Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@hachyderm.io), page 2

@lauren

Assume you've read https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a

I spent 4 years at G and am pessimistic, the cultural malaise leaves no good platform for all those technically excellent people to stand on.

@lauren I think you and I are of comparable vintage. I'm a heavy user of G products and admirer of their tech and technologists, generally; My problem with G is the corrupting influence of AdTech and the monopolized structure of that marketplace. There is pure evil there and I just can't get past it.

Symptom: I worked at Google for 4 years in fairly senior outward-facing roles and never met a customer. That is weird and dysfunctional.

In which I discover that geeks REALLY CARE about monospace fonts, and survey 16 free ones, and recommend 3: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/02/09/Monospace

Hey, today is XML’s 25th birthday. Back in the day I wrote a lot about it: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/Technology/XML/

Probably the most important: Neither XML’s father nor inventor: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/22/Not-the-Inventor-of-XML

Amusing: “XML People”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/10/XML-People

Quoting from “What XML Means” (2007): “XML is the first successful instance of a data packaging system that is simultaneously (human) language-independent and (computer) system-independent. It’s the existence proof that such a thing can be built and be useful.”

@mmasnick @decius

And, here comes the anti-scraping buzzsaw from the instance admins. Prepare for #fediblock.

We need a prominent sign displayed on every geek's first Mastodon screen:

⮕⮕⮕ Make It Opt-In!!!

I'm convinced it is possible to build bot-like software to enhance the Fediverse experience and stay in harmony with the community. But anything that is (a) for-profit and (b) opt-out-only will awaken the dragons.

see also “Private and Public Mastodon” https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search

Since January 2022 I’ve been working on (and blogging about) Quamina, a Go-language open-source library that implements the same kind of efficient event-filtering that AWS EventBridge offers.

Yesterday (with help from others) I pushed the “release v1.0.0” button.

If you’re interested in some combination of Go and event-driven software and high performance you might like it.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/01/25/Quamina-1.0

@evan

“Prodromou (Greek: Προδρόμου) is a Greek surname. It is the genitive form of prodromos (Greek: πρόδρομος), which means forerunner. ”

@gruber

Sadly, there's nothing dramatically, qualitatively better than the official app.

My faves are Fedilab and Tooot.

(Protip: You can turn the web app into a Chrome Web app which isn't all that great but has the virtue that once it's logged in it'll authenticate any other new clients you want to try.)

Wow, @chockenberry (Twitterific guy) fires a mighty broadside: https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

@apps

Hey FL, nice client but still work to be done on threads with forks in them. If you poke in my feed, yesterday there's this mega thread (I didn't start it) that started out talking about, well, threads, but diverged into subscription business models. I have yet to find any Mastodon client that allows me to navigate around it easily.

0/ I have 4 Mastodon clients on my Google Pixel. Thought I’d do a quick illustrated run-through. It’s going to take a bit of time to construct this thread, so I'll boost the 1/ post once I’ve finished, wait for that to come around again if you want to read it in one sweep.

1/ Mastodon: This is the original “official”-ish client, called Mastodon in the Google Play store. It’s OK, really nothing at all wrong with it. I like that in the Notifications page it just has “All” and “Mentions” because I think that’s the only filter I care about. It’s what I used most until recently.

2/ Tusky: This is the one that everyone recommended when I first joined. It’s OK too, but there isn’t anything I do in Mastodon where Tusky is clearly better. If you care about your follower count they give you an actual number, not rounded to the nearest thousand.

3/ Chrome Web App: When I followed a few Masto links from Chrome, eventually Chrome asked me if I wanted a “Hachyderm” app - hachyderm.io is my home instance. This is that. I actually liked the visuals on this one the most, but it has a fatal flaw; it won’t open Web links in Chrome, just spawns tabs inside itself. I want all my generic Web content in Chrome, no exceptions.

4/ Fedilab: I paid for this one, $3 I think? It seems like every couple of days when I open it, it announces new features. Haven’t used many of them yet. The UI is pleasing to the eye but could be redesigned to be considerably more information-dense. It’s what I use these days.

Hey, Justin McElroy poked his head in: @j_mcelroy

Come on in man, the water’s beautiful.

So, I learned some things. If you don't want to have all your posts be publicly available to everyone on the Web, you have to go to Preferences=>Preferences=>Other, as illustrated here, and select "Followers only".

I bet a whole lot of community members have never bothered to even look in here.

[Sorry to everybody who already knew this, but I sure didn't, so I bet there are at least some others like me.]

Twitter has one feature I'd like to see here. When you're about to respond to a post with a link and you haven't opened the link, it asks you "want to read the link first?"

Disclosure: A little grumpy about people shouting me based on having seen the title of my last blog piece who obviously hadn't read it.

“Masty”, we called him. When I told him “John, we’re cut off from rescue and you’re not gonna make it” he said “You think there’s just one of me?”

OMG, emacs.ch is an instance for the Emacs community. Tempted…