Short, tiny drama between two friends

The two people I'll be talking about today are Chris Lemmer-Webber and Emacsen.

At one point they had a podcast together called Libre Lounge. I believe I found it on one of their Hacker News profiles. It was decent enough but the most informative part was that Chris had helped write the ActivityPub protocol, which is a standard for Federated networks and forms the basis of the current FediVerse (Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube etc.).

During the 'rona they started posting erratically and then none at all. Chris started up the feed again then transitioned to a new podcast, FOSS and Crafts, with his wife.

A while later Emacsen posts on his blog, Stern Fan In Recovery (I expect to see these in a decade about Cumtown - maybe rDrama too...)

In it he posts:

After the pandemic hit, I was alone. I found myself isolated from my fiancee and my pets by a national border. I was alone in my apartment for about fifteen months. During this time, I also had a very bad ending to something that spanned friendship, collaborator, and planned business partner. The word relationship is often used to mean a romantic relationship, but this relationship felt as close as it could be without any romantic or sexual feelings.

The relationship ended because I became that the person I was collaborating with was a narcissist. As I began to ask for solid commitments in exchange for my free work and began to assert boundaries, the interactions became more toxic until I had to end the relationship altogether.

This was sadly not my first time at the rodeo. My childhood has left me with a lot of scars and codependency, or what psychologist Ross Rosenberg calls "self-love deficit". Simply put, I am always afraid of being rejected, and especially susceptible to people who are affectionate. This makes me especially vulnerable to people with Cluster-B personality types, including Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

It doesn't take a detective to realize who this is if you follow any of their online history. The funny thing is about a month before this post Chris comes out as non-binary

Is this a Contra and PhilosophyTube case? I'm going to say it is without evidence.

But yeah that's pretty much it, some tiny drama and a friendship ruined probably due to shit.

Sidenote: Aevann, is there a reason the site doesn't use ActivityPub? Not much of a reason for federation plus the extra overhead (it's a beefy protocol from what I can tell...)?