Notices by Nik (nikclayton@mastodon.social)

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma As a (non-Fedi) benchmark, #Metafilter (/cc @jessamyn) costs about $250K a year, and most of that is moderator staff cost.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1k_OtgtWwh80LyvukFOZYvYWTkv8rEKgj

@inthehands Not sure why you thought that was sarcastic. Trying to form a mental model of how Word interprets formatting instructions ("Why does the formatting change when I collapsed two paragraphs into one?") and then giving instructions to Word based on that mental model meets the definition.

Contrast that with pounding on the keyboard trying to get it to do what you want without understanding what's going on.

@hbuchel why does "it's largely a tech instance" matter?

I confess, I don't understand peoples' obsession with specific servers. It feels like as if when you joined Reddit your account was somehow limited to posting to a specific subreddit.

I appreciate there's a critical server connectivity limit below which reach and discovery are affected, and new users might not be best served by those smaller servers, but apart from that...?

@hbuchel if Hachyderm is

1. Sufficiently well connected that discovery and search works well
2. Sufficiently well moderated
3. Not going to ask a user to leave if they post about non-tech topics

then I'm not sure how it's a bad recommendation.

I'm assuming people want to follow accounts of people they know, and their primary discovery mechanism is posts that are boosted into their feed.

@sebinthestars Do you know about the cosocial.ca model? https://blog.cosocial.ca/

@andrew @jerry These are available as JSON using the API.

https://infosec.exchange/api/v1/instance/domain_blocks

@vv221 @ellie that's not a very nuanced take. For example, today I found myself writing code to migrate between different internal storage formats in an app, as the format has changed across versions.

Eventually no one is going to be using the old version, and that code is technical debt that can be deleted.

But without telemetry that reports back the version of the app in use it's impossible to know when it's safe to do so.

[This is very likely only going to be of interest to Mastodon client developers, so a very small niche]

There are some very odd configuration choices exposed by Mastodon/Mastodon-like servers. Some are probably errors, others desperate cries for attention.

https://gist.github.com/nikclayton/ebba4c76261b377094d31fe72f503ec9

@codinghorror @powersoffour recommendations again?

Via https://bootiemashup.com/best-of-bootie/bestofbootie2018/:

https://bootiemashup.com/bestofbootie2018/Best%20of%20Bootie%202018/15.%20Rappy%20-%20F.R.I.E.N.D.S.%20(Marshmello%20%26%20Anne-Marie%20vs.%20The%20Rembrandts).mp3

@cstross so mistakes in the output are parroty-errors?

I'll see myself out...

@adnan @bcantrill Absolutely. Back in the day Sun ran a contest, "Try before you buy". Get a machine (an Ultra 60, IIRC), for 60 days shipped to you free.

Blog about something interesting you did with it, enter the contest, and maybe win the machine.

I instrumented Sendmail with DTrace, evaluating different queuing strategies (along with a comparison of Solaris and FreeBSD on the machine). Found a sendmail bug along the way, and won the contest.

https://nikclayton.wordpress.com/2006/07/04/raison-detre/

Thanks Bryan

@Tusky "Our OpenCollective policy has always been that we will use our budget to enable contributors who would otherwise not be able to contribute. "

I am disappointed beyond words to have to say this, but this is a lie, #tusky.

https://write.as/nikclayton/update-2-on-stepping-back

I **do not** have a conflict of interest; I have not taken money from the #Tusky project in the past, I do not have any open expenses with the project now, and none of my income is remotely related to the project or any competing projects.

I'll be reading any replies with questions, collating the questions directed at me, and then writing a single response addressing all of them (or one per day if the questions run over multiple days).

I am stepping back from the #Tusky project with immediate effect.

I discovered severe lapses in how the Tusky project's donations (received via #OpenCollective) were being handled. When I reported those to the project's private "Tusky Contributors" Matrix channel the financial admins tone policed the feedback, refused to engage with the concerns I and others raised, and demanded the discussion be stopped.

There is too much detail for a thread, so please read https://write.as/nikclayton/stepping-back-from-the-tusky-project.

@dansup @pixelfed please don't repeat this mistake, https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25939

Now that #Tusky 21 is released I'll be doing a post a day on each new feature or user-visible bug fix you might see.

I'll be trying to do these in the rough order the change landed.

I'm not covering everything. Notably, I'm skipping over the amazing translation work that's done by volunteers at https://weblate.tusky.app/. And anything that either fixes a crash, or refactors code.

@trunksapp tangent, but don't do what @apps does.

Fedilab has an intent filter like this:

<data
                   android:host="*"
                   android:pathPrefix="/@"
                   android:scheme="https" />

https://github.com/caraesten/Fedilab/blob/develop/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml#L138

This hijacks non-Mastodon links like https://medium.com/@kris-nova/why-fix-kubernetes-and-systemd-782840e50104 and tries to open them in Fedilab.

This obviously fails, and is obnoxious when it happens.