Gregory's Server
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So I decided I would try to continue to maintain Spooler, my tool that renders Twitter threads in readable format without re-hosting any content. Lol. Lmao. Joke's on me. Here's what the Spooler website has looked like for a week now  @darius I kept saving bookmarks to spool while musing about why twitter would care to lift a finger to revive it. There's no joke. Whoa, cool blog post summarizing a bunch of available studies on quote tweeting behavior -- research that I was unaware existed! https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/01/12/quote-tweeting-over-30-studies-dispel-some-myths/ No silver bullets that will end any debates here but, you know, here's some data at least
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@darius Grateful to Hilda for this! Could you ever see instances using data and experiments to inform design decisions? Me, having time traveled to 1995: ...and in the future we are going to have handheld supercomputers that are entirely touch screen controlled! 12 year old me: Wow, amazing Present me: They become impossible to use when they come in contact with one (1) drop of water 12 year old me: That sounds bad
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 @darius Yet they work just fine after spending 30min at the bottom of a swimming pool 😮  I've been using touchscreen phones since 2008. Typing on one is still an extremely frustrating experience for me, especially typing in Russian. Since it's been this many years of me doing it every day and it still doesn't feel like an extension of my body, it must not a problem with me, but rather with this whole thing that a communication device is terrible at the one job it was supposedly designed for in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, we might want to rethink some of that stuff. @darius Was just thinking about old phones. I sometimes miss being able to use the core function of a phone when there’s water or snow. Can kinda get by with voice assistants. One day, Github will fix their opengraph implementation to point link previews to, you know, the correct # anchor, or the correct sub-page of a wiki, or what have you. (I opened a ticket months ago with support and got a nice message that was "We can reproduce this bug and are escalating it to engineering. Unfortunately it means we are also closing this ticket and you can't track it. Sorry!")
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 @darius If it costs more money to fix that fixing it will make them, they probably won't fix it. I keep getting asked to support writing rich-text-formatted posts in #Hometown (we already read them just fine). I finally wrote down, in this comment on this Github issue, a short essay outlining all my concerns with doing so: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1274#issuecomment-1379647384 Some of this is problems with Markdown, while some of this is problems with interoperability regarding any rich text rendering at all.
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 @darius Definitely a class of problem that needs wider Fediverse adoption for safe usage. Lovely chickens and eggs There almost needs to be an RFC process for this that includes more than just Mastodon, but also has key members from upstream Mastodon at the table Out of curiosity, this seems the most active upstream issue on it that I see: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18958 Don’t see any clear maintainer discussions and love the bog down into subset of Markdown semantics  This is how I do it in RSS. I include both the rendered version and the markdown version of the text if it's available. The default is the rendered version because there aren't many apps that are looking for the markdown version, but my apps are. Here's a blog post that explains. http://scripting.com/2022/07/19/152235.html?title=devNotesForMarkdownInFeeds after 25 years of using the command line... it's probably time I learn how `xargs` works huh
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@darius first step is pronouncing it... which should be done with a heavy pirate accent I hint at this a bit in runyourown.social, but "UX-based onboarding" is a horrible compromise that social-media-at-scale like Facebook has convinced us all is "best practice." It makes sense if you are one company serving millions. I think this fediverse moment we are having is as good a chance as we are going to get to examine these assumptions, and experiment with throwing them away and trying very new (or very old!) things.
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 @darius we fondly remember the glory days of IRC when everyone would help newcomers to figure stuff out, and it was a social bonding activity in addition to a practical function it's not that people are wrong to prefer things that are less work, but it's a missed opportunity these days Sooooo... the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year is "-ussy", and I am personally thanked in their primary scholarly reference for "-ussification", a paper called "A corpus study of phonological factors in novel English blends." The announcement: https://www.americandialect.org/2022-word-of-the-year-is-ussy The paper (PDF): https://cla-acl.ca/pdfs/actes-2018/Dow-2018.pdf And my citation attached ehehehehe
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For whatever reason I've been recently wistful for workhorse food from specific cheap unassuming restaurants when I lived in the Boston area. Super burrito from Anna's Taqueria in Porter Square, falafel wrap from Moody's Falafel Palace (RIP) in Central Square, sausage egg and cheese croissant from a Dunkin Donuts I used to stop at in Needham.... these are some of my many madeleines I guess
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@darius ahhh! I still think about and crave Anna’s to this day despite being on the other side of the country for over 10 years now and not having had an Anna’s burrito since I left. Today I learned that 1) to some people a server of ~1000 users is "small" 2) there are apparently servers of ~1000 users where not even ~5% of the people chip in a couple of bucks a month for operational costs?? I don't know what to call a server that doesn't support itself but it doesn't sound like a community. Something more like "a group of people signing up arbitrarily for free web services"
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@darius Public radio does fundraisers on an annual schedule. Free commercial services sell consumer data to advertisers. Philanthropists and foundations may give grants, with or without strings and interests. The bills will be paid, or instances will shut down. I’m putting in the eight dollars a month that I will never give to #ElonMusk, because I like #Mastodon and the #FediVerse better than #Twitter. If enough step up with funds and volunteering, then it won’t get dominated @darius I run an actually small server and figure I will take the L for quite some time. I also do my own stream hosting and take an L on that, but that's got a line item in my excel budget. For me at least it's a matter of taking pride in facilitating community, art, and conversation. At some point I will have to Patreon or ask for donations, I don't really like that, but realistically it's inevitable. wow, a thing that seemed obviously fake, and was then shown by data to be probably fake, now has the people who were pushing it saying it was possibly not as true as they claimed all along https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html "DNS is like many other protocols in that, in its mad dash toward universality, it produces sameness or consistency where originally there existed arbitrariness."  @darius I can see it with web origins but not quite with DNS. What an interesting claim! "Protocol is always a second-order process; it governs the architecture of the architecture of objects. [...] It is etiquette for autonomous agents. It is the *chivalry* of the object." I had actually forgotten that in December 2019 I was asked by The Verge to give my opinion on Jack Dorsey's Bluesky decentralization project. This is what I said at the time and, well, lol, I stand by it
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 @darius this blurb about blue sky is spot on and I would have agreed at the time too @mosheroperandi Made a Mastodon pull request. In v4, there is an issue on servers that don't have elasticsearch: when a user types @ in the compose box and starts to type a name, the results they get are ordered by a popularity ranking algorithm. This is fine if you were only searching accounts you don't follow, but to me it makes more sense to FIRST return matches for accounts you DO follow as a suggestion, and then return popular accounts that you don't follow
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 @darius I wonder if it would make more sense to sort by the degrees of freedom on the social graph and abandon artificial popularity ranking entirely. That would mean someone with a million followers who I don’t know would be ranked below someone who followed a person I’m following, who I was probably searching for Looks like it was a bug in the ranking algorithm, and I am just about done fixing it (with help from Eugen)  Now reading: "DNS: A Short History and a Short Future", by Ted Byfield ( @tb ), 1999 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/654/569 @darius "Look! Like meat-back on the men, you boys." - when the boys discovered meat-back 
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Added new data sources to @RosesAreRedBot so it isn't posting about Cheesecake Factory so much
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I propose we imagine a world where it is morally acceptable for a preview card to render with some amount of lag. |
@darius positor vibes only
@darius get away from her, you BUMMER
@darius oviposidrive