executives on The Talk Show every year at WWDC that proved to be great, surprisingly safe PR for Apple. No executive ever said something they shouldn’t have (they’re pros), no sensational or negative news stories ever resulted from them, and Apple’s enthusiastic fans and developers felt seen, heard, and appreciated. *     *     * For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in the meantime.) Maybe Apple has good reasons. Maybe not. We’ll see what their WWDC PR strategy looks like in a couple of weeks. In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way. I hope that’s either not the case, or it doesn’t stay the case for long. This will be the first WWDC I’m not attending since 2009 (excluding the remote 2020 one, of course). Given my realizations about my relationship with Apple and how they view developers, I’ve decided that it’s best for me to take a break this year, gain some perspective, and decide what my future relationship should look like. Maybe Apple’s leaders are doing that, too.