201–210 of 220 posts
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> in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load In a perfect world, HN wouldn't need any web thing at all, NNTP is better fit for it. With all the features of decent newsreader of your taste.
How does one upvote comments using NNTP?
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The web is heavily abused because many developers are not aware of its misguided history or even what the web is for. To be extremely clear the web is a document (markup) delivery/rendering application. The design goal of the web is to deliver documents that contain hyperlinks, where those hyperlinks address content extension. The web had no intention to be anything else. That said the web was hijacked, for lack of a…
> That said the web was hijacked, for lack of a better term, by early web browsers that intended to do things that the web was never intended to do. This is how we got JavaScript. I'm not sure that this is accurate. Tim Berners-Lee in his 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web [1] contemplates usage that is compatible (or at least not incompatible) with the JavaScript we have today. Excerpts from his proposal: > "Hyper…
Not exactly. REST is only semantic addressing. It becomes an architectural principle when that is the primary basis for the organization of content. That said it is additive to the organizational concept of hyperlinks, but it does not replace or disqualify the original intention of content distribution.
> Burners-Lee goes on to sketch out what such a system might look like, and characterizes the current browser/server architecture, emphasizing the separation between display logic and server logic, and anticipating the evolution of those display programs:
That is how we came to something like CSS. I remember developing for the web in the 90s and browsers completely abandoned this concept. This concept of separation didn't become a practical reality (cross-browser) until about 2006 and then was still challenging in those (IE6) days.
> Lastly, an excerpt from an interview with a Wired interview of Burners-Lee from 2014, characterizing JavaScript as part of the web's "fabric" and emphasizing its ability to evolve [3]:
Yes, the current web cannot function without something like JavaScript. That is the web adapting to the technology opposed to the technology adapting to the web.
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What if a lot of your friends and family are on it, and some interesting people you don't know yet are on it, and your favourite brands… aren't ? What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it?
> What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.
Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages.
It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
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Sorry, but I wouldn't like to lose the ability to build fully custom solutions. I don't want to rely on defaults. One person's sensible default is another's insane one. JavaScript is what it is today because it serves a purpose and frankly, I think it does it well enough for now. And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible defau…
> And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible default. That'd be amazing. I wouldn't have to manually kill awful anti-user elements on half the pages I visit, learn how some special snowflake interface works yet again, and so on. I'd know exactly when server communication was going to happen. I could set custom user styles to wh…
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> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...
>Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! No, the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. Why would my 60-odd year old mother who uses Facebook to talk to her COPD support group even care about Diaspora? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the ans…
That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch.
> I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance.
Scuttlebutt is neither anonymous nor censorship-resistant. It's free of adverts and sponsored content experiences. It's a friendly, co-operative culture (hence the software is open source, but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software).
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>Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! No, the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. Why would my 60-odd year old mother who uses Facebook to talk to her COPD support group even care about Diaspora? I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the ans…
> the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch. > I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance. Scut…
Here's the problem though - it's not really nicer to use than Facebook for someone who is already familiar with Facebook and who doesn't mind using it. The UX of these platforms tends to be rough in ways that would annoy many non-technical users, which is understandable given their newness, and the fact that technical users are early adopters, but still makes mainstream adoption difficult.
The Scuttlebutt client I downloaded has a search form at the top that will not behave as mainstream users will expect - they will wonder where their "newsfeed" is, try to search for a topic of interest and it will fail out of the box. Making an intellectual or emotional argument for why an alternative to existing social media clients is preferable won't work as long as the physical experience of using the alternatives is more complicated.
>but your mom only has to care about those details if she wants to help build the software.
But those are the details that dominate the frontpages of these platforms. She either has to care or else care enough to wade through it to find what she needs. That's a real problem.
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> the task is to first create alternatives which are just as accessible and user-friendly as Facebook, and then sell them to the mainstream on terms they actually care about. That's exactly my point! A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch. > I do know the answer has nothing to do with open source, anonymity or censorship-resistance. Scut…
> A term they might care about is: this is so much nicer to use than Facebook; I feel happier using this to keep in touch. Here's the problem though - it's not really nicer to use than Facebook for someone who is already familiar with Facebook and who doesn't mind using it. The UX of these platforms tends to be rough in ways that would annoy many non-technical users, which is understandable given their newness, and t…
The user experience of using the app, and of discovering the app (i.e. its web presence), needs to be friendly and relevant to the user.
I don't think we want to imitate Facebook too directly, because we don't want it to be Facebook, but it needs to make sense as you use it :)
(By the way, I'm a mere end-user here, and this is just my opinion!)
> Smartphone manufacturers sell mesh-first mobile devices for the developing world I hope puri.sm is listening. This is what I want my Librem 5 to be!
First of all the Librem5 is as open as possible, i.e. if there is a way to support this or another kind of mesh networking then you will be able to add this function to the Librem5 - as long as the software needed for this is free and works on Linux on ARM (ARM64 to be more precise). There will be no restrictions from our side, none at all.
But I also have to point out that we are bound to what we find on the market, concerning hardware and drivers. The latter can be modified to support what is needed for meshes but hardware usually is hard to change. We are currently looking for as good as possible free software supported WiFi and BT chips that do not require runtime firmware and are power saving enough for a mobile device. This turns out not to be very easy. Once we settle on some type we will check thoroughly for mesh requirements.
So yes, your voice(s) are heard! And we will do our best to support mesh networking, in soft- and hardware on the Librem5.
Cheers nicole
My wife gets increasingly pissed off when she searches for various materials she wants to purchase. A specific site keeps coming up for her that she absolutely hates and starts with an E. And there's nothing special about the links, and likely nothing important about the specific products other than the domain name that starts with E has billions of cross-links all over the web. It makes the random long-tail search t…
Try https://millionshort.com/ .
It needs some user-experience upgrades - currently its default is to not omit anything, should be a default in settings. It is also trying to re-write my search as I type and often causing spelling errors. But yes I agree this is what I am looking for.
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> What if our secret advantage is that not everyone is on it? Facebook might have started out that way, but don't think that angle is gonna help you build a new, even bigger, Facebook. How long did Facebook actually stick to its "Only students" rule? Imho that was more marketing than anything else.
Scuttlebutt is designed deliberately so that you don't see the whole network, only the bits you care about. Partly this is view-filtering, but also your user agent only requests and stores data if it might be relevant to you, i.e. friends of friends and replies to their messages. It's not really one network, but a group of potentially-overlapping networks.
That might hold true for the technical implementation, but it doesn't hold true for the actual user experience.
If you are from the US and looking to befriend somebody from France, then you don't have to join "Facebook.fr" to make that connection, it all works through Facebook.com.
Not too long ago the same process looked pretty much like this:
"Are you on AIM?"
"No, are you on ICQ?"
"Nah, but I'm on MSM!"
"Sorry I'm not on MSM, but I'm on Linkedin!"
"No good for me I don't like Linkedin!"
"Guess I'm gonna make an MSM account -_-"
For that very same reason I ended up creating my first Facebook account on Facebook.de, which was a scam site back then. But decades of compartmentalization of users into "regions" convinced me that if I want to get any use out of Facebook I better sign up with their German version of the site, as most of my friends/family are German, that's how alien this whole "aggregate all your social contacts in one place" idea was back then.