Do What You Love
Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
My dad used to say this to me. He didn’t come up with it of course. Searching for the source, I see attribution to Marc Anthony. How it came to be a 70-80 year old man was quoting a singer to me I’d bet money he’d never heard, I’ll never know. Maybe he didn’t either.
The basic idea behind the quote is that what you’re doing won’t feel like work if it’s something you love doing anyway. I mean, think of the thing you want to be doing right now instead of reading this post. Your favorite thing in the world. Now, along comes some idiot who offers to pay you to do that very thing! How can you possibly say no?
There’s a darker aspect to this quote that I don’t think people consider though. If you take the thing you love and do that for work, you’re turning what you love into a job. This is a trap that I’ve fallen into. Multiple times.
Technology
I love technology. I’ve loved technology since I was a kid writing short little basic programs on a Commodore 64 that looped rude comments on the two computers at KMart. When I was really little, all I wanted to do was build robots. It seemed like the coolest thing ever. When I got a little older, I realized that robots were just machines controlled by computers. Computers were the really interesting part. When it came to choosing a major for college, I went with Computer Science instead of Electrical Engineering.
During college I had to pay my own way through, so I got a job at the local IT shop building computers and fixing the broken ones. When I finished college and got my first job coding, I realized I missed the IT work, so I went back into that.
I took the thing I loved and I got a job doing it! Win! That’s a win, right?
Looking back, I don’t know if it was. Sitting here today, years and years later, I’ve made a career out of computers. There’s a company willing to pay me to sit at a computer every day and do all kinds of things people walking around on the street couldn’t begin to guess even exist. Still, when 5:00 comes that laptop lid slams shut, and the last thing I want to do for the rest of the night is touch a computer.
The thing I loved has become a job. In doing so, the love I had for it has been leeched out and all that’s left is work.
About eight years ago, by failing to learn from this experience, I did it again.
Fosstodon
Google+ was shutting down, and I was looking for a new place to socialize about tech. Mastodon was one of the options that was suggested, and so I created an account. I immediately loved it. I loved it so much I started dragging friends over that were leaving Goolge+ too. One of those friends was Kev.
Kev seemed to be having a great time with Mastodon too, and at one point he approached me about creating our own instance. I thought it was a great idea having our own vanity URL, and so I was all in. Fosstodon was born on July 31st, 2017.
Fosstodon was great. I followed friends and interesting people. Had great conversations. It was better than Google+ because no one was selling my data. Nothing to complain about at all. But we made a mistake.
I don’t know if Kev knew about this before I did, but one day we looked up and there was someone else on Fosstodon. I don’t remember who it was, and it doesn’t really matter, but it wasn’t Kev and it wasn’t me.
I recall this person being very polite. Asking if it was OK if they had an account there. They liked FOSS too, and they thought it was a cool idea to have a Mastodon instance that focused on free software. Kev and I probably sent a message or two back and forth. “Do you mind?” “Nope, do you?” “Nope.” So we opened Fosstodon to anybody that wanted to join. In retrospect, this was our first mistake regarding Fosstodon. Not because the people who were joining us at the time. They all seemed great. The problem is that when we started letting other people into the instance, we started the process.
There was a point in the last almost eight years were Kev and I started getting alarmed. Fosstodon was growing, and growing really fast. We got our first report on February 25th, 2018, and at first it was a novelty. It rapidly became less of a novelty, and Kev and I were dealing with reports often. We decided we needed help. If we were going to be asking for help, we needed to have guidelines. It was about this time that we came up with our first Code of Conduct and all the official rules an such. We needed something for our moderators to go on.
We brought in moderators, and we made an effort to try to keep things as neutral as possible. This was probably the next mistake in our line of mistakes. Another step in the process.
We wanted to make sure individual ideology didn’t become a determining factor when dealing with reports, so the SOP was that tickets were handled by a group. There are exceptions to this of course. No one needs to gather everybody together for discussion if an account is posting 10000 messages an hour begging for bitcoin. We also tried to make sure our moderation group was diverse. We didn’t want to have group of all straight white guys from a particular part of the world. That would have been pretty close to the same thing as just letting individual moderators moderate as they saw fit. Without a diversity of opinion, there’s no discussion or nuance to decisions.
We let Fosstodon continue to grow. Another mistake. Another step in the process.
At one point we came to the realization that this just wasn’t sustainable for us. We either had to cut off the growth or do something drastic. Bring in more moderators and administrators. Maybe create a foundation or something to help with running things and keeping things on track. This was something that Kev and I talked about for quite a while. We knew it was necessary if we wanted to continue to grow, but neither of us actually wanted to take that step.
Fosstodon went invite only. You may or may not disagree with this decision, but there were some very specific reasons we went this way. One, Fosstodon was already too big and we didn’t want it to get bigger and two, this protected us from spam account registrations that kept coming in constantly that had to be dealt with.
We were hoping that by cutting off new registrations for the most part and people leaving through attrition for whatever reason they chose, Fosstodon would shrink back down to a level that was more manageable. Maybe that was naive. No, that was definitely naive, and it didn’t happen. The growth slowed, but it didn’t stop. More people still came in than were leaving. We could have cut off the invites I suppose. We didn’t. Another mistake. Another step in the process.
That brings us to today. I’m sitting here and looking at the fourteen reports that haven’t been resolved. I’m looking at the 100+ messages sitting in my notifications.
This is work. This is not something I love. The part of this that I loved leeched out a long time ago. I wake up in the morning, and I dread signing in to Fosstodon. To make matters worse, this is the worst kind of work. It’s not something I’m being compensated for in any way. I spend hours of time away from my friends and family. I spend my own money to keep things going. I burn my own mental health. For what?
This morning Kev posted to his personal blog that he was done. This was partially a response to a recent drama we’d been experiencing with one of our moderators, but honestly it’s been a long time coming. I’m pretty sure Kev is only on Fosstodon today because I asked him to stay. I’m grateful for that.
I’m Done.
I understand that Kev is at his limit. I am too. I’m done. Enough is enough.
I do want to say that it hasn’t been all bad. Occasionally, someone will do something or say something that puts a smile on my face. Unfortunately, those times are like drops of water in the dessert. There will be far more people lining up to tell me I wrote “dessert” instead of “desert” than will have gotten the point I was trying to make.
Kev and I are still talking about the future of Fosstodon. I don’t know what that will be at this point. I don’t know if we’d hand it off if someone made an offer to take it, or if we’d prefer to turn the lights off behind us. What I do know is, if Fosstodon continues on it’ll be without me. I don’t know if I’ll keep going on Mastodon. If I do, I might just start an anonymous account somewhere and get back to talking about things I used to enjoy. Kev and I will honor the three months notice we promised we’d give, but this is no longer something I love. I’m going to go and try to find some of that again.
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