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alex
13 comments
Kartik Agaram

@aw "I was (this is embarrassing to admit) an active Twitter user for a long time. I don't feel good about how I acted and behaved on that platform, and in retrospect, I realize much of this is not about some personal moral flaw, but the way in which the platform drew certain traits out of me -- a tendency to be flippant, sarcastic, ironic, sanctimonious, sometimes cruel." :pilin: :pilin: 😭 :pilin:

20 May 2023 at 2:22 | Open on merveilles.town
Kartik Agaram

@aw One idea I've had for a while is to create a service that requires its own little client to read. That might serve as another way to signal that you aren't on the open web. You get some of that benefit with flounder just by being on Gemini.

20 May 2023 at 2:24 | Open on merveilles.town
alex

@akkartik that’s interesting — have you seen offpunk? It would be interesting to have a server that enforces a once a day pull of data too notabug.org/ploum/offpunk/

20 May 2023 at 2:35 | Open on merveilles.town
Kartik Agaram

@aw Indeed! Though I was imagining some weirder interactions. Imagine being on a client and being able to tell that the author is present on the server working on a new blog post. Probably not a good idea 😂

20 May 2023 at 2:38 | Open on merveilles.town
Devine Lu Linvega
Kartik Agaram

@neauoire @aw "3 people leaving hearts in anticipation of what you are going to write."

20 May 2023 at 2:39 | Open on merveilles.town
⛧ esoterik ⛧

@aw to your point about not feeling good about how twitter encourages us to act, this is something i wrote in 2014 (in a sprawling post that you could be forgiven for not wanting to read):

plastic-idolatry.com/erik/log.

20 May 2023 at 2:39 | Open on merveilles.town
⛧ esoterik ⛧

@aw > but i am starting to hate the sarcasm, the mockery, the tone. i am just as guilty of it as anyone, so i am not trying to point a disapproving finger at you or anyone else. i just don't like the person that twitter seems to be training me to become. at the same time, it's true that without sarcasm, ire, or force, 140 character statements seem to compete less well in the "marketplace of tweets".

20 May 2023 at 2:42 | Open on merveilles.town
spooky blip 👻

@d6 @aw I was so bad about this. I was also much angrier at the world (in an unhealthy "I can't act on any of these things I'm retweeting anyway" way) and annoyingly over talkative even if I had nothing useful to say. I blame this in varying parts on myself and the platform, but it took leaving Twitter fully to really break various aspects of that :/ what a messy place.

So to that end, AW, what I'll say is just "same............ I empathize"

20 May 2023 at 4:16 | Open on merveilles.town
m455

@aw this was a fun read, thanks. it feels similar to how i run a private irc server for friends. the server only allows registered accounts to connect, and im the one that creates them, with an initial temp password and instructions on how to change it. im very particular in who i invite to the community due to my lack of time, but also want to make sure people fit into the vibe we have there. there isnt really a way to register either haha

20 May 2023 at 2:56 | Open on tiny.tilde.website
makeworld

@aw a good example of how the small web is not just a big web site that isn't visited often. The paradigm has to be different!

20 May 2023 at 13:38 | Open on merveilles.town
cathos

@aw That's an interesting point - the rules that inform the culture are arbitrary, but also important for setting the scene of the community

20 May 2023 at 14:17 | Open on merveilles.town
ティージェーグレェ

@aw pretty common in the BBS era to have similar policies, sometimes outright questionnaires, if more 1337: sometimes listing scene affiliations was a prerequisite to being granted certain kinds of access.

That stuff never went away, but there was a marked difference in the intention and design of the web. View Source was not an afterthought, it was an ethos. The intention was that WWW was supposedly going to be open from the get go.

That didn't last long, we didn't even make it through the 1990s without the so-called "browser wars" and commerical vendors trying to lock people into things.

Ironically, it could be argued (I think rather successfully) that the 1960s era RFC driven nature of the Internet was even more open than the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, the Web came after Micro$oft and other nare do well technocrat robber barons were plundering and commercializing technology. Few today know of the underpinnings spearheaded by Doug Engelbart with NLS (oNline System, earlier than even RFC-1 or UCLA joining) even within academia these days. Whereas Doug was a personal friend of mine.

To be honest, while I've seen lovely levels of BBS era fine grained permissions and close knit communities since the web, I've rarely, perhaps never, seen them on the web.

Too many, particularly in recent years, sword rattle about so-called "gatekeeping" when, at least from my vantage it's always been a bit more: "you must be this tall to ride" and most people, aren't.

@aw pretty common in the BBS era to have similar policies, sometimes outright questionnaires, if more 1337: sometimes listing scene affiliations was a prerequisite to being granted certain kinds of access.

That stuff never went away, but there was a marked difference in the intention and design of the web. View Source was not an afterthought, it was an ethos. The intention was that WWW was supposedly going to be open from the get go.

20 May 2023 at 14:27 | Open on rap.social
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