D-side

Hi, I'm D-side, or D:\side\ where display name restrictions allow (not here) and escaping is proper. My contacts and a bunch of other details can be found on my website.

I somewhat follow happenings in videogames, self-hosting, smart homes and generally local-first infrastructure that empowers users to stand by their own interests and intentions in the digital age against those who seem to be hell-bent on making that a service that only they can provide.

Why am I here

Up until the time of writing I've lived in Russia that experienced firsthand in 2022 how entangled modern computing is and how much can be cut off both from inside and from outside. It also illustrated new lows in learning lessons from these rare experiences. It is the year when I lost my decently high position in software development and zoomed out my perspective on the world, watching legal systems crumble not just nearby, but seemingly all around the world.

Throughout my life I see my most prominent contributions to be in tech education. And it hurts me to see how the state of consumer-facing technology is increasingly devolving despite major advances in infrastructure, accessibility and cost. And how ostensible interest in "sovereign technology" we keep hearing about in Russia is concerned with national sovereignty more than anything else, with dis-empowering its citizens, destroying local communities and splitting off from what global communities still remain — all of which slowly erodes technological advances that we have come to expect and enjoy. So I'm especially interested in local digital infrastructure that's in the hands of the community it inhabits. Which is why I very much enjoy self-hosting that maintains a slow&steady progress when commercial services are in a state of perpetual race to get away with as much as possible. And why of all social media I'm only active on Fediverse, mostly in Russian.

I believe the current issues with consumer rights are from exhausting reasonable demands from legal processes and must involve some level of organization on part of consumers, who at present are largely passive, reliant on legal frameworks that slowly lose their power as understanding of their purpose wanes; while the other side of the deal is very much active. So I'm not sure how much CRW and FULU can help technology recover the fun and delight of making things work, but I think they're at least going in the direction I can get behind.

How I expect to contribute

I find a lot of technology corporatization highly upsetting and thus might contribute to creating good sources that prove that technology actually used to be better and it's not just "old man yells at cloud", I'd like to think that I'm not that old yet. I expect my contributions to be reactive rather than systemic, boosting visibility and clarity of issues I find important through my writing. My contributions might just come in form of directing like-minded people here.

But at this time I'm still getting my bearings and observing what I can do. And I have my own project also, which is currently a priority for me, but on which I can't work all the time, while all the mission-critical stuff keeps blowing up.

💬 Yo, I see those em dashes and triples

Before anyone asks, nothing on this page is LLM-generated (I avoid the term "AI" because I find it meaningless), and it saddens me to see how my writing style which I've honed for years (and set up tools for) is suddenly being called what it factually isn't. Still, I can't prove this. Though my use of em dash is a bit chaotic, "I was never properly trained in its operation" (English isn't my first language), so maybe that gives away the human brain behind this text. That's not up to me, I guess.