Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 10

I'm not sure how often I've directly articulated this fundamental change in my thinking. Many people have been convinced that arguing and debating your goals and values with those in the opposition is the best way to influence people. I just don't believe that anymore. Debate has it's place. But it's not the best lever to reach the people I want to reach.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112050290234438314

So what are we missing in this discourse about frontend development? A few important things.

In order for people to change their current decisions, they need a better option. And not just a little bit better. It has to be better enough to outweigh the cost of actively switching. The cost of switching frontend tools is super high today. That's also partly due to the complexity. So it's a long game. We're really trying to influence devs at the moment they start a new project.

There are a ton of options for frontend development today. The landscape is actually dizzying. And that's also a different kind of problem. Choosing react is the easy option. Wading through the long list of other tools and doing an actual evaluation of the tradeoffs is very hard. I want to see more trusted professionals doing that work and coming to solid conclusions and recommendations. What should we choose besides react, and why?

Another controversial issue I see is that the frontend community has over-indexed on "developer experience" as a goal. I've ranted about this as a related but separate topic. Most of the discourse that compares frameworks is either about "performance" or "I like this better because I think it's a better experience". Those are fine things to discuss. But I think there are way more factors that matter. Complexity should be a much bigger part of the discourse.

React starts off really easy. Because it hides a lot of the complexity from you. "Easy to get started" is also at the root of a lot of dysfunction today in my opinion. Getting started is cool. But you know what's even better? Finishing the thing. Expanding the thing. Maintaining the thing as is scales. Changing the thing when the goals or requirements change. Improving the performance when users report that it's slow. All of those things matter way more than "getting started".

It's difficult to try to influence people when you're truly coming from a radical position. I mean we know this. But describing how it *feels* is hard to do.

I've always had a hard time understanding why things that make sense to me don't seem to make sense to other people. I spend a lot of time on language. So I can be as effective as possible at explaining where I'm coming from. But truly influencing people takes more. And I haven't really cracked it.

The main reason that productivity metrics for software development aren't useful is that we don't really have any standards for determining what outcomes we are shooting for. Nobody knows what "good" is. So we don't know what we're measuring for.
https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112010057412867182

Last week was my first time really looking into what settings are available to admins who run their own instance. I was a bit surprised to find there isn't much there. At least through masto.host. I don't think they hide settings though. Only some of the deeper technical stuff.

As I continue to educate myself about how mastodon and ActivityPub currently works, I found myself asking a basic question. How do I see the list of servers I'm currently federated with?

I expected to see a list of servers that I federate with. There is a view that looks like it *should* show that list. Under the moderation tools. But it was empty.

Not weird at all. We have been trained out of wanting to understand and control our own experience. But it's actually very cool and empowering.
https://mastodon.social/@Palleas/111998749838523835

So here's my best theory. I know that another implicit way to enable federation is if a user on my instance follows a user on another instance. My instance will start pulling those posts in automatically and putting them into that user's feed. It looks like that kind of implicit federation is not shown in the tools? That's very surprising to me.

Feel free to tell me what I'm missing here. I'll follow up later this week and share what I'm learning. I want to understand this for two reasons.

1. I want to learn more about the moderation tools and what controls mastodon gives to instance admins.

2. I still want to understand more about how federation impacts the performance of the system.

FYI @mastohost

I'm once again experiencing very slow read and write times since I dropped back to the lowest paid tier. Please let me know if there's something you can do.

Well there you have it folks. If you actually use mastodon and people wanna talk to you, then the lowest tier plan is not gonna work for you.

No offense to masto support, but I wish we could've gotten here sooner. Instead I had people swearing to me that it shouldn't be a problem.
https://mastodon.social/@mastohost/111998917873143310

Here's the snapshot of my sidekiq status again. The take away here is that there was no huge spike this morning. This is normal usage. It still produced upwards of 15K jobs that need to be completed. That's just doesn't feel like a reasonable design for this kind of system.

@inthehands I just want you to know that I did notice the edit. I did go find out what changed. It was a little tedious. But also I'm completely fine with it. It's okay to fix nagging things.

Me, clearly and explicitly: "I have this idea. It's unpopular today, so I'm sure it'll take people a while to come around on this idea..."

Other people, immediately: "No! I absolutely disagree with you at this point in time!"

Me: "Yes, I know. That's why I... you know what, it's fine. Thanks for stopping by."

Let me find a way to critique without being acerbic. I don't like how people popup to tell me they disagree about how to define the fediverse. But that's not important

What I do think is important is how hard people work to gatekeep and squeeze down the actual promise and potential of the fediverse. It's exactly the kind of pedantic myopia that reminds us that the nerds will not lead us to the future we want. That's not what they do.

What bothers me more is how much of nerd culture is not self-aware about how much their ethos is about policing. Keeping people out or forcing them to conform. Many of these folks fancy themselves as anti-establishment. But the energy is constantly doing cop shit. They just wanna *be* the establishment.

@Gargron yes I understand the perspective. I still disagree with it. Explaining it again doesn't change anything.