To be honest, I'd like to see more totally-independent AP microblogging codebases, but I'm not sure if implementing one is genuinely an unavoidable hassle or what, because even the small ones are too big for one person to maintain?
Like, a tiny reference implementation with barely any features is the best thing for any protocol to have, because once you have that there's a pressure to keep the protocol simple enough that the reference implementation stays small, while at the same time, the small reference implementation can be easily forked or ported by anybody who doesn't like the behavior of a major implementation.
Mastodon is the opposite of a good candidate for this (and actually, this problem also affects SSB): it contains both frontend and backend code (whereas what you really want is just the server portion and let somebody else build a client -- frontends are always full of fiddly bullshit that needs to be tuned, and users should have control over their frontends anyhow), and it's full of features somebody requested that maybe somebody else doesn't want.
Often the cost of forking is just downstream of protocol design; there are a billion gopher clients because anybody can build a gopher client in an afternoon, and there are exactly two full-featured web browsers (firefox and various chrome skins) because a small group could not write a modern web browser in a lifetime.
the first grand twitter -> masto migration was not last year; it was in 2017. this migration brought in a lot of gay & trans people who were boycotting twitter over moderation policies on organized harassment by gamergaters, TERFs, and the alt right, and it's a major reason why fedi is *so* trans so it feels really weird for people to act like it never happened just because they're noobs.
the first grand twitter -> fedi migration was in the identica days, back when twitter was competing with google+ and ello... so 2009ish maybe? this was related to excitement over distributed, noncommercial social media, and brought in a lot of anticapitalist & FOSS people. this was during a period when twitter still had the fail whale, to give you a sense for the time.
there has been at least one major migration-wave to the fediverse per year since 2017, more or less evenly split between people moving because they don't want to give a rich guy more money and people moving because centralized moderation sucks. the one that happened after musk bought twitter was unusually large but not different in kind from any of the others.
tomorrow, all my games and such are on deep discount for my birthday. if you were considering checking them out, now is the time. https://itch.io/s/116290/birthday-sale
Absolutely. There are places I've avoided submitting to because I'd have to functionally join their club and I don't have the spoons. (Particularly, voice & video chat is something that's stressful for me & so I try to limit it to groups I'm already comfortable with.)
Well, we've got a lot of small presses with discords because we've got a lot of small presses, right? Basically, the economics of self-publishing has gotten good enough that it doesn't take much capital to run an imprint. So we should expect some to pop up with completely different styles, as well.
I definitely agree with the sentiment, though I've noticed that a lot of the small presses with discords that I've encountered have basically developed an artistic community of writers via the discord, which could be very productive.
On the whole, I compare them favorably to the discords for open source projects, basically because while open source had previously had a good, accessible ecosystem for project communities (irc+listservs+forums+bug trackers, etc), having a small press develop a community (versus being established to serve an existing scene) seems to be a new development. What's more, people are using discord features in an interesting way (Tenebrous uses voice chat to do pitch party / brainstorming events, for instance).
It's kind of stupid *not* to take email submissions, but I guess it gets rid of the need for a slushpile if you're basically socially vetting every author & getting involved with prospective authors before they even start writing.
One thing movies used to do that I liked is having guys who are just, like, buddies, on the same wavelength, in a way that the audience is supposed to recognize but not participate in. Like, the actor with one line says it to another guy who's an extra, and he chuckles, and we realize these guys are buddies and this is an in-joke and we're not buddies with these characters so we'll never get it. Maybe later in the movie one of these guys dies and the buddy is sad about it, or one guy is in trouble and the other is worried. Just having a movie world that has social relationships not organized around the leads
I thought "oh man, I really want a piece of postapocalyptic media where the bondage weirdos are the heroes and the villians are neonazis" and then I realized that was just The Invisibles
i took french all through high school, and i'd like to brush up to the point where i can maybe read serious books at some point. so, i'm thinking of starting with comics. anybody got french graphic novels they can recommend i read in the original language? is it worth investing in some tintin and moebius collections?
huh. i heard people talking about maybe implementing something like that a couple years ago, but i thought it was dropped since it never seemed to show up
any name you have chosen for yourself -- even temporarily -- is more real than the one chosen for you by the strangers who gave birth to you. they didn't know who you'd become.
A pig in a cage on antibiotics. Ex-Xanadu, resident hypertext crank. "Under electronic conditions, there is no escape" -McLuhanElsewhere:@enkiv2@niu.moe @enkiv2 @nkiv2 @enkiv2