PUSSY Is Open. Apparently That’s the Problem.
A few thoughts on X, Nostr, and the approved destinations of the independent web.
When we announced X and Nostr support for PUSSY: Publish on Ur Site, Syndicate Yonder, I thought we were adding two publishing destinations.
Apparently, we were issuing a statement.
Some of the response from Mastodon and Bluesky has been disappointing. Not because people don’t want to use these integrations. That’s fine. PUSSY is about choice.
What concerns me is that people have made their choices and then expressed opinions about mine.
I’d hoped we were building a more open web than that.
X support is not an endorsement
Let me start with X.
Several people have asked why we’re making it easier to publish to a service they’ve deliberately left. Others have suggested that encouraging people to keep supplying it with content undermines the case for moving elsewhere.
I understand these concerns. But I think we need to distinguish between endorsing a platform and spending several weeks building, promoting, and maintaining a feature that helps people use it.
The former is a value judgment.
The latter has release notes.
When we added support for Mastodon and Bluesky, I described it as an investment in a healthier social web. Those integrations reflected what we believed the future could look like.
X support is different. That’s just plumbing.
I don’t think it’s helpful to insist that every integration means something merely because I previously wrote several essays about what our integrations meant.
Software evolves.
So does the level of abstraction at which I’m comfortable discussing it.
Nostr: the wrong kind of alternative
The reaction to Nostr has been especially frustrating.
I’d assumed that supporting another approach to independent publishing would be welcome among people who regularly ask for alternatives.
I now understand that “we need alternatives” comes with a list, and I should have requested the list.
Some objections have focused on the culture people associate with Nostr. Others have questioned whether it’s a direction worth encouraging.
But Nostr is a protocol. I think we should judge it on technical possibilities, rather than the people someone encountered while investigating those possibilities.
Mastodon and Bluesky, on the other hand, should be judged by the people who replied to my announcement.
That’s not inconsistent. Those replies were to me.
There’s something troubling about celebrating decentralization until someone makes a decision you wouldn’t have made. We can’t build an independent web if every new connection requires approval from the same people who approved the last connection.
I had understood “permissionless” to mean I wouldn’t need permission.
I hadn’t anticipated how much disappointment could be communicated without technically withholding it.
An open web, but not over there
What strikes me most is how quickly the objections to X and Nostr converge, despite being objections to quite different things.
For one, I’m told we should be helping people move on.
For the other, I’m told we shouldn’t be encouraging people to go there.
I’m beginning to suspect that “build bridges” was intended as more of an aesthetic.
On Mastodon, one response carefully explained why a publishing tool’s supported destinations affect whether people feel comfortable recommending it.
On Bluesky, someone made the same point by posting a screenshot of our integrations page with “well, that’s disappointing.”
Different protocols. Remarkable interoperability.
I don’t want to generalize about either community. Many people have been perfectly reasonable, by which I mean they’ve disagreed privately or not at all.
But there’s a particular kind of openness that seems to mean everyone should be free to leave a platform, provided nobody builds anything that makes staying more convenient.
That’s not the PUSSY way.
The PUSSY way is to let you maintain every account you’ve ever regretted creating, from the comfort of a website you describe as your escape.
A note about choice
Nobody is required to enable X or Nostr support.
The checkboxes are optional.
A few people have explained that their objection isn’t to being forced to use the integrations. It’s to supporting a product that prioritizes them.
I appreciate the clarification, although I preferred answering the first question.
One reader said they would be taking their subscription elsewhere. Of course, they’re free to do that. Portability and independence are foundational principles here.
Still, I wish people would give dialogue a chance before exercising the freedoms we’ve worked so hard to sell them.
When I choose which networks to support, that’s product direction.
When someone chooses a different product because of it, I do worry about fragmentation.
Moving forward
X and Nostr support will remain.
We’ll also be updating the documentation to make it clearer that supporting a destination does not constitute an endorsement, except in announcements where we explicitly describe supporting a destination as an endorsement.
I hope this addresses the confusion.
Ultimately, PUSSY is about publishing beyond the boundaries of any single community. Sometimes that means going somewhere your friends wouldn’t go. Sometimes it means hearing why they wouldn’t go there.
We’re committed to making the first part effortless.
The second continues to feel unnecessarily negative.
PUSSY. Publish on Ur Site. Syndicate Yonder. Justify Yourself Everywhere.