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Where Has Social Media Gone?

tl;dr: Read “Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media” The lovely folks at the Social Media + Society journal asked me to contribute to their anniversary issue by reflecting on the trajectory of social media. Ooof. Snark exuded from my pores as I tried to figure out what I might say. But then I thought about how my students don’t […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

New Paper Alert (plus a fun talk involving youth + AI)

The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. Janet Vertesi, Alex Taylor, Ben Shestakofsky, and I teamed up to try to disentangle the technical systems we call “AI” from the political-economic project that is sustaining […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

1 month until new book!

In one month, my new book will be in folks’ hands. “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census” tells the story of what it takes to produce democracy’s data – and how hard it was to do this in 2020 during a pandemic […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

Today’s Census News is a Big Deal

When with Congress and the public recognize how important the census is? tl;dr: “American democracy depends on the census. Trump is undermining it” is my new op-ed at the Guardian. Check it out! For census geeks, this summer has been one eeeek after another. Planks of the Jenga tower keep getting pulled out. First, the […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

Today’s the Day!

Ten years ago, I started asking questions about the census. Little did I know that I entered a Hotel California-esque vortex. Each question led to another question as I started to discover just how infrastructural the census is. Want to understand American democracy? The census is the key. Curious how to ensure data quality? The […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

What’s Up with 4-3-5?

A few weeks ago, I launched my new book – Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census. To my sheer delight, many friends have stepped up to host events and join me on stage and I’m now touring the country to spread the […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

Dear Civil Servants and the Ventriloquists behind the proposed residence rules

The “Census Bureau” is currently seeking comments to a proposed new set of residence rules for the 2030 census. Comments are due on November 2, 2026. In reality, the actual proposal is a tirade written by the current administration pretending to be in compliance with the rules governing agencies like the Census Bureau. Over 100,000 […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong.

According to recently released discovery materials, Meta directly targeted Jonathan Haidt by trying to stir up academics to oppose him. The odd thing is that many of us scholars who disagree with him knew nothing about this and weren’t involved in it. And so now scholars like the amazing Candice Odgers are being doubted about […]

danah boyd | apophenia · EN

Project: Canastra on the go

Hi! I’ve spent a considerable amount of time this year rewriting my Canastra project in Go. While I wanted to write a specific post about this conversion, it has been over 6 months, so it’s unlikely it will still happen. For the purposes of this post though, all it matters is that the project is now built in Go, but the frontend and database architectures are still the same as described in the project page , with Go now handling all the HTTP and Websocket communication. So a few weeks ago I got a newsletter from my local Raspberry Pi reseller stating the Pi Zero 2 was back in stock

Rafael Kassner · EN

Launching: canastra.online

Hi! Today I’m launching canastra.online ! It’s a website I’ve built where you can play Canastra for free, without ads, both single-player and multi-player. Canastra is a card game, quite popular in Southern Brazil. There are several variations of the game, but for now canastra.online only supports one set. Read the rules on our website. Building I’ve built the game in 2018 to play with my significant other, as we couldn’t find anything that was both multiplatform and that supported the subset of rules we wanted to play. Since then, our families and us play it on a

Rafael Kassner · EN

Auto-deployments with systemd

Hi! I like Kubernetes, and having written my own operators in the past, you quickly grow fond of the high level of automation that it allows you to achieve. However, now that I’m spending the days building my own projects , my requirements (and budget) can’t fit k8s anymore. A couple of production VPSs and my GitHub Actions free quota is all I’m allowing myself to afford on vanity projects, so let’s work with what we have. GitHub Actions already builds the Canastra binary, so I’m just missing is a way to auto-deploy it to the production VPS. This is composed of tw

Rafael Kassner · EN

Internet via IPv6

Hi! I know I’m late to the party, but with the IPv4 exhaustion now being expressed in monetary costs by VPS/Cloud providers, it is time to seek IPv6. My main use-case is to be able to reach servers exclusively over IPv6, so I don’t need to pay for IPv4 assignments if those servers will not serve direct public traffic (i.e.: database, storage and job servers). My home provider did have IPv6 support, but they pulled the plug in 2020, and now 3 years later, I still don’t have IPv6 access. Let’s fix that today. I had a brief experience experience with SixXS back in 2013, an

Rafael Kassner · EN

Home A-CI-stant

Hi! For years I lurked in the Home Assistant channel of a community Discord, but never had much interest in it. Earlier this month I had some discount coupons in hand and decided that it was time to give it a go. I got Home Assistant, the ZBT-1 and one IKEA Inspelning and managed to make it control my balcony lights. In my opinion, the sun “device” in Home Assistant might be the most underrated out-of-the-box integration! In any case, I live in an apartment, so after that I was mostly done. I don’t have much else to automate, and I do really value physical buttons, so it all

Rafael Kassner · EN

Resizing a LUKS-backed BTRFS RAID1 filesystem

Hi. After a series of hardware upgrades, I finally have 2x 2TB SDD for data on my NAS ! However, they are still configured with ~900GiB data partitions, and today it is time to expand it! Initial state The current disk layout is: # fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors Disk model: PNY CS900 2TB SS Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 497664 243M 83 Linux /dev/sda2 499712 43468799 42969088 20.5G 83 Linux /dev/sda3 43468800 1918322687 1874853888 894G 83 Linux # fdisk -

Rafael Kassner · EN

Delta Chat: encrypted chat with boring technology

Hi, A couple of days ago I’ve heard about Delta Chat , and for once I got thrilled with some piece of technology again. At the surface it’s just a chat app to the likes of Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp. The exciting part, however, is that is uses plenty of open standards technology under the hood. It’s a chat app built on top the regular e-mail protocols, SMTP and IMAP, with a sprinkle of PGP to make it end-to-end encrypted. It has the same secure initial key exchange issue that PGP e-mail has, but at least now we have an interface that is straight up easy to use, specially f

Rafael Kassner · EN

2026 hardware update

Hi! It has been a good while since my last post about my NAS, so I want to share an update on how things are looking nowadays. Filesystem I won’t get into details here, but I’m out of BTRFS. The filesystem did not fail on me and thankfully I didn’t lose any data, but suffice to say that BTRFS does not like when you shuffle snapshots to a different system, transform them into live subvolumes, change stuff, snapshot them, and move them back into the old system. After the third time syncing full disks, I gave up and went back to OpenZFS. It also helped I already had my new Trave

Rafael Kassner · EN

Just sitting

The sky is pink as we drive back from Peebles, gently racing the sunset to avoid navigating country roads in the crisp twilight of the first of January. “That’s definitely snow, isn’t it?” Anisa observes from the passenger seat. She reaches back to point this out to the kids but notices everyone else is asleep. She chuckles and goes back to staring happily out of the window, wondering aloud what it means when sheep lie down in the fields. “Probably that they wanted to lie down” I muse, a smile on my face. 2026 is off to a good start. We’re full of steak pie and fresh air after a brisk family w

Relative Sanity · EN

The plan must never be to have a plan

My writing process is typically thus: I will bang out a stream of consciousness first draft, getting everything that I think I want to say out of my head and into text; I will then read over that first draft and realise it’s not right. The fact is that while I may have had an idea of what I wanted to say, the piece iteslf has no fucking clue what it’s about. In fact, it’s garbage. I suck and should never write again; I must now leave it for a day. Or a week. Or a month. And then, if I feel up to it, I will come back; Usually I select-all-and-delete, then try and write a plan to actually figure

Relative Sanity · EN

Sometimes you get the gold

I don’t think back on my early years with a computer anywhere near enough. Sam Henri Gold’s excellent article on the MacBook Neo made me need to do just that. My mum got me a Commodore VIC-20 from the local Fine Fare supermarket when I was probably five. We were a Tomorrow’s World household and watched Star Trek repeats over dinner. She knew what was up. Computers were going to eat the world, and her kid was going to be on the right end of the fork. I spent hours on that machine. Days, weeks, months, and years. It came with a manual on how to program stuff in BASIC. We couldn’t afford a tape d

Relative Sanity · EN

How’s the writing going?

Identity is weird. I’m a writer, but saying that casts this weird spell on people. I think the spell comes from a good place, a place of compassion and curiosity. But it’s a deadly spell. “So… how’s the writing going?” Immediately I feel a fraud. How is the writing going? I haven’t published to the blog for ages, haven’t sat down to actually put an essay together for weeks. No, months. Who says I’m a writer? “Oh, you know. It’s going” The deflation is palpable. They’re rooting for me, they want to hear about the progress on the novel, or the collection of short stories, or the self-help book,

Relative Sanity · EN

You are listening to

Not everything has to be a long meditation on creativity or what it means to be productive while maintaining a healthy balance between what you need to do and what you want to do. Sometimes, I’m allowed to just point you at stuff I like. Like You are listening to , a wonderful only-the-internet-could-do-this old-school mashup website combining a curated, chilled playlist (rotates regularly) with live public feeds from air traffic control, shipping forecasts, transit authorities. Hauntingly beautiful and a reminder that even on the internet, stuff is happening right now that may never happen ag

Relative Sanity · EN

Being the room

I’ve written before about my computing origin story , and it’s still true. These boxes of sand, they can change the world, but only with the right programming. On its own, a computer isn’t even a fancy calculator. With software, it can be whatever it needs to be. Who wouldn’t want to write software that could change someone’s life for the better? It’s still the dream. I moved into management when I remembered that programming was a means to an end. I had become enamoured with programming as its own craft, but I knew I was never going to be that one programmer that you’d give an impossible prob

Relative Sanity · EN

Naming things

Hang around a group of engineers for any amount of time, and eventually one will tell you how hard it is to name things. This might seem obvious, even to non-engineers. Good names are tricky. Maybe you think about a good product or brand name, and how hard that is to come by. How many times have you been put off buying something, for example, because it has a bit of a rubbish name? But it’s not a challenge confined to engineers and product designers, or marketing and branding gurus. We all name things, especially now that computers and related devices are such an integral part of our lives. We

Relative Sanity · EN

The sports bar

Look, I get it . The Nazi bar cleaned up its act. A few years, maybe even just a few months ago, it was full of Nazi bullshit and propaganda, and run by a clear Nazi, and that sucked, as it was the only bar in town that showed sports. So you left. Because fuck Nazis and who in their right mind hangs out in a Nazi bar, right? I mean, other than Nazis. But honestly, the other places you tried with your friends showed different sports, or no sports at all. And a lot of the conversations you had were just about how bad the Nazis are, and isn’t this a better place than the old Nazi bar, and thank g

Relative Sanity · EN