I owe my career in HPC in large part to social media, and Twitter specifically:
- As a materials science graduate student, I relied on IRC and Twitter to learn enough about HPC to get a job working at SDSC
- At SDSC, my posts on Twitter led me to be discovered by both NERSC and 10x Genomics, leading me to my next two jobs
- At NERSC, my posts on Twitter led me to get connected to people at Microsoft in HPC/AI
However, Twitter’s acquisition and subsequent deconstruction has left me at loose ends since I’ve never had a career that wasn’t intimately interconnected with a social media platform. In preparation for the ultimate collapse of the HPC community on Twitter, I’ve been trying multiple alternate platforms as my next home.
In addition to Twitter, as of November 2024, I can be found on:
Platforms
Bluesky
Bluesky missed a major opportunity when Twitter was dismantled because it was still invitation-only with a months-long wait list. When I first got my invitation, it also felt very fringe; all the community lists seemed to revolve around furries and other personal (rather than professional) interests.
After November 2024 though, there was a large exodus of from Twitter1 which included many folks from the HPC community.
Pros
Bluesky’s biggest appeal to me is that you log in and are not hit with a firehose of content that you never asked to see. There is no algorithmic feed by default, so there’s much less angst about not seeing something from someone you care about amidst a sea of unsolicited (recommended) posts from people you don’t care about.
- It is centralized around one company with a strong vision for what a federated social network should look like
- It is gaining support for all the essential features like private messages, gifs, quote-reposts, and development is engaged with the user community
- The underlying protocol, AT, focuses on individual federation and control rather than server-level federation. You can pick up your identity and all your posts, and you can take all of it to another federated server without losing your followers.
- Feeds are programmable and shareable, not black boxes implemented by a corporate overlord.
Cons
- No business model - unclear how long it will survive as a public benefit corporation
- Features such as Feeds still feel rough around the edges
Feeds
Bluesky allows anyone to create a feed which can implement whatever algorithms they want to prioritize the content that is served up. I use SkyFeed to create and host my HPC feed.
Feeds still require specifying universal identifiers (DIDs) for individuals, lists, and other entities which populate them, and figuring out someone’s DID requires hitting an API yourself. Online tools exist to perform some of these API calls such as Bluesky DID Resolver, but you can also hit the API endpoint in a browser. For example, finding HPC_Guru’s DID can be done by going to:
https://bsky.social/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle?handle=hpcguru.bsky.social
His DID is did:plc:oni2qr7zfiouajmojbnyctgl where
didindicates it’s a didplcis a “public ledger of credentials” DID which was developed by Blueskyoni2qr7zfiouajmojbnyctglis the identifier which is generated and authenticable by Bluesky
My DID is did:plc:3fi74j5ui7v6kcso64mjdexk.
Pros:
- Huge amount of engagement on every post
- Focused around professional topics, which is ultimately why I use social media
Cons:
- It feels inauthentic due to the huge number of viewers. I don’t like posting there, because I don’t think the typical LinkedIn reader should hear the sorts of opinions I tend to throw out into social media.
Mastodon
I want to like Mastodon, and it had good momentum after Twitter was dismantled because it existed and was very similar. However, it’s too complex and fringey for mainstream adoption, and as the years go on, its features and UI seem to fall further behind other platforms. I think it is attractive for the same reason IRC was attractive, but it will also probably never become more mainstream than IRC ever was.
Pros:
- Federation protocol has been adopted by Threads, giving it a chance of eventually connecting to a more mainstream platform.
- Supports really long posts.
Cons:
- The first-party client is not very good and has not gotten much better.
- Quote-reposts are not supported. This was originally a deliberate stance (backed by some illogical claim that it promotes the spread of misinformation), then was promised in May 2023. Over a year later though, it still doesn’t exist.
HPC.social Slack
This is a small, Slack-based community that has significant overlap with the Mastodon community above. It made good sense when I used Slack at work, but it’s become harder to keep up since using Slack is no longer part of my day-to-day.
Libera
I’ve been on IRC for decades, and the #hpc channel on FreeNode was where I first fell in with the HPC community as a graduate student. When FreeNode imploded, I moved the community over to Libera where I now technically own the #hpc channel.
The community used to be very biased towards sysadmins and user support people, but it has gotten very quiet over the last decade.
I have e-mail alerts set up for r/hpc and respond to posts sometimes, but this is a very sleepy community that is pretty one-dimensional. The posts tend to be questions from sysadmins or users that are hyper-specific, or career advice questions from students who want to break into HPC.
History
I gave a career retrospective that led me to dig up records that show how Twitter benefitted my career. For posterity, here are some of the screenshots.
I joined Twitter in May 2009.
In April 2014, I was contacted by someone who found me on Twitter who worked at a stealth-mode startup. I wound up leaving SDSC to go work for him.
In mid-2020, I began a multi-year conversation with someone at Microsoft who ultimately convinced me to join the company in May 2022.
