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The Platform That Was Supposed to Save Social Media Is Eating Its Own Users
from Vinterkarusell
Bluesky sold us a dream of a better internet. Then it built a machine that couldn’t tell a real person from a bot, labeled them publicly, and stopped answering emails
I post my own music. I take my own photos. I write my own thoughts. Some days I share links to privacy tools or open source projects, because that stuff matters to me. That’s it. That’s my entire social media presence. No gimmicks, no scraped content, no follow-for-follow nonsense. Just a person on the internet, doing what people on the internet do.
Bluesky looked at that and said: spam.
Not privately. Not quietly. They slapped a public label on my account, visible to anyone who found me, so that every potential connection, every fellow musician, every photographer who might have hit follow, could see that badge sitting there like a warning sign. And when I tried to find out why? When I appealed, when I emailed, when I tried every channel available to me? Nothing. Silence.
Mastodon never did this. Threads never did this. The platforms that Bluesky is supposedly better than handled my content just fine.
So let’s talk about what Bluesky actually is, because I’m tired of reading press releases pretending it’s something it clearly isn’t.
The Origin Story They Love Telling
Bluesky started inside Twitter back in 2019. Jack Dorsey’s idea. The pitch was genuinely exciting: build an open, decentralized social protocol that no single billionaire could hijack. A platform where your data was yours, where you could move between servers, where the community had real power.
Jay Graber ran the company from 2021 until she stepped down as CEO in March 2026, and she was good at selling the vision. When Elon Musk started dismantling Twitter piece by piece, people came to Bluesky in waves. It became the place for people who cared about privacy, about open source, about not handing their digital lives to yet another tech overlord.
“Billionaire-proof,” Graber called it in a CNBC interview, pointing to the open source foundation as proof that what happened to Twitter couldn’t happen here.
I believed that. A lot of people did.
What the Machine Does When Nobody’s Looking
Here’s the thing Bluesky would rather you didn’t think too hard about: they have automated a massive portion of their moderation, and their own reports admit it hasn’t gone cleanly.
Their 2024 moderation report confirmed that automation was expanded well beyond spam detection into broader content categories, and the company’s own language acknowledged this “sometimes led to false positives.” That’s a careful way of saying their algorithm is branding innocent people without understanding what it’s looking at.
The way the flagging apparently works, accounts can be tagged based on behavioral patterns like posting frequency, link repetition, or action volume. If you post consistently and include a recurring link, you start looking, to a pattern-matching system with no judgment or context, like a bot. It doesn’t matter that the link is your own music. It doesn’t matter that the platform hosting that link is Feature.FM, which is about as industry-standard as smartlinks get in independent music. Feature.FM is what artists use. It’s how you send one link and let the listener choose Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal or whatever they prefer. It is not spam infrastructure. But the algorithm doesn’t know that, and apparently, no human stepped in to notice before the label went live.
The numbers here are genuinely startling. In 2025, Bluesky applied 16.49 million labels across the platform, which was a 200% jump from the year before. They are operating at a scale where individual cases stop being cases and start being data points. And when you are a data point instead of a person, this is what happens to you.
The Appeal That Goes Nowhere
Bluesky will tell you there is an appeals process. Technically, this is true.
You can write to their moderation email. You can contest the label. And then you can wait. And keep waiting. And watch the label sit on your profile while you wait, because the label is public, remember. It’s right there. Anyone looking at your account sees it.
In 2024, 93,076 users filed a total of 205,000 individual appeals. That is not a small number of people who disagreed with a moderation call. That is nearly a hundred thousand accounts saying “you got this wrong.” And the team processing those appeals was the same team handling six and a half million total reports that year. You do not need a math degree to understand what that backlog looks like.
Bluesky has said they’re working on building appeals directly into the app, so users don’t have to rely on email. That’s good! But promising future improvements while people are sitting with active false-positive labels on their profiles right now is the kind of thing that’s very easy to say in a blog post and very hard to experience on the receiving end.
They Built an AI Tool. Their Own Users Responded by Mass Blocking It.
This is where the story gets genuinely surreal.
Bluesky’s entire cultural identity was built around people who were exhausted by exploitative algorithmic systems. The users who migrated there cared deeply about privacy and were, broadly, not fans of AI being inserted into every corner of their lives. This wasn’t a niche opinion on Bluesky. It was practically the community’s defining characteristic.
So when Jay Graber stepped down from the CEO role to “explore new ideas,” and then showed up at a conference to announce an AI product called Attie, the response was not warm.
Attie is an AI tool that builds custom feeds for you based on natural language descriptions. Within about 27 hours of launch, roughly 125,000 Bluesky users had blocked its account. To be specific about what that means: 83 times more users blocked Attie than followed it. It became the second most-blocked account on the entire platform, sitting just behind J.D. Vance, and ahead of the White House account and ICE’s official account.
Bluesky’s own AI product is, to its own user base, less welcome than ICE.
When people pushed back on this, Graber reshared a post calling the critics “shortsighted” and implying that opposing AI was a losing strategy. The CEO who built a platform on the promise of user agency told users their instincts about their own platform were wrong. Meanwhile, interim CEO Toni Schneider was telling journalists the company was still figuring out how to charge people for Attie. So the “billionaire-proof,” open-source social sanctuary is now workshopping a monetization strategy for an AI feature its community overwhelmingly rejected.
Also worth noting: as of this writing, you still cannot send images in a Bluesky DM. That feature exists on every other major platform. The team apparently had time to build an AI agent that got mass-blocked but not time to let you send a photo to a friend.
What “Decentralized” Actually Means in Practice
Bluesky brings up decentralization a lot. The AT Protocol. Data portability. The ability to migrate to another server. These are real technical features and the people who built them deserve genuine credit for the work.
But decentralization is not the same thing as being accountable to the people using your platform. If your account gets a spam label applied by Bluesky’s moderation service, that label comes from the dominant authority on the network. The theoretical ability to migrate somewhere else does not remove the label. The open-source nature of the protocol does not explain to you why the flag was triggered or how to avoid it happening again.
What Bluesky has built is a system where they take philosophical credit for being open and decentralized, and then use the complexity of that architecture as a reason why they can’t be held responsible when the machine makes a mistake. The marketing says “you have control.” The reality is that when the algorithm brands you, you’re sending emails into a void and wait.
Who Is This Platform Actually Serving
I think it’s worth asking directly: who does Bluesky actually work for?
It works for researchers who are interested in the AT Protocol as a technical object. It works for developers building apps on top of the ecosystem. It works for journalists and academics who need a public square that isn’t run by someone openly hostile to them. It works for the people at Bluesky who genuinely believe in what they’re building and feel good about building it.
What it does not reliably work for is the independent artist posting their own music through industry-standard tools. The photographer sharing self-taken images. The person cross-posting thoughtful content to multiple platforms without any commercial intent. The ordinary human being who just wants to exist online and connect with other people.
An Actual Request
Fix the appeals process. Not in the next product cycle. Now.
When someone gets a spam label and contests it, they deserve a real response. Not an auto-reply, not a blog post about future improvements, a real human explanation of what the system saw, what triggered the flag, and what they can do going forward. If your automated moderation cannot tell the difference between an independent musician using Feature.FM to share their work and an actual spam network, that is a failure of your system, not of the user.
You made promises to people. They trusted you with their social lives. They built their online presence on your platform. The minimum you owe them, when your machine gets something wrong, is to treat them like the people they are.
Right now, Bluesky, you are a smaller and considerably more self-righteous version of the exact thing you said you were building against.
That should bother you more than it seems to.
El juego de María José Llergo
from 
Cajón Desastre
Tags: #música #BienDeAmores
Ni ganas he tenido de escuchar música estos días. No quería poner el nuevo de la Llergo en ese estado así que he esperado hasta volver a ser aproximadamente yo. Hasta hace un rato.
Vaya discazo arrebatado, mestizo, absolutamente contemporáneo y a la vez enraizado en muchas tradiciones. Vaya discazo de mujer desnuda y valiente, de mujer sabía que se empapa de toda la música que puede. Un disco cero orgánico. Como casi todos los que merecen la pena. Ha hecho honor al nombre del disco y ha jugado con todo lo que le ha dado la gana. Con la maestría de la audacia.
Hay una energía que los señoros confunden con la juventud y que es solo la gana pura de desbordarse. No es un error de los señoros. Es peor. Una excusa barata para sus discos de culto. Inertes, muertos de aburrimiento como ellos. Más sosos que maduros.
Madura es Maria José entendiendo tan pero tan bien todas las formas de amor, incluido el amor por la música. Entendiendo todo tan bien que más que un disco parece un tratado.
Benditas las mujeres libres que corren riesgos necesarios y solo esos. Que ni se apalancan ni se conforman.
Porque suena Olvídame y cualquier cuerpo vivo se estremece. Crece. Se esponja.
Si un disco te da ganas de bailar y de cantar es que es un buen disco. Si un disco te hace recordar todo lo que has aprendido, todo lo que te han enseñado del amor en tu vida, es que se quedará para siempre.
Dicen que cada vez hay menos de esos. De los que se quedan. De los que escuchas hasta desgastar cada nota, cada giro, cada matiz de cada instrumento. Cada jueguito. Pero siempre dicen eso los mismos señores acojonados y aburridos que llevan escuchando el mismo disco con distintos nombres durante toda su puñetera vida. Dicen eso y no se enteran de nada.
Pero da igual. Nos dan igual aunque nos enfurezcan. Porque suena abuelo y yo lloro en un tren de cercanías. Not all men. Algunos abuelos te cuidan hasta cuando hace mucho que se fueron. Porque te enseñaron dos cosas importantes sobre ti.
Da igual porque hay 14 canciones de las que disfrutar. Da igual porque hace 45 min has enviado un bolero mafioso al otro lado del mundo, a alguien que cada vez entiende menos español pero ha respondido a tu mensaje preguntando si podemos hacerla oficialmente “nuestra canción”
Tiene una lista de yutuf que se llama así. Una broma privada. Nuestra canción. En singular. Y que gracias al juego de Maria José Llergo ahora incluye también un bolero.
Justo después de una canción de INXS que también es nuestra canción.
La Llergo entiende este juego, todos los juegos, aproximadamente como yo. Intuyo que va a disfrutar mucho contra todo pronóstico. Aunque no sé si tanto como disfruto yo de su música. Hay muchas formas de ganar, solo una de perder: negarte lo que sientes y este disco es lo contrario. Es la verdad absoluta. Inquebrantable. Frágil pero indestructible. Es ponerlo todo del revés buscando bien de amores.
Quiero verla en directo. Urgentemente.
from 
Roscoe's Quick Notes
Washington Nationals vs Cleveland Guardians
Today's MLB game of choice finds the Washington Nationals playing the Cleveland Guardians. It has a scheduled start time of 5:10 PM CDT. As usual, I plan to follow the score and stats uploaded in real time on MLB's Gameday Screen where I'll also find audio links to the radio call of the game.
And the adventure continues.
A poetry moment
from 
The happy place
there is a fountain near to where I am sitting, waiting for my food
Indian food
And there is a wind making the leaves rustle pleasantly, but I’m not paying any attention to this really
And the sky is blue with clouds like the windows xp desktop wallpaper
And the money I earn is slipping through my fingers
And the time, it’s slipping through my fingers
But I caught a whiff of garlic just now, which is cool because most days I smell nothing
Thank God they made me so strong
test
from Acéphale
Joyfume Journal #2
from Elias
Today I did what I usually don't like to do: go to a perfume shop. In this case, together with Ben, justifying my own presence with his purchase intent, it was more comfortable. Also, seeing that he was genuinely impressed by the selection of perfumes at Woodberg, I also got more curious.
As usually, I didn't like most perfumes that are far inside the mainstream, and to my surprise, I was still drawn to forest and sea perfumes.
One of my surprising favorites, one that Ben didn't like at all: Pining Dew 2 by Toskovat' The combination of Black and Pink Pepper with Lavender and Gin: Sharp but interesting and pleasant!
Back at home I immediately set out to recreate it. The original structure:
Top Notes: Black pepper, Pineapple, Pink Pepper, Lavender Heart Notes: Gin Base Notes: Java vetiver, Cedar, Tear accord, Tonka bean
My takes: Pineapple: doesn't exist as a natural. Dropped. Gin: Juniper berry CO2, Coriander seed CO2, Lemon Vetiver: rather go with Haitian than Javan, even though I have both, but Javanese Vetiver is a bit too smoky and deep for this light fragrance. Cedarwood: Texan for the dry fresh lift Tear accord: this is Toskovat's own creation, and to me smells like carrot greens, a bit like Frankincense serrata – for now left out Tonka bean: I have it, but instead of Tonka I go for my Waldmeister tincture which is a bit more fresh
The first round: not bad actually! Despite the low dose, the Vetiver came out surprisingly strong. The pink pepper could come out a bit stronger, so I tripled down on it, and I had forgotten the Cedarwood, so I also added that. After that, some Maceration at 28°C indoor temperature won't hurt.
Lettera 32
from Tuesdays in Autumn
I like to use old manual typewriters to write letters to friends & family. I currently have a dozen of the things, most of them collected in the second half of the last decade, when, with a little patience, one could still buy them very inexpensively. Post-pandemic, prices have been higher, which is really just as well as it's helped discourage this collection from growing out of control. Despite that, I succumbed anew to the lure of acquisition this week, buying an Olivetti Lettera 32 via ebay (Fig. 22). I collected it from the seller on Friday.
It's a compact unit with some features evidently intended to keep the size & weight down, such as the stubby, folding return lever and the skinny spacebar. The overall design though was well thought-out so that these have no real adverse impact on usability. It has as light a typing action as any typewriter I've used, which is almost disconcerting, so accustomed am I to pressing keys with more force. I'm very pleased with how well it's working so far (Fig. 23).
There's no way I would have coughed up £50 for such a commonplace machine a decade ago, but in 2026 it didn't seem too steep an asking-price, especially given that this one had been so well looked after, with its carrying case intact and complete with original accessories such as its dust-cover, cleaning brushes and instruction card (Fig. 24). I'd hitherto had no luck with Olivetti portables, being disappointed by a Studio 42 that had irreparably seized up and a Lettera 35 that had suffered catastrophic damage in transit.
Among the second-hand jazz albums I picked up in Monmouth on Saturday: on CD, Mongo in Montreux, a thrilling live performance from 1971 by the renowned percussionist & his band (example track ‘Soleil’); The Art of Rhythm, a very agreeably easy-going late '90s CD led by trumpeter/flugelhornist and composer Tom Harrell (e.g. ‘Petals Danse’); and Joyride (on re-issued vinyl) by saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, recorded in 1965 with big-band accompaniments arranged by Oliver Nelson (example track: ‘River’s Invitation’).
The cheese of the week is Blue Wenallt, a relatively new offering made at Brooke’s Dairy in the nearby Wye Valley. It's just about as local a cheese as I can get. It's a softish variety made from the milk of Jersey cows and sold in small (200g) wheels. Its blue veins infiltrate through a creamy, yellow paste. While relatively mellow for a blue, its flavour is nevertheless satisfyingly complex.
from 
Un blog fusible
dans le chenal que la marée a envahi l'élan puissant de l'océan maintenant s’essouffle le vent frise la surface pour ralentir le flux l'eau hésite se creuse d'autres rives contourne les talus caresse les herbes l'eau se tord cherche et puis cesse elle ne peut remonter davantage bientôt un autre courant l'entraîne si léger pourtant presque invisible — rien à faire l'eau rejoindra l'eau et se perdra en elle
Joyfume Journal #1
from Elias
Last evening I met a real perfume enthusiast. He is actively researching and sharing perfumes with other people and has so far bought 40 full bottles, sold many samples from those, and bought a total of 1400 samples of other perfumes.
He showed me a quite broad range of perfumes, starting with Pineward Perfume and ending on 432. My favourite of the whole range of perfumes was probably Viento Puelche by 432 – fresh, like the sea, but also carrying some scent of the mountain and the forest.
What fascinated me in this whole evening of perfume degustation was his narration of the perfumes: the more special a material in the list seemed, the more excited he was. One perfume contained actual Russian leather that was extracted with ultrasound, and with the perfume, he also got a sample with that very material. Other perfumes had materials in them with very specific descriptors including the exact origin of the material. For the scent, this can be relevant, but in this context, I realized, it is mostly relevant for the story.
What also fascinated me was that when I asked him if there is a perfume that doesn't exist yet but that he would like to have, he said that he wouldn't want to blend his own perfume because he thinks that the result would be terrible, but that he does have some ideas that he hasn't smelled yet.
His anchor material was the Latschenkiefer (the Mountain Pine), which reminds him of holidays in the mountains. He also loves Frankincense and Mandarin.
To me, that's already an almost perfect pretext:
“Sun on the south wall of a mountain chapel – the resin in the old wood going soft in the afternoon heat, and someone has left a peeled mandarin on the sill.”
or:
“A wool sweater that spent the morning in the pines, brought indoors at noon – the cold mountain air still in the fibers, warming into something sweet and resinous against the skin.”
Cloud Native Days Italy 2026
from 
rebtoor
Last week I was in Bologna (hands down my favorite Italian city) for Cloud Native Days Italy 2026, a two-day conference centered around cloud native and everything that revolves around it.
The conference followed a very precise schedule: keynotes, talks, and lightning talks (many of which were sponsored) interspersed with coffee breaks and lunch.
The venue
Once again this year, the conference took place at the Savoia Hotel Regency congress center, and I can't help but appreciate it. The environment is spacious and bright on the inside, and outside you can relax by the pool or surrounded by greenery. The lunch and coffee breaks were also wonderful. We are in Bologna after all, aren't we?
Sponsor and community area
AKA gadget gathering!
Jokes aside, it was an excellent opportunity for networking and getting to know products and initiatives from companies and communities. Without going into detail about all the conversations I had, I just want to mention the folks from https://www.greensoftwareitalia.org because I believe their work is essential at a time like this.
In any case, the t-shirts, socks, bottle openers, keychains, hat, and lego sets were highly appreciated. :p
The talks
This is the list of talks I attended, along with a few comments:
Day 1
- Keynote: The hidden cognitive cost of cloud-native sprawl: making (and surviving) hundreds of choices a day an interesting topic of discussion, which I am not entirely a stranger to (having a behavioral scientist by my side), but which was interesting to analyze in relation to my world. An honorable mention for including links and references for every post/video/book.
- Intro to Calico Observability: a sponsored talk dedicated to Whisker, a network observability tool integrated into Calico (even in the open-source version!).
- API-First IDPs on Kubernetes: Unifying APIs, Workloads & Developer Experience: a talk about OpenChoreo, an IDP platform. The concept of IDP wasn't completely clear to me, but the problem it solves is quite common and relatable. Definitely something I would like to try introducing to my team as well.
- What Image-Based Systems Taught Us About Linux Distributions: Lessons From Kairos and Why We Built Hadron: Hadron is an immutable operating system built from scratch. As a nerd passionate about the topic, I was curious to understand the different approach adopted by the devs compared to, for instance, bootc.
- Osservabilità by Design con OTel Weaver: Weaver was defined by the speaker as “IaC for observability”, a beautiful definition.
- The Truth About GPU Sharing in Multi-Tenant Kubernetes: an introduction to how GPUs are “shared” on k8s.
- Oops-Driven Development: a funny lightning talk about the best practices to adopt in order to prevent the classic “oops” moments experienced by every (System/DevOps/Platform/Site Reliability) Engineer.
- SB💣💣M: Making SBOMs play together: the talk illustrates the research work and the related tool developed to connect different tools that produce SBOMs and the results of their analyses, demonstrating once again the need for some sort of standardization from vendors.
- Booting into Kubernetes with an Immutable OS: another interesting talk about immutable operating systems, analyzing the reasons behind their creation and what kind of use case they aim to solve, especially in a world as standardized as that of k8s.
Day 2
- Keynote: Open Source at CERN: how a research institution like CERN develops and releases open-source software. Personally, I was very happy that OpenStack was mentioned not just as the foundation of their infrastructure but as a flagship product, with a few slides showing the massive usage it sees internally.
- Applying CI/CD Patterns to Bootc Containers: an interesting talk by a colleague about integrating bootc into CI/CD pipelines with some practical examples.
- GitOps at Scale: Why Your Hub-and-Spoke Architecture is a Security Risk: one of the talks I enjoyed the most, featuring a comparison of various architectural approaches with their pros and cons.
- Open Source made in Italy: l'evoluzione cloud-native di ArubaCloud: in this lightning talk I learned how ArubaCloud has “transformed” from a classic hosting provider into something cloud-native friendly, offering SDKs, CLI tools, and a Terraform provider.
- What Should a Cloud-Native OS Look Like? Rethinking the Foundation of Modern Platforms: yet another talk dedicated to immutable OSs, illustrating why their model works in a cloud-native environment, how hyperscalers are behaving, and why it is important to define an open standard.
- Scraping logs on legacy microservices: an adventure in the land of YAML descriptors: logs, legacy microservices, YAML, logging operators –> the recipe for an interesting and ever-timely talk.
- Building, sharing, running and governing AI Agents: an AI-themed lightning talk from Docker. The speaker showed a demo of products related to the topic: Docker Sandboxes, Gordon, AI governance.
- From Cloud Native to Agentic Applications: Workflows & Observability: another talk I highly appreciated because it showed how to monitor the impact and costs of an “agentic” application developed with Dapr Workflow.
- Platform Engineering and AI Agents: Spec-Driven development for IaC: the speaker showed a demo of IaC development using a “spec-driven development” approach, particularly emphasizing potential security issues and how to mitigate them.
Takeaways
The conference talks were generally of excellent quality, and I am very glad that AI-themed talks did not monopolize the entire event, leaving room for topics that are, IMO, more interesting. The organizers did a great job from every perspective, and I was truly happy to have participated. I met colleagues and former colleagues, chatted about interesting topics, ate well, and I even won a CNCF voucher because I left the most feedback on the talks! :D
If I had to nitpick, I would say I'd like to see a lot more care taken to avoid completely AI-generated slides (sigh) and more effort to engage the community through open standards (the fediverse) rather than relying on the usual commercial social networks or messaging systems with questionable security standards. But that's another story.
See you on May 20, 2027, for the next edition!
from 
G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y
Reading Taha Hussein's “Adeeb” from 1935, I came across a line describing banter as essential to authors as food, water, air, and smoke. Smoke here meaning tobacco. It might just be the first time I've read something that placed tobacco within the same hierarchy of needs as food and water.
The word “Adeeb” is an interesting one. It comes from the root “adab”, meaning literature, and is used to describe someone whose vocation is literature. But it implies more than the word “writer” (that would be “katib”), which by definition is focused on the doing of writing. It also implies more than “author” (that would be “mo'allif”). It's a far more broad term that evokes a sense of all-encompassing immersion in literature that doesn't quite have an English-language equivalent.
Scooped up a big pile of books from Cairo Book Fair (which was just gloriously insane) some months ago and finally getting around to making my way through them. Partly because I have been away from Arabic-language Egyptian literature for a long time now and realized how much I miss it (and boy is it different from most of what is churned out by the anglophone world), but partly also because PROJECT HOURGLASS will produced in both English and Arabic and a good greasing of my Arabic-language functions is sorely in order.
#journal #reads #work #tnh
Letzte Tage in Vinnytsia - Last days in Vinnytsia
from 
Brieftaube
Nach dem Camp war ich noch ein paar Tage in Vinnytsia, habe Freundis und Bekannte getroffen. Und viel Blog geschrieben.
Ich treffe eine Freundin, die gerade 2 Monate Freiwilligendienst in Rumänien hinter sich hat. Sie erzählt mir von einer Situation vor Ort: Sie war mit anderen unterwegs und müde, es war nach Mitternacht, und plötzlich hatte sie Panik, weil es nach 23 Uhr war. Ab 23 Uhr gilt in Vinnytsia, und grob um die Uhrzeit im ganzen Land, Ausgangssperre. Ihre Freundis haben sie daran erinnert, dass sie in Rumänien ist, sicher, und sie sich keine Sorgen machen muss. Jetzt lacht sie selbst darüber.
Aber ja, Nachtleben gibt es hier keines mehr, und der Abend endet früher. Restaurants und Bars machen meistens schon um 22 Uhr zu. Das gesamte “‘man trifft sich, genießt die Zeit, tanzt” passiert wenn überhaupt früher. Einen Freitag Abend war ich in Berschad mit meinen Gastschwestern unterwegs, dort wo sich die Jugend der Region trifft, ein Restaurant/ Bar “Mandarin”, ziemlich schick. Es war ordentlich was los, wurde ein bisschen getanzt, gegessen und getrunken. Alle waren sehr schick gekleidet, meine Gastschwester hat mir auch was von ihren Klamotten angeboten dafür, ich habe abgelehnt. Der Abend startet um 19 Uhr, sonst lohnt es sich kaum. Irgendwann wurde ein ukrainisches Lied gespielt, zu dem plötzlich der gesamte Laden auf die Tanzfläche gerannt kam, und es wurde im Kreis getanzt, sowie in dessen Mitte. Einige in der Mitte hatten ein Kissen in der Hand – dieses konnte vor eine Person aus dem Kreis auf den Boden gelegt werden, als Aufruf zum Kuss oder Umarmung, und gemeinsamem Tanz in der Mitte. Alle anderen wussten was passiert, waren voll dabei, und ich dann halt auch. Sehr spannend, sowas hab ich noch nicht gesehen. So gut die Stimmung in dem Moment war, nach dem Lied war es wieder ruhiger, und ab halb 11 hat sich der Laden geleert, wir waren um 23 Uhr quasi die letzten, die nach Hause gegangen sind. Der Altersdurchschnitt war so bei 15 / 16 Jahren, diese Generation wird so groß, und kennt nichts anderes. Die davor sind mit Corona bedingten Einschränkungen groß geworden.
Ich genieße die Zeit und die Gespräche über alltägliches, was im Leben so passiert, und was in Zukunft passiert. Ein Bekannter überlegt nach Deutschland zu kommen. Bis im Herbst ist er noch jung genug, danach darf auch er das Land nicht mehr verlassen. Dazu hatte er mir auch schon geschrieben. Ich erzähle ihm von der Situation in Deutschland: ja, früher oder später wird er Arbeit finden. Jedoch heißt es vorher viel Papierterror, warten, deutsch lernen. Auf einem quasi nicht existierenden Wohnungsmarkt eine Wohnung finden. Er sagt selbst dass er Angst vor Einsamkeit hat. Hier hat er seine Freundin, Familie und Arbeit, gerade tendiert er dazu in der Ukraine zu bleiben.
In der Nacht von Samstag auf Sonntag war Luftalarm, lang. In Vinnytsia ist nichts passiert, dafür hat es Kyiv umso schlimmer getroffen. Der Vater eines Freundes wohnt dort, und ist in dieser Nacht das zweite Mal seit Beginn der russischen Vollinvasion in den Luftschutzraum gegangen, weil es so übel gekracht hat. Alle die Familie und Bekannte im Raum Kyiv haben, vergewissern sich, dass es den Bekannten gut geht. Das passiert weder bei jedem Alarm, und auch nicht bei jedem Angriff. Diese Nacht war tatsächlich mit der schlimmste Angriff auf Kyiv. Die Tagesschau berichtete:
https://www.tagesschau.de/video/video-1588750.html
Ich mache letzte Besorgungen, zum Beispiel Lieblingsschokolade von Roshen, und finde mich damit ab, bald nach Hause zu fahren. Ich freue mich auf die Privatsphäre in meinem eigenen Zimmer, nachdem ich mir hier ununterbrochen mit anderen ein Zimmer, oder Hostelzimmer geteilt habe. Und gleichzeitig möchte ich wie immer auch in Vinnytsia bleiben. Es gibt immer noch so viel zu entdecken, ukrainisch verbessern, und die Stadt bietet einfach eine hohe Lebensqualität, wenn mensch die Kriegssituation ausblendet. Gerade habe ich aber auch Glück, da es warm genug ist, dass keine Heizung mehr gebraucht wurde, und es noch nicht so warm ist, dass es eine Klimaanlage bräuchte. Tatsächlich habe ich in der Zeit keinen einzigen Stromausfall erlebt, im Sommer und Winter war das seit der Vollinvasion nie der Fall.
After the Camp I spent some days in Vinnytsia, to meet friends and writing a lot in the blog.
I met a friend who had just completed 2 months of volunteer service in Romania. She told me about a situation there: she was out with others, tired, it was past midnight, and suddenly she panicked because it was after 11 pm. From 11 pm onwards, there's a curfew in Vinnytsia, and roughly at that time across the whole country. Her friends reminded her that she was in Romania, safe, and didn't need to worry. Now she laughs about it herself.
But yeah, there's no nightlife here anymore, and evenings end earlier. Restaurants and bars mostly close at 10 pm. All the “meeting up, enjoying the time, dancing” happens earlier, if at all. One Friday evening I was out in Berschad with my host sisters, where the youth of the region meets — a restaurant/bar called “Mandarin”, pretty fancy. It was quite busy, there was some dancing, eating and drinking. Everyone was dressed up nicely, my host sister even offered me some of her clothes for it, I declined. The evening starts at 7 pm, otherwise it's barely worth it. At some point a Ukrainian song came on, and suddenly the entire place ran onto the dance floor, dancing in a circle and in its centre. Some people in the middle had a cushion — this could be placed on the floor in front of someone from the circle, as an invitation to kiss or hug and dance together in the middle. Everyone else knew what was happening, was totally into it, and then so was I. Really fascinating, I'd never seen anything like it. As good as the atmosphere was in that moment, after the song it quieted down again, and from half past ten the place emptied out — we were practically the last ones to leave around 11 pm. The average age was around 15/16, this generation is growing up like this and knows nothing else. The one before them grew up with Covid restrictions.
In Vinnytsia I enjoy the time and the conversations about everyday life, what's going on, and what happens in the future. An acquaintance is considering coming to Germany. Until autumn he's still young enough, after that he too won't be allowed to leave the country anymore. He had already written to me about this. I tell him about the situation in Germany: yes, sooner or later he'll find work. But first comes a lot of bureaucracy, waiting, learning German. Finding an apartment in an essentially non-existent housing market. He says himself that he's afraid of loneliness. Here he has his girlfriend, family and work — right now he's leaning towards staying in Ukraine.
On the night from Saturday to Sunday there was an air raid alarm, a long one. Nothing happened in Vinnytsia, but Kyiv got hit hard. The father of a friend lives there, and that night he went to the air raid shelter for the second time since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, because the blasts were so severe. Everyone with family and friends in the Kyiv area checks in to make sure they're okay. This doesn't happen with every alarm, or even every attack. That night was actually one of the worst attacks on Kyiv. Tagesschau reported on it:
https://www.tagesschau.de/video/video-1588750.html
I run my last errands — like picking up my favourite Roshen chocolate — and come to terms with heading home soon. I'm looking forward to having privacy in my own room, after sharing a room non-stop with others here, or staying in hostel rooms. And at the same time, as always, I also want to stay in Vinnytsia. There's still so much to discover, Ukrainian to improve, and the city just offers a high quality of life — if you block out the war situation. Right now I'm also lucky that it's warm enough that heating is no longer needed, but not so warm that air conditioning would be required either. In fact, during my whole time there I didn't experience a single power outage — since the full-scale invasion that had never been the case in summer or winter.
Der Beweis, dass leichte, billige Verpackungen möglich sind. Hier, weil sie billiger sind, in Deutschland wäre das die am besten zu recycelnde Verpackung. (Die Markenprodukte sind in der Ukraine genau wie in D verpackt).
grüne, schöne Wege für Fußgänger*innen mitten in der Stadt <3
in der Ukraine ist das Leitungswasser nicht trinkbar, bzw. nicht für den täglichen Gebrauch gesund. Deshalb gibt es oft separate Wasserhähne für Trinkwasser, hier in einem Restaurant zur Selbstbedienung. Können wir uns abschauen, wenn bei uns das Wasser wegen dem Klimawandel weniger wird. An sich clever, Trinkwasserqualität braucht es wirklich nur an einem Wasserhahn im Haus, nicht zum Waschen.
Markt für Handwerkskunst in Vinnytsia
super leckerer kraftovyi Tee
Beyond the Couch: Why Modern Therapy Finds Deeper Healing with Spiritual Backing
from SpiritualDavid
In an increasingly complex world, the pursuit of mental and emotional well-being has led many to seek solace and solutions in modern therapy. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), psychotherapy, and other contemporary approaches offer invaluable tools for understanding the mind, managing emotions, and navigating life's challenges. Yet, for some, a persistent void remains, a sense that something fundamental is missing from their healing journey. This is where the profound wisdom of spiritual practices, often overlooked in conventional settings, can offer a crucial dimension to achieving holistic well-being. Indeed, modern therapy sometimes needs spiritual backing to address the deeper, often unarticulated, needs of the human spirit.
Modern therapeutic models, while highly effective in addressing psychological symptoms, frequently operate within a framework that prioritizes the material and the observable. They excel at dissecting thought patterns, identifying behavioral triggers, and fostering coping mechanisms. However, human experience is not solely confined to the psychological; it is deeply intertwined with spiritual dimensions, questions of purpose, meaning, and connection to something greater than oneself. When these spiritual aspects are neglected, healing can feel incomplete, leaving individuals feeling disconnected from their inner selves and the broader cosmos.
Consider the pervasive issues of anxiety, depression, and relationship struggles. While therapy can equip individuals with strategies to manage these conditions, it may not always delve into the existential or spiritual roots of their distress. For instance, a feeling of aimlessness might be pathologized as depression, when its true origin lies in a spiritual crisis, a yearning for meaning that transcends daily routines. Similarly, chronic relationship conflicts might stem not just from communication breakdowns, but from deeper energetic imbalances or unresolved spiritual wounds that manifest in interpersonal dynamics.
This is precisely where spiritual practices, such as those offered by experienced practitioners like Spiritual David, can bridge the gap. Spiritual traditions, including Voodoo, Vodou, or Vodun, as practiced by Spiritual David, recognize the intricate connection between the spiritual, emotional, and physical realms. They offer a holistic paradigm where healing is not merely the absence of symptoms, but the restoration of balance across all aspects of being. Spiritual David, a world-renowned Voodoo Priest and spell caster, brings a lineage of healing that dates back centuries, offering authentic spiritual solutions that complement and deepen the work of modern therapy. His approach, as detailed on his website, provides a unique perspective on addressing life's challenges through ancient wisdom and powerful rituals.
For example, while modern therapy might help an individual process the grief of a lost love, spiritual practices can offer rituals for soul retrieval, energetic cleansing, or even spells aimed at reuniting lovers, as described on Spiritual David's website. These practices are not about bypassing psychological work but about addressing the spiritual currents that influence emotional states. They acknowledge that sometimes, external forces or energetic blockages contribute to personal suffering, and these require spiritual intervention.
Similarly, protection spells and cleansing rituals, often employed in spiritual traditions, can create an energetic shield against negativity and ward off malevolent influences. In a therapeutic context, this might translate to an individual feeling perpetually drained or vulnerable, symptoms that therapy might attribute to stress or trauma. However, from a spiritual perspective, these could be signs of energetic attacks or spiritual imbalances that require specific rituals to purify the aura and restore peace. Spiritual David's services in curse removal and spiritual cleansing offer a tangible way to address these unseen forces, allowing individuals to reclaim their energetic sovereignty and foster a sense of safety that deepens their therapeutic progress.
Even in matters of prosperity and wealth, where modern therapy might focus on mindset shifts and practical financial planning, spiritual practices introduce the concept of energetic alignment with abundance. Prosperity spells, as offered by Spiritual David, aim to remove financial obstacles and attract opportunities by honoring spirits associated with wealth and luck. This isn't about magical thinking in isolation, but about aligning one's spiritual energy with their material goals, creating a fertile ground for success that can amplify the practical strategies learned in therapy.
The integration of spiritual backing with modern therapy is not about choosing one over the other, but about recognizing their complementary strengths. Therapy provides the framework for cognitive and emotional restructuring, while spiritual practices offer a pathway to deeper meaning, energetic balance, and connection to ancestral wisdom. When combined, they create a powerful synergy that addresses the human being in their entirety, mind, body, and spirit. This holistic approach can lead to more profound, lasting healing, transforming not just symptoms, but the very fabric of one's existence. By embracing the spiritual dimension, individuals can move beyond mere coping to a state of genuine flourishing, finding purpose, protection, and prosperity in a truly integrated way.
from bios
10: An Understanding Of Lack
She winds down her window.
“You need your bath.”
Opening the door, settling in, driving away from the intersection where all of us spend the days asking for change, whathaveyou.
She cuts my clothes off with a pair of industrial scissors, the kind seamstresses wield. A month of embedded shit, caked dirt, of no washing. The soot has seeped through onto my skin. No need for instructions, step into the bath, she washes me slowly. With care. She makes vague statements about the whiteness of my skin coming out from behind the dirt.
She is maybe thirty, maybe thirty five, her apartment is on the edge of a neat clean affluent suburb and is neat clean and affluent. Most of the doors are closed. The sexual component to this transaction takes place on the bathroom floor. The hexagonal black and white tiles. The rounded curve, the lip of the cast iron bath digs into my neck.
With a kindness approaching allegory, she comes for me near the end of the month, it happens three four times. Pulls me alone, the lone white guy, from the crowd of hands and asking.
It ends every time with her giving me an entire new set of clothes, new shoes. Dressing me as slowly as she has undressed and washed me. I am not allowed to participate. And then a backpack of tinned and other foods, medication, bandages, and some cash. She calls me a taxi, never drives me back. Always upon my leaving she says the same thing...
“Just survive.”
There is a concrete fence and dust, long dry grass between the fence and the dust tailing onto the road, the concrete faded with painted letters peeling proclaiming a paint discount at a paint shop, traffic kicking up tiny stones at my shins. Winter in shorts, returning from sorting myself out, walking back to the shebeen, sleeping in a back room among the beer crates.
Neither the dust nor the cold reaches me, while talking to my mother on a barely together cell phone. Describing the last conversation with my father, shortly before he took his life with whiskey.
“I told him to go home and kill himself,” I weep.
“Your sister says you didn’t say that.”
My mother just wants to know where I am staying, am I okay? She can’t do this anymore. A truck passes drowning out the conversation.
From whatever dark room or disappointment, reaching out, always confessing guilt, asking for money. After having lived with my father’s drinking for so long, they stop responding.
The doctor’s room is not a room, a small cubicle grafted onto the pharmacist’s counter. Curtains, no door. The closeness of a stethoscope. Possessed only with a convincing desperation, wheedling the doctor to phone my mother. The medication to stop using is paid for, conditionally to be fetched weekly.
Somehow between this doctor, the pharmacy and my mother an arrangement evolves. My mother will no longer send me money. She rents a room in the doctor’s yard, a chipboard square in the guts of the double garage – a bed, some books, a television, a fridge, a cupboard of tinned food, noodles, and always the medication to stay clean. Everything is bolted down, nothing can be removed. Coming and going without restriction. Whenever anything lacks on the street there is always here. More and more there is here.
There is a dank concrete familiarity, over time moisture invades the chipboard. Waking up with the prospect of street hustling or medication. More and more I choose Judge Judy. The medication is slowly reduced. In a year long dissolve my life eventually pieces back together.
The pieced together dissolves a decade later when I find myself self-sufficient, there is a proper relapse and perhaps seven years of more life lived in drug houses and parks and avoiding pain. I decide to get clean again. The decision is not enough.
There is a rehab someone will pay for, in another city. They are waiting for me. From the wet floors of the drug house, peel myself into motion. Money will be sent for the bus ticket once at the bus station, once photographic proof is provided. Packing up at the backpackers, heading down the hill, passing the paras, I am leaving I am leaving, goodbye, goodbye. Past the wide park where we smoke, the taxi graveyard, down past the abandoned methadone clinic where the dealers live, and into the bus station. I send proof of my being there. An ewallet is sent. There is no ATM in the bus station. The bus leaves in an hour, the trip is ten hours. I find an ATM across from the methadone clinic. Ten hours. I should probably smoke first.
By the third or fourth time that bus ticket money is sent – just sending the same picture of the bus station, the pretence that I am going to get on the bus is abandoned. In the burnt out taxi, a fucked phone being boosted through a collection of wires to a car battery, eking out every minute of battery power begging for bus ticket money. The entrance to the bus station is just across the road, down that street, past the ATM and the dealers. An impossible journey.
The seats creak under blankets musty, the cold through the former windows. It is sometimes hard to tell whether it is withdrawal or weather. The people I stay with wash taxis in the main road, the dealers are users who sleep in the same broken minibuses we do. In the blue dawn we scrape foils and share. There is never anything to myself. When I get bus ticket money I try to keep enough for the actual bus. They are helping me, I must help them, defeated by the sure knowledge that I can not get on the bus.
Every time someone is about to send bus money I gather what is left of my things, the unsellable. The NA book, the two pairs of shorts and the torn track pants, and the ratty t-shirt that I am not wearing today, the hoodie with only one sleeve. And pack them into plastic bags, to prepare for a journey imagined. There are goodbyes, there are promises that I will come back and help them. There is the walk to the ATM and the walk back to the dealers and back to the taxi, the sponge breaking out of the old seats, the vinegar of the nyaope, the burning of copper and the daily ritual of carwashing and pleading.
I can not get on the bus. I have no solution to this.
And then I realise I can call someone and tell them that I can not get on the bus. That someone will help me, I can appeal to someone who knew me when I had a life, who has the resources to get me on the bus.
They arrive and take me to the bus. And put me on the bus.
Escape is so simple.
Last day with me
from An Open Letter
V is leaving around 4 in the morning while I’m asleep. I’ve really enjoyed just being able to hang out with him, this has felt like having a roommate that you get along with. I understand why that’s something that people are really afraid to let go of, because having such proximity to someone that you really click with and a constant source of socialization must be really valuable. I guess in a way I’m kind of grateful now that I did not have that, because it means that I didn’t have to let go of anything and I wouldn’t have that now anyway.
from Unvarnished diary of a lill Japanese mouse
JOURNAL 26 mai 2026
#dojo Ce matin mon pauvre jeune Américain est venu. Il a fait des progrès en japonais c’est incontestable, en politesse aussi. Il voulait vérifier que je voulais toujours bien de lui. Je l'ai encouragé il est sur la bonne voie. Je suis curieuse maintenant de ce que je pourrai faire avec lui malgré les énormes différences culturelles et comportementales. Il a une façon de se mouvoir si différente. Son centre de gravité semble tellement plus haut que nous. On verra. C'est intéressant de toute façon.