 I hated the design of thread unroller apps on Twitter so much that I made my own a few years back called Spooler. It's still used by lots of people (I don't collect usage stats but people complain when it breaks). https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/ All it does is: you give it a link to a thread, and it renders it to look like a blog post. It doesn't save or rehost the thread. It just makes it easy to read *in your browser* (for example, on a screen reader). Heyyyy I got a PR merged into WriteFreely https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/pull/537 π
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@darius Nice to see another minimalist editor out there. I've been using Atlantis Word Processor since the 1990s and it is still being maintained. Best $10 I ever spent. Wrote 7 novels using it. For ~some reason~ I have Creed's "My Own Prison" stuck in my head but the lyrics are now "I created, I created, I created my own Twitter" lol :blobsobglasses:  @darius my brain does this with songs. It pumps the same lyric over and over in a infinity circle. At some point it swaps other words in and out. Sometimes the same song for months at a time. Not bad if it's a song you like. if you want an alert when new Mastodon releases happen, you can follow @mastodon_releases (my mirror of the Github releases RSS feed) and then press the little notification bell icon that will appear next to the follow button after you click. this means posts from this bot will show up in your notifications tab. Same idea but for #hometown releases: @hometown_releases (clicking on either of these will show an empty profile. don't worry, new posts will show up) I hear they changed "toot" to "post"...... that's one #Hometown feature upstreamed :AngelDevil:
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  Just woke up and learned about #fedified. I literally work at my day job on technology to aid verification of sources and let me tell you: it seems like a pretty big hack of a project that misses the point. Basically you have to trust the humans who run that site. What we actually need is buy-in from organizations to provide rel=me linkbacks to their various representatives. And for unaffiliated people who want verification, you add it to your website. That's it. We already have it on Mastodon
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 @darius I thought about a democratic vouching system but Iβm not skilled enough to write it. (Each voucher could also be vouched for within the system) @darius 100% agreed I asked #SquareSpace support to add an easy way to insert rel=me on their hosted sites (they support custom headers if you have premium service, but not the regular service). If lots of folks make similar requests, support should come. It's a trivial feature to add. of course, lots of web hosting services already have the hooks @darius I think the problem you run into is non-techie people trying to onboard themselves but do not have the time or desire to build a whole website to give that verification meaning. What we need is a way for Mastodon's verification system to allow people to verify by putting their link somewhere on their other social media profile(s). Another tip for fediverse admins: a lot of software (including Mastodon, at least v3, not sure about v4) lets you completely turn off trending posts/hashtags/news/recommendations for your users. Our "Explore" page is just 4 tabs of glorious blankness. Obviously talk to your community before doing this. We were massively in favor of it, so I did it. We've had them turned off for years. It's been nice
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@darius Unpopular opinion: I really feel that my timeline misses an algorithm. There are is great content I am missing simply because I am not online when it gets posted, then it gets flooded by many other posts and I could never stumble upon it againβ¦ I really do not know. @darius it would be cooler if those tabs were filled with cross-server awesomeness - is that an option? Discoverability of interesting content is very difficult depending on your server & can feel silo'd Not sure on how easy it is to make a trending/new/interesting feed of content from various servers - even if it's a preselected list of sister servers that share a common niche/topic  Here's a bot I enjoy following. I never boost it because it posts images without alt text (and there basically no way for it to do so* without its author manually writing thousands of captions) but if you want to see some wild clip art from 1994, @1994clipart is one of my favs *please don't say AI captioning thanks @darius How do you find the interesting bots here? I only learn of them when someone boosts them. I wish botsinspace had a directory... @darius @1994clipart there used to be a second bot on twitter that would reply to this bot with a far higher res, antialiased rasterization of the same clip art. When twitter changed their rules to require bots to be more polite about interjecting in replies it went away, and I still miss it. A robot reply guy excited to show me CorelDRAW! art in self-named βglorious HD.β Something cool about being admin of a small server -- I am at this very moment in a room singing karaoke with 16% of our 50 active users :hotboi:  @darius I am extremely jealous because I know for a fact those are 8 lovely people, even if I don't know which 8 they are  @darius woohoo! that's awesome! *tries to imagine Musk or Zuck getting 16% of their users in a room* For this #followFriday, consider following @FeliciaDavin - she is an author of queer scifi/fantasy/romance and I daresay her posts have been very good so far. But also I'm a sucker for people who write about writing. Very glad to have her here on fediverse and she's worth a follow if you're into any of this stuff!  @darius Thank you! I really appreciated your essay on running your own social mediaβit helped me grasp the fediverse.  @darius just hopping in to also encourage people to subscribe to her newsletter, Word Suitcase - one of maybe three things that helped keep me nominally sane through the early part of the pandemic, when my brain decided the only reading it would allow beyond patient charts was romance novels and essays about same. On Monday I'll be doing a release of Hometown v1.0.7+3.5.3, which will feature lots of bug fixes, some new features, and bring us up to date with Mastodon 3.5.3. (Monday release is because I like to run the release on Friend Camp for a few days before subjecting others to it. But if you want it early, the latest hometown-dev branch is yours to have at.) I am also working on the Mastodon v4.0 merge but that will take a while longer as it is pretty complex.
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 @darius more and more I like the hometown concept. I love my instance but the mix of everyone and a small community is weird  @darius Thank you so much for all this hard work. When I booted up silvan.cloud I ended up going with Mastodon even though I've been eyeing hometown since at least 2019. I'm very interested in seeing Mastodon 4.0, especially for some of the moderation/API stuff, but then I'm super excited to dip my toes into Hometown! My number one recommendation to all new (and old) fediverse server administrators is: make your registrations closed, however your software allows for it. For Mastodon I think "registration with a review step" is the minimum level you should be locked down. Open-registration instances are 1) going to get overwhelmed with computing needs
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 @darius It's going to be fascinating to see what happens to instances like @toot.community which in 24 hours went from 0 to 15k users. An mid-sized town of people who have nothing in common apart from having woken up to the news of Mastodon on that day, and found it as the only option in the official signup process. @darius it largely depends on your goals with Mastodon. I've heard many people wanting to migrate here from Twitter due to the...new CEO. It's a huge opportunity to popularize the Fediverse and turning off open registration turns them away. For me, this was the only remotely relevant instance where I could register and that's not good. Then again, every community has the right and interest to defend itself. Hmm I should probably change the https://dolphin.town notification sound to a dolphin screech
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@darius "Bottlenose bruises. Blowhole burns. Flipper prints. This looks like the work of rowdy teens." @darius https://github.com/aaronland/go-chicken#clucking might be relevant to your interests  @darius Dolphin.town! So *that's* where all the spare e's from oulipo.social have gone! Okay this was interesting stuff but also WOW the kicker > The Verge reached out to Musk for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elon-musk-lawyer-changes-fine-warning
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 @darius this is great, iOS 16 has been a big deal for customization, this just adds onto that.
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@darius ooh nice! Thanks for pointing this out! Iβve been using the basic client and was wondering if there were better alternatives. I was really afraid our hard-right candidate would win the governor's seat but it looks like the not-hard-right candidate (who imo is actually pretty good as far as democrats go) managed to eke out a victory just barely.   @darius I'm both relieved and also deeply concerned and disappointed that these awful candidates keep getting within spitting distance of winning. Feeling this more about Herschel Walker, an absolute buffoon, coming close to unseating Raphael Warnock, one of the most impressive senators we've got. |
Gregory's Server
Would this be useful for Fediverse threads? Again this doesn't rehost content. It is basically just a 3rd party client for viewing threads. If you delete the thread, it can't do anything with it. People can't share the spooled post with other people, not really. The best they can do is send you a link to spooler with the url of the thread already in it and you press "spool" -- if you don't have permission to see the thread (bc you are blocked or whatever) it won't work
@darius I did not know about this but now I will definitely use