It’s a story of someone just wanting the “verified checkmark” on LinkedIn. Quite legit, right? Just that – afterwards – he started to check which companies his biometric data are now shared with.
17 companies with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud on the list. And just as I wanted to mention “Usually — as a company — you have enterprise contracts that the data must not be used for training purposes”, the next surprise comes up. Because by using the system you consent to exactly that – well okay, not consent but “Legitimate interest”.
In the end I agree: the checkmark might not be worth the invest.
Nolto.social started as a small experiment as a free alternative to LinkedIn. The author wanted to explore ActivityPub and see what could be built. There was no funding, no team, no roadmap. Just an idea and some time.
Within a few weeks, almost a thousand people signed up. Companies created pages. Articles were posted. Events were shared. I never marketed it. It spread through blogs and word of mout
According to the author, Nolto was never meant to be a polished product. It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen. Now, the author has decided to shut it down.
Some might dismiss it as another AI project failing. – I see it differently.
What Nolto Really Proved
Nolto demonstrated demand. A private project attracted users and companies in record time. It showed that people want this. That companies want this. The author open-sourced the code and had the courage to stop it when it became clear the project was beyond their capacity to maintain.
What I see here is an opportunity!
Or as JTensetti writes it:
Nolto proved something simple:
You don’t need permission to experiment.You do not need funding to create value.
And you don’t need to be “approved” to build.
To everyone who builds, even when it’s uncomfortable — keep going.
The AI hype claims that LLMs will make everyone a coder. I say: that’s pretty much BS. Most people don’t want to build software. They want their problems solved, preferably without lifting a finger.
Joan Westenberg nails this so well in her recent article: The “everyone will code” myth ignores decades of proof. We’ve had WordPress (since 2003) and desktop publishing tools (since the 1980s), yet most still pay for solutions or use templates.
The real shift? AI will make existing tools smarter — not turn everybody into vibe-coders.
It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen.
At this point I have decided to shut it down.
Ahh too bad.
But I respect the decision of this guy! He made quite a thing but also admits that he’s just a one man show and doesn’t have the experience to operate such a thing. I might have done the same in his situation.
Since I am moving more and more away from BigTech (see here…), I was wondering if we need a Fediverse alternative for LinkedIn. I don’t even want to go into the details but LinkedIn shows the same bad symptoms as all other big “social” media plattforms.
Xing, Fediverse, …?
Yes, in Germany we have Xing, but Xing is mainly in Germany and they stripped a lot of community features that made it a bit unattractive.
Another Fediverse-account? Yes, would be an alternative. But LinkedIn just specialized on career-features. Like showing your past stations in your career and your profession in the profile. That’s just super useful.
Nolto The Professional Network That Respects Your Freedom
Then, just recently I read about “nolto.social“. Which aims at … well .. exactly that! Being an alternative to LinkedIn.
The Nolto startpage is pretty clear: Own your data. No algorithms, no ads, no lock-in. Okay, shut up and take my money. Oh, It’s free!
Import data from LinkedIn
I just signed up yesterday and exported all my LinkedIn data (which … isn’t a lot, since I deleted almost all content). Now my profile is filled! The career details, education and skills are all maintained. Great!
I just saw that the StaffEng Podcast is coming back!
We’re rebooting the Staff Engineer podcast with a specific focus: practitioners using AI to deliver valuable outcomes with specific examples
If you don’t know StaffEng, its About Staff Engineering, “Leadership beyond the management track”.
At most technology companies, you’ll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level, in five to eight years. At that point your path branches, and you have the opportunity to pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer.
The world is complicated. I like the #DIDcampaign – regaining your digital independence step by step. Like changing from X to Mastodon or from Chrome to another browser. For me, the next logical step was reconsidering my browser choice.
Firefox was the first choice, but then I wondered: why not Vivaldi? A Norwegian developed browser – supporting a european company. A post on Mastodon quickly shifted to a more fundamental aspect:
Vivaldi is built on Chromium, which is dominated by Google.
Firefox, while developed by the U.S.-based Mozilla Foundation, maintains its own browser engine – one of the last alternatives to Chromium’s dominance.
So, what matters more? Supporting a European company or preserving engine diversity? It’s not just about where the browser is developed, but also how diverse the browser landscape can remain …
(Maybe, if I find a way to sync the bookmarks, I could just use both?)
This is a practical how-to on moving email from Gmail to another provider.
The main challenge is Gmail’s label system: one email can have multiple labels and all mails also appear in “All Mail”. Most other providers use folders instead, where an email can only exist in one place. If you migrate without taking this into account, you will most likely end up with duplicated mails or a messy folder structure.
I see a lot of AI skepticism in the dev community — and some of it is fair (okay, maybe “a lot”). Vague bug reports, monster commits, untested code … We’ve proably read it all, and maybe even seen it all.
Even Mitchell Hashimoto whose post appeared yesterday in my timeline writes “Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports”. But … he continues with an impressive story: A Ghostty user with no Zig or macOS experience took crash logs, fed them through AI, reached out on Discord, explained what was done. And the result:
Whatever you believe about what the Right Thing should be, you can't control it by refusing what is happening right now. Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career.
