Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 14

Both of these are good I think. Twitter was hugely valuable for many different reasons. And we need to recreate that value in a way that isn't controlled by a bigoted and narcissistic megalomaniac. I don't know if bsky can succeed at that. But I hope it does.

But there was also an underlying issue with social media. Because it was controlled by corporate interests and needed to make billions of dollars, there were constraints on what it could be. It has to stay vanilla so it can support the presence of brands.

I think mastodon has to lean into getting weird. It has to really open up the ability for developers to add things that aren't allowed on centralized platforms. I'm not sure what that looks like. But I'm going to try to get closer to it myself.

The promise of mastodon is that it doesn't have to stay vanilla. And it doesn't have to stay coherent or uniform. It provides a foundation of social media messaging. But people can put their own spin on top of it to add more value.

If you haven't read Anil Dash's Rolling Stone piece, you should. He has always been an ambassador of the way weird subcultures help shape the web for the masses. We've been missing that, and it might come back. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/

With mastodon, the problems are completely different. It still has a revenue problem. But it's not centralized. Which means it can't depend on collecting large pools of capital. Some things can only happen quickly when you pay people lots of money to do it.

So here's what I see as the barriers for both endeavors. Bsky's biggest problem is straight forward. It seems to operate under a model that requires centralized revenue. They gotta start making money at some point.
https://bsky.app/profile/polotek.bsky.social/post/3kkjqelc3ql2w

Maybe most people don't know the difference. But they can feel the difference. We know that because we study it and measure it. Mastodon is not nice to use. Right now, people are getting unique value from it, so that is overcoming the UX problems. I don't think that will stay true.

The upside is that we have experienced all of the horrors of profit-motivated social media. It's bad, but it's a known quantity at least. And we know that ultimately people will still show up. So it can work.

If bsky stays centralized, then it's just another upstart platform trying to compete for users in a market of huge players. For better or worse, Meta got threads to work. So along with Twitter, bsky is competing with two giants and not just one. It's not looking good tbh.

Mastodon is missing lots of polish. The experience is slow and laggy. Not just on the official client. I mean everywhere. The UI on most clients is bad. Not ugly per se. But you can tell that it doesn't have a team of professional designers going that extra mile to make it great.

Last night I ended up pairing with a friend on a Next.js app. I don't like react or next. I've been largely avoiding them. But we were able to figure out their problem and get something working.

I've been using Nest.js (not a type, a different thing) and Angular. It's not "better". It still sucks the way a lot of this overly complex modern stuff sucks.

But I was reminded that the best framework to use is the one you already know. It doesn't matter all that much in the long run.

I swear this happens to me every single time I mention anything to do with frontend. I don't know how htmx has cornered the market on getting mentioned in every conversation without many people actually using it.
https://mastodon.cloud/@mogul/111863532338048630

No offense to Bret. It's not his fault. I just think the question about htmx has been asked and answered. Yes I have heard of it. No I don't use it. Lots of people have heard of it. But they're not using it. That says a lot right out the gate. So let's try moving to the next conversation.

@thomasfuchs @anildash do people talk about why the touchbar failed so hard? What lessons were learned?

Tweet-sized book on workplace collaboration:

Try to be aware of when you're proposing something that creates work for other people. It's something we do all the time without being self-aware about it.

Maybe you're proposing this really "obvious" solution to a problem that everybody recognizes, and you're wondering why you're getting pushback. Ask yourself who has to do work to make it happen. If it's not *you* then you're actually imposing work on other people. People hate that.

"AI companies are implicitly betting that their customers will buy AI for highly consequential automation, fire workers, and cause physical, mental and economic harm to their own customers as a result, somehow escaping liability for these harms. Early indicators are that this bet won’t pay off."
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Been using nest.js recently, and I don't hate it. I don't hate Angular as a frontend framework either. And Nest has similar architecture and design principles. A lot of people are gonna back away from this level of complexity. And I get that. But as a person who has spent the last 10 years building long-lived and successful applications that support teams of hundreds of devs, a good opinionated framework is necessary.

I'm sharing this opinion because I'm thinking about development workflows and what contributes to long term maintainability. I'm using Nest and Angular for a side project. It definitely feels like overkill for something that will probably never see the light of day. But I'm also finding that the structure that comes with these tools is allowing me to get a lot further than I usually do with side projects.

It feels good to hack something together in a way that feels easy to get started. But a lot of times, you get to a point where continuing to add features feels harder and harder to do. Because you didn't give yourself any of the structure that would've made it easier. There are many reasons that side projects die and never get "finished". But this is definitely one of them.