OMG. I love how the infinite scroll feed is gone. If you're making pie, do you think, "ah, yeah, lets add literal heroin to this so people eat more pie"? No, you're not a sociopath. But, we put infinite scrolls on user interfaces. The people that don't put Vicodin in their kids cookies don't even think about adding infinite-scroll everywhere.
Home
Public posts preserved on my own site.
When someone chooses "Volapük" as the interface language, what language do you display "Help, I was just kidding, I don't know Volapük please put my UI back" I guess last language. Edge case of if we don't know the last language, then it should be Esperanto.
Ha, that's funny. No way my posts have reached over 50% of the entire active Mastodon user base.
Epiphany... some social media sites have monastic codes to follow:
- codeburg, mastodon
- but also gab, twitter, truth social
The split kind of match up to left/right, but imho, accidentally.
You can use a telephone, email, HTTP and not follow any monastic code. Twitter was like that for awhile.
That leaves github, threads as the heirs of free speech, but mostly because their leadership is oblivious, it just isn't something they're paying attention to.
To be clear, I'm nobody, I'm not your moderator, do what you want, do what you can get away with, follow your monastic code. I follow the Brahma Net Sutra (no joke, I reread it a few times a year), it doesn't really have much to say about LLM usage or starter packs or quote tweets.
♡ 1 ↻ 0
Anonymous textboard #mastodon instance... would it
- be defederated immediately and universally
- fit right in, not like anyone knows who anyone really is around here. I'm a squirrel in an ape suit, for example. A reverse furry.
- depends on moderation algorithm. If moderation works, then it doesn't matter who the users are
Whoa Matt, you didn't use a poll?! Yeah, self selected, small sample size poll stats are meaningless and discourages meaningful discussion because it looks like I'm asking people for a button click.
♡ 1 ↻ 0
A mastodon UI shouldn't have a different entry path for lists, tags, etc and the half dozen other kinds of feeds. Just one button and see a menu of all your feed categories (tags, lists, collections, favorites, bookmarks, saved searches) they're all the same object... a list of posts and members, but made differently.
They should still get their own distinct edit screens tho.
Brought to you by me staring too long at "Lists", "Tags" as main menu options.
I hate trifocles and bifocles
#Phanpy went so hard on the empty "zen" UI that for years I thought "this app hasn't implemented anything, it is an abandoned weekend project"
Oh look at that, it supports "like"! Took me a while to find it. I mean, I suppose I could do what users are supposed to do and go read the source code. That's on me.
They're not wrong, it's a product choice.
- phanpy - all UI widgets hidden
- elk.zone - widgets mostly visible
- tweetdeck clones - airplane cockpit UI, just an ocean of buttons and columns♡ 0 ↻ 0
Booksmarks are another "whut" feature in mastodon... the burden for figuring out how to use this cow tool is on the user.
- reader later?
- a curated, but private feed?
- a private like?
- an incomplete way to bookmark things (because it doesn't do offsite bookmarking and doesn't support unwrapping and bookmarking the article in the post)
Features on #mastodon I hardly ever use
- Unlisted/private scopes
- Scheduled posts
- Sensitive. Why is it on the post? It's the profile that is sensitive and likely to cry if the replies are too mean.
I have not come across a weirder product than pastebins since I first discovered twitter. My first reaction to twitter was "this is useless" and I think everyone else thought the same and kept thinking of creative uses. When everything looks like a cow tool, you can't stop thinking if maybe it has some use case.
(I'm using pastebin as the generic product category)
- Tweet long - pastebin is for the overflow
- Source code - pastebin with correct formatting and forking
- textboard - message in the bottle with data too hot to put your name on it
- off site drafts - either encrypted or not
- textboard - IF ONE EXISTED WITH APIs, it would be a fully anonymous mastodon experience. These exist only in Japan where people behave well enough even when anonymous.♡ 1 ↻ 0
OMG. I run an API thingy for 2800 of my accounts and find 8 Mastodon collections.
I add all my own accounts to a collection and about 7/8 of them fail because I need to login into each and allow collection membership or something.
From my twitter archive
- found 5000 recoverable handles via replies
- found 100s of matches by handle
- can visual inspect that the avatars are the same
Doesn't have a whole website like debirdify had tho... this is just in the settings/import friends tab.
so many "this is a bot replica from twitter" with 0 posts. Just so many of them.
♡ 1 ↻ 0I'm finding so many people I who I followed on twitter and they have 0 or 1 posts, following 0, followed by 0. And that is just going to discourage the next person to follow that account. In onboarding, apps should get people following 10-20 real people that they might know right away, get some posts going right away.
♡ 3 ↻ 1
Who is the leading anonymous text website? 4chan? world2ch.net? some other textboard? NO!
https://regulations.gov - you can post anonymous and your comment will be posted for the public to see!
Do you have a tofu salad sandwich recipe you want to post anonymously? Technically you can post it on regulations.gov
govt: "OASH Request for Information Temporary Placement of 7-Hydroxymitragynine Above a Specified Threshold in Schedule I"?
me: Oh, don't put that on a tofu salad sandwich. Let me give you a proper recipe.♡ 0 ↻ 0
The twitter archive does not include a list of your friend info. At best you can extract a handle list of everyone you replied to.
*Mastodon*: What will we ever do to grow the ecosystem?
*Debirdify*: We'll let people from twitter find all their friends on mastodon.
<2023 surge in usership>
*Mastodon*: Exactly! A grassroots movement to tell new and old users to adhere more closely to the Mastodon monastic code!
<2024 exodus to bsky>
My twitter export is 280mb zipped. Next to see if it can be "uploaded" to the browsers and held in memory, then unzipped in memory and extract the 20kb of user Info, then a few hundred API calls later we could recreate debirdify in the browser.
Pastbins (plural!) are very unstable websites. No single one dominates the scene, the show up and go offline constantly.
You can put a webpage into the URL by compressing it into the PATH (the part after `?` eg `example.com?<html><title>URLs are my Host</title></html>`
That makes all link shortening/bookmarking sites pastebins. If example.com has JS that expands and displays the document, then the user gets a good experience.
Anonymous post = pastebin/textboard
Follow anonymous person(s) = public feed on pastebin
Anonymous retweet = share link to pastebin
Anonymous like = uh... you shout "I LIKE YOUR POST!" unless they're standing by, then whisper, "I like your post"
Anonymous bookmark, draft, friend, follow = same but data stored in browser
OK. Spent way to much time thinking about this.
You can't support anonymous posting on mastodon, without, like creating a pubic API that writes to say `@Anonymous` accounts. I'd worry it would get banned as soon as a bad post got thru.
But a social media client can support multiple providers, like bsky+mastodon. So I could support a pastebin or two as a provider. So the experience would be, read public mastodon feeds, and then write to an anonymous pastebin.
I'll have to keep looking to see if there aren't any awful textboards, because that would be more in the spirit, i.e. anonymous writing with replies and so on.
♡ 0 ↻ 0This would be a cool problem to solve. How to do enough auth so that you could stop bad behavior but not so much auth that you know who anyone is & moderating in an environment where people are anonymous probably precisely because they want to misbehave.
♡ 1 ↻ 0
Why'd no one tell me about textboards? Oh because you'd have to reveal your identity.
TODO: create a mastodon-to-textboard integration.
Maybe not? Oh nothing is left because it is all either awful or spam or offline.
Funny on Mastodon, we barely know who people are and it isn't overrun by spam. But on textboards, they get overrun by spam. Maybe things could be despammed by relying on browser fingerprints for identity.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
#gitlab
Day 1: oh yeah, 36 layers of `extends:` imported across 8 repos, this is so clever.
Day 10,000: Yeah, we don't know what any of these `extends:` do, just keep adding more if you need to
IDEA: autodopamine features in a mastodon client. Post and immediately, the star count and retweet count start going up, like 10 or 20 per second, an auto reply that says, "you're so smart". No one else can see this, but you'll know that your mastodon client likes your content and has your back.
2 ways to monetize the client side of social media apps
- app connections. You can't integrate most websites experience into social media without an always on server.
- cache search. Letting people index every tweet they've seen to enable features that the main server can't support.
I correlated about 100 accounts I follow on github with accounts on mastodon & found about 10 new ones. So few people follow people on Github, I don't see this being a big deal. But I have 500 repos starred, I bet if I checked all them for a rel=me link, I could find some more accounts to follow.
A few years ago I priced out a mac with 128gb of memory and decided I couldn't justify spending that much money. Had I, I could be selling that now and buying Bolivia.
Checking to see what frame rate Bolivia gets.
♡ 1 ↻ 0
I'm correlating my social network graphs with mastodon. Export my google contacts, 173 of them, do a bulk search and I get 1 new hit! About 3 hits total. LinkedIn export would probably perform better.
Whoa! I logged into Bandcamp! I thought their login and signup system had been broken so I waited a few years to try again. I kind of figure if auth didn't work they'd go out of business.
Is spotify still evil?
Archived poll
- No, they've mended their ways0 votes
- Nah, still evil10 votes
- Nah, but about as evil as all the other companies1 votes
- Wait, whut2 votes
13 voters
Mastodon, Spotify, Dropbox support #PKCE integration so an browser-only app can get permissions from a user to make API calls on their behalf from a clientside only app. But most other integration possibilities require a server so would cost $ to provide such an integration.
Google & Microsoft appear to have some sort of PKCE support, so it should be possible to do "find friends from google contacts" but app registration looks difficult. At that point, it's easier to ask people to export a csv of their contacts and work with that.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
Just need a bottle of water, but it is too hard to pronounce
Y'all think you're shitposting and here I am distilling all your tweets. Soon all your intelligence will be mine! MINE!
Oh, oh, I got an idea for an oauth website-to-website integration... and they don't support that.
Can't stop me tho, what if I just have my user run the web client locally, connect to a local screen scraping proxy and I can do integrations to EVERYTHING.
The oauth automatic app registration process on mastodon is so easy, I keep thinking surely example.com has similar easy integrations. But nope. Either they don't support oauth or they don't support easy app registration, so a user would have to go register an app or create an API key and paste it in, etc, etc.
♡ 0 ↻ 0
IDEA: an anonymous account on Mastodon that you or anyone post to. Kind of like that public confessions account, but without asking you to do something bad first. Have no idea if it would end up in content that anyone would want to follow.
Implementation
- needs moderation.
- would need to prohibit links, replies
- would need some sort of flood control
IDEA: social media website focused on talking to yourself.
Signal, Teams, Slack, etc all have a "notes to self" feature and that doesn't need a server or account.
The usual notification section exists to abuse my attention, another example of free OSS mindlessly copying dark patterns because evil corp did it too. It should instead give me reach analytics and a list of new people to maybe follow.
The bell/or something just happened icon or signal should only happen for replies because that convos happen in real time. Dopamine rushes from looking at reach analytics does not HAVE to happen in real time as it happens
♡ 0 ↻ 0
Mastodon endorsements... I'm not even sure what I'd use them for...
- account represents a topic I care about? But what if they don't make good content? An endorsement would be like a big "badge" in the shape of a user profile link?
- account is someone who tweets content similar to me? Yeah, that makes sense, people would see the endorsement as a recommendation to follow.
featured profile/endorsement docs: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/endorsements/
♡ 0 ↻ 0
I don't know maybe Eliza wasn't that good of a chat bot
Well, the Mockingbird client now has someone to chat with in Anonymous mode, Eliza
Downside, the chat/notification is essentially whole new pages and don't really show off the authenticated chat/notification UI.
The idea was it would disappear as soon as you follow some accounts.
I never liked TweetDeck or its clones. I don't need that much distraction on one monitor. Give me one column of distraction at a time. I noticed that all of these are basically feeds/user lists & put them all in one place
- lists
- collections
- endorsements (heard of those?)
- local feed, fedi feed
- trending posts
- trending links
- saved searches (on mastodon.social I think save can only mean browser bookmark?)♡ 0 ↻ 0
So retweets used to be retweets, then likes were retweets and now replies are retweets too. 50% of my feed here is the original post that someone I am following replied to.