Notices by fluffy 💜 (fluffy@plush.city), page 4

@stufromoz @alienskyler @jpm @si_fuller not with that attitude

My Roomba keeps falling short on its battery estimate.

@graay https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme7d5/once-upon-a-time-this-tech-company-actively-recruited-furries

@revengeday this is Ïï, Ÿÿ and Ëë erasure

@tillianisafox A couple years ago I was in a mad rush to preserve all of my MiniDV tapes because I realized that time was running out to be able to make the connection.

I also have irreplaceable CDs which are now completely unreadable because they were burned CD-Rs where the ink has decayed too much.

@nano @esm does discord actually call them “servers” or is that just the community term for it, like how in the 80s people called NES cartridges “tapes?”

@Chrishallbeck If only being honest weren't penalized in this context.

How to make an ethical Mastodon/Fediverse search engine:

1. Run a bot that follows back everyone who follows it
2. Index the public toots that bot receives from those that it follows and nothing else (i.e. no followers-only or unlisted toots)
3. Honor all edits and deletes, and remove toots from folks who unfollow the bot
4. Do all the above with full transparency

Alternate, easier approach:

1. Don't

Am I doing this meme right?

@john @admin Yes, but also the great thing about standards is there’s so many to choose from, and in theory Mastodon could support IndieWeb in addition to ActivityPub. Having multiple subscription types (and support for bearer tokens and adaptive polling) wouldn’t be the worst thing.

IMO the most unfortunate things about Mastodon’s implementation from a UX standpoint are their assumptions about post formatting, and their insistence on Webfinger as sole form of identity.

@admin @john The reason I feel that it’s superior is that it’s much simpler to implement (especially in a static hosting context), and the publish vs. subscribe mechanisms are separated. Push is also optional and temporary outages don’t mean a loss of communications overall. Also there are well-established patterns for declaring a feed for a specific resource. And why would one want to agree on a common RSS software? It’s all about having a shared protocol, not a shared implementation.

@admin @john As far as those other protocols go, I only have a very surface-level understanding of Matrix, and I’ve never heard of those other ones. I’m also not particularly an expert at ActivityPub, and most of my exposure to it is Mastodon which doesn’t even implement it quite correctly per the spec — and now everything that implements ActivityPub is expected to be compatible with Mastodon, which really hampers the use of many of its features.

@john the thing about this that bugs me is that Flickr already supported independent federation via Atom and RSS feeds, and IMO ActivityPub is not a very good Atom/RSS replacement. Mastodon used to be based on Atom+WebSub, but then switched to ActivityPub not due to any real technical improvement but because it was easier to hack in private posting (badly), rather than working with any of the initiatives that existed to add post privacy to Atom.

@helene I'm aware that mastodon publishes RSS feeds, but they're not particularly useful. Following mastodon from RSS means getting flooded with tiny micro-updates without context, especially when threads happen, and the entire interaction model is completely different.

Also I have serious misgivings about activitypub as a protocol, and I have written extensively about that on my blog.

@helene like it's not just about the protocols, it's about how they're used and the entire UX involved.

You could very well build something exactly like twitter/mastodon/etc. on RSS (several people have, even), and I think that would still be an awful idea.

@helene for that matter, Mastodon started out as OStatus, which is basically "Twitter but using Atom+WebSub." The move to ActivityPub was to hack in slightly better access control as a minimum-effort thing, rather than in trying to actually solve the problem of distributed access control.

@helene but anyway the main thing that I really want people to do is to own their own experience, and to have experiences that they can own in the first place. Blogging is a much easier chunk to carve off for that than, say, running a personal Pleroma instance or whatever.

@helene also quick jokes and shitposts are something that twitter/mastodon do better than blogs, yeah, but I'm not sure if enabling those is worth the other interaction pitfalls, and things like that are also well-suited to realtime chat places like Discord or IRC.

@helene "In terms of what they see and who they interact with" comes down to two things:

1. The timeline where you have to peruse a deluge of disconnected thoughts and try to piece together a conversation from it
2. The inability to delete comments/replies to your posts in any nuanced way; there's just an all-or-nothing Block Someone result, and that still allows others to pollute your "space" for others to see

@helene and don't get me wrong, Tumblr has a lot of issues with its interaction model as well, like the way that "notes" work is pretty cruddy too

Maybe it's just my own nostalgia based on how things were in the Movable Type and Livejournal days, and maybe that benefited a lot from a smaller audience to begin with.

But blog drama hit very different than Twitter/Mastodon drama.