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Text-Only Social Network

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Re: Text-Only Social Network

#21

Post by reaperducer »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #18
cosmotic wrote: post #13

Basically half the messages have an emoji in it, so I would not describe it as "text only"

I would argue that emojis would fit within a technical definition of "text". They fit inside the text/* mimetype.

So do uuencoded and base64-encoded images.

...and we're right back where we started from.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#24

Post by knowledge-clay »

reaperducer wrote: post #21
knowledge-clay wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that emojis would fit within a technical definition of "text". They fit inside the text/* mimetype.

So do uuencoded and base64-encoded images. ...and we're right back where we started from.

True, but my terminal, web browser, phone, and text editor don't render base64-encoded images in-line, nor is base64 encoding part of the Unicode spec. Emojis behave much more like text than like images.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#27

Post by crazygringo »

ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #2

"About -> Limitations: ASCII only because it works everywhere" This should be in the features. It is the strongest selling point of the site as I see it.

So... even if it's English-only, I can't quickly refer to a price in £ or € or ¥? Or that it's 90°F out? I can't talk about my fiancée? I can't even use “proper quotes”?

Yikes.

These days, talking about the "benefits" of ASCII-only is like talking about the "benefits" of HTTP over HTTPS, or the benefits of dial-up as opposed to broadband.

No thanks. It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason. For every reasonable programming language, there are functions to do everything in UTF-8 that you can do in ASCII, with about the same complexity.

In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from typing the honest-to-goodness useful characters they want to communicate with? In English?! Where exactly does UTF-8 not work, that this site does?

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#28

Post by gverrilla »

edu wrote: post #26

Really nice, the big question is who to follow and how to find them. Twitter solved that masterfully on their on-boarding experience.

yes because social networks are intended to follow webcelebrities, tv celebrities, brands, and government leaders, alright! great job twitter

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#29

Post by ekr »

newman8r wrote: post #22

I've been trying to make something along those lines at podaero.com, and I'm actually trying to get HN users to join some of the small groups... see here if interested https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod

I did try signing up. The second I ran into the activity requirement quota I quickly got out of there. That's a huge red flag for me, why is there a quota imposed on me? Are you paying users or something? Why expect free work to be done?
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