The co-founder of iconic New York Mac computer shop Tekserve has died. I learned about Tekserve after I moved to New York from Berkeley in 2014. My new employer, The Intercept, dealt in sensitive files (e.g. from the Snowden archive of NSA documents) and had a healthy paranoia about buying things like laptops online.

Tekserve was very close to our first office on 5th Ave. The Intercept, funded by the founder of eBay, had a very tech startup-y approach to IT: I was told to walk over there and buy whatever I needed. My boss told me they sold to pretty much all the news media outlets in the city.

I opted for a little Macbook Air with an 11 inch screen, maxed out on RAM and flash storage (I think we still called those SSDs). I also bought an NEC MultiSync monitor (27 inches?) since I'd wanted one of those since I was a teenager, and also because my wife's uncle (by then retired) was an NEC sales rep traveling to the U.S. for many years. And an external keyboard and trackpad.

I remember being awed by the size of the store. I also remember distinctly that there was already another Ryan Tate in the database -- I gave them my name and they asked something like, "OK ya you live on <address in Manhattan>?" And I said no, must be a different Ryan Tate, I live in Brooklyn. (I had probably met this other Ryan Tate, probably it was the chef whose SoHo restaurant Savoy I visited right before it closed, maybe two years before all this, on a trip to NYC, and he came out that night to say hello to his name twin.)

It was probably the nicest, smoothest, most informative sales process I've been through at any computer store. I had done the Apple store thing to buy two Macs at this point, it was fine but always a lot of standing around (this has not changed) and at no point did I feel like someone on staff knew more than me about what I was buying. Tekserve flipped that around. It was all very human. I remember something at some point got mixed up about the monitor but they corrected the mistake on the spot.

I did deal with two Mac stores in Berkeley, M.A.C. on University Ave, which was great but much smaller than Tekserve. Actually they are still around it looks like! When I went there, as I recall, they were up a narrow flight of stairs in a second-floor retail space not even a block from the university. Indie Mac stores always felt a bit like pirate operations in the best way, and M.A.C. definitely was part of that aesthetic. I also got my first Mac from the UC Berkeley computer store (do those exist any more?).

I also patronized my friend Thomas Oh's Mac consultancy, Platinum Systems, also based in Berkeley (I can't remember if they ever had an office). He upgraded my Performa 636CD.

Tekserve went out of business in 2016, under pressure from company-owned Apple Stores, including a spectacular-looking one on 5th Ave.

The Apple Stores were an excellent move for Apple and its customers, but I always thought it was crummy and cheap that Steve Jobs' Apple didn't throw a bone to the indie shops that supported the company for decades, including when it was on the ropes. There's a thing I learned about recently called Record Store Day, where recording labels support indie shops with special vinyl releases and deals. There was a half block line out the door of my local record store for this last year. Apple could have had something similar, with some exclusive windows here and there for indie shops on some products or versions of products.

Anyway, it was nice to read about what a decent person and boss David Lerner was at Tekserve.

Earlier this year, iPhone developers Marco Arment and David Smith sat down to discuss how they efficiently manage their apps as sole proprietors. Arment makes a podcasting app and Smith makes an app for customizing your homescreen with widgets. Both are successful businesses.

One thing that made me a little sad was that both men said they found it important to avoid facilitating direct communication between human beings.

Here's Arment, for example:

I intentionally have not created any way in Overcast for users to write text or post images that would be visible to other users. Because then you have user to user communication, then you have things like harassment, illegal content being posted, takedowns, all sorts of stuff you have to deal with.

And so, you know, and you look at the problem set of a podcast app, it's like I can do 95% of what people want without incurring some of those giant burdens that would require a staff to moderate and things over time.

Smith similarly called it "a massive sort of obligation" to enable features like allowing users to, for example, send pictures into one another's widgets. "So I just don't go near those," he said.

On the one hand, I completely understand where both developers are coming from and can't fault their choice. I've actually been the editor sending a reporter to ask a tech company why they allowed bad behaviors to fester on their platform for so long (if only because others were leveling this criticism). I've become very familiar with how far some powerful people expect platforms to go to police their content, and why that expectation exists.

But I'm also old enough to remember when the internet was a more free and hopeful place, and when connecting people directly — strangers very much included — was considered one of its great superpowers. We've spent the last decade or so becoming intimately familiar with what can go wrong when you connect people online and how to mitigate the risks inherent in doing that.

There are also costs on the other side, though, in creating expectations for how platforms should police communication and in focusing a good chunk of interface design on stopping the worst actors. If we designed parks and cafes and sidewalks to thwart the most malevolent people who might use them, they would be a lot less enjoyable for the rest of us, and much of the web increasingly feels nerfed in this way.

I hold out some hope that the pendulum of conventional tech wisdom will swing the other way soon, and that we can collectively see the value in online spaces that bring people together and find some ways to make it easier for people like Marco and David to build and manage those spaces in a way that feels safe for everyone.

Because I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of how the internet can bring people together to accomplish great things.