The Power of a Well Built Community

Escaping the pit of doom

When I made my Bluesky account, late 2024, I had no plan in mind, and no affinity whatsoever for social media in any form. I felt like the apps I then consumed regularly ate at my soul for hours on end, rotting my brain away as I scrolled them in my free time, no real point to anything. I took it for an escape mechanism more than anything else and even though I had by then slowly started to curate the sort of content I followed, I felt uneasy about the whole relationship to Social Media, where the media was clear, but there was nothing social about the whole experience. Something key was missing; maybe following people I actually knew, or topics I somewhat felt were more interesting that pure entertainment. Either way I didn't really know then.

I had started looking into Mastodon in the summer of 2023 and while as an app, it had a great interface, it felt fresh, but then again, maybe too fresh; a bit empty for me to really find an anchor to continuously bring me back to it. I had a hard time grasping its concept of servers and how everything was spread out seemingly all over the place, where I had to make multiple accounts to follow the people I wanted to follow then. Note that this is not a review of the architecture, simply a commentary around my then-perception of its workings, likely flawed. That didn't stick, but then again, my first foray into Bluesky also didn't really stick.

I was getting my hands wet with some Rust 🦀 at the time (which I love working with, btw) and my first interactions on Bluesky were just some boring posts of me completing Advent of Code challenges, yay! Back to doomscrolling it was for me, and my first engagement afterwards was roughly 4 months later, reposting a quirky post by a developer (and podcaster) whose content I really enjoy. Quite the gap! I might have given the odd like on some good content here and there, but not much in the way of engagement, though one major thing changed for me during those months: who and what I was following on the platform.

Changing Operating Systems and Operating Mindsets

Early 2025, I started getting annoyed at the bloat of my home PC's system, which was at the time primarily used for gaming and to some extent data storage, and I was feeling a bit of technical burnout from my setup. Just like at work, everything major seemed to be cloud-based, and in the hands of someone else, requiring some subscription or other, a recurring cost, a feeling of being stuck. Having some technical affinity and knowing my way around computers, I decided to start looking for alternatives, primarily switching from Windows to Linux for most of my daily tasks. I wanted to move somewhat away from big tech in my day-to-day, and bring more of my stuff locally, close to me, under my own stewardship.

In my mind, at the time, Windows PCs were great for gaming and Linux was just a nerd's playground, with a quirky interface and a ton of software that wasn't compatible. Oh and of course, servers and Raspberry Pi! Nevertheless, I was starting to hear more about people making the switch, as well as the apparent success the Steam Deck was having (which was built on a flavour of Linux), and I thought, oh heck, why not try to run a separate partition with Linux Mint and see how that goes. I had seen enough by then to know that it was seen as a great entry point for people switching from Windows as it had a very similar interface. I had no idea what a wild ride that would take me on, now daily driving Arch for the past 6 months.

I was also then looking for more such Linux content, and naturally found some good feeds, which paired with my following of Rust topics must have triggered something in the Bluesky algorithm. I was slowly getting more and more content from devs I wasn't following but who had interesting projects to show, similar interests, a strong online presence and who slowly explained a ton of great concepts that piqued my interest in understanding not just Bluesky the social media app, but the underlying protocol and its goals of portability. Alongside my push from moving off of large corporate solutions, the appeal of moving hosting services for my Bluesky data locally was also growing.

I was reading a lot about portability, then primarily shown by the awesome work that @rude1.blacksky.team was doing for Blacksky, and @baileytownsend.dev 's PDS Moover, which spoke to me: "Hey, this ecosystem makes it easy if you want to store your own data securely, and still interact with everyone else, out of the box". Slowly, I got familiar with the other cool alternate interfaces like Anisota, Witchsky, Northsky. Eventually I heard about Leaflet and Offprint and later Pckt. Many apps in one ecosystem, all able to interact together, no overarching entity to control them all à la Sauron's One Ring. When I stumbled upon Dan's post about the Social Filesystem which lead to my first post here ( https://mihaizaurus.leaflet.pub/3mdfiboiagc2y ), it put a lot of other pieces into place and I decided to try on a personal website project with the quirk of linking my own data to it from the ATmosphere. Who needs a database anymore? 🤭 Well, at first, I kinda did, because I was thinking of firing up my own PDS for myself.

Come join us, we have cookies and a community...

Around a month ago from writing this, scrolling on bsky, I came across a post by @patak.cat that read "move to Europe with us": https://bsky.app/profile/patak.cat/post/3mfes7mtxys2w . and I was like "Sure, let's go, I've seen others try this, can't be too hard.", which may sound like some famous last words, but with this community, was a walk in the park. At that time, I had swapped my PDS over to npmx.social, meaning that all the data related to my account was stored in Europe, and for me, the only hurdle was that I had to log into my services again...

The move was straightforward. I was invited to the open discord, and it was incredibly easy to ask around, get a link, follow it to the right spot to initiate the Moove (Yes, it was again Bailey's tool mentioned above ^^), and it was done and above all painless, for real!

Since I was now part of the @npmx.dev community, I spent a bit more time reading through the discord, first on social channels, and then on the dev side, looking into contributions, what people did, how it was discussed, and I thought it was a very likely frictionless environment to try my hand at some open source contributing, something I've wanted to do for a long time. This lead to two merged PRs in the last week! And I'm still super excited to help out more, with other topics, and see this project grow.

Not only is the product fast and well designed;
Not only are the maintainers and stewards of the npmx project technically strong;
Not only are they open to help and guide;
There is a real sense of community and people passionate about the project they're supporting.

This reinvigorates my trust that the internet is not entirely dead yet.

P.S. Meeting people from the community IRL also spurred some nice discussions about other online dev projects with similar communities and vibes and it brings me hope that there are great projects out there to contribute to, and to support!