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Text-Only Social Network

subreply.com

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Re: Text-Only Social Network

#81

Post by Fuzzwah »

flir wrote: post #47
crazygringo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

> It's exclusionary and for zero good technical reason There might be a good social reason, though.

Because the world needs another US-centric social network.....

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#82

Post by blotter_paper »

jbaudanza wrote: post #60

I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that. I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets.…

From the about section (emphasis added):

>Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only, public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks.

[...]

>Limitations

>480 characters per reply ASCII only because it works everywhere

I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set (for minimalism). I'm not making a claim about the motivations, but either way your desire seems counter to his vision.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#83

Post by zem »

newman8r wrote: post #32
ekr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm experimenting with it and I might get rid of it. It's mostly just to try to keep the group active, because it's a small group and if the activity level dies out, the group dies out. But thanks for the feedback, I'm making a note of it.

I once watched a livejournal group die in my general takeaway from that was that people might get annoyed when you tell them what they are not allowed to do on your site, but most of them will roll their eyes and put up with it. if you tell them what they have to do they will simply drop the site and never look back.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#84

Post by bigiain »

crazygringo wrote: post #27
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 reas…

> 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”?

Those are all totally argument-for-the-sake-of-argument nit-picks, in my opinion.

To be honest, I rarely enough need to refer to UK pounds, Euro, or Yen - that I'd much more likely just type it out like that instead of try to remember/experiment what the magic key combination to produce them properly is. There is no a single English speaker in the world that wouldn't understand "fiancee" - even with non "proper" quotes around it.

> In 2020, why are you going out of your way to prevent people from ...

That argument seems to me to inevitable end with some combination of 4chan-ish image boards (because "people want to communicate in memes") or Snapchat-ish 100% video content (because "people want to communicate in video"). If you want those things - go use those things.

The OP is trying something different. You call it "exclusionary", and claim it's a decision based on zero good technical reasons. I suspect it's better described as "intentionally constrained" and a social experiment.

(And thinking bigger picture, there are totally "benefits" to using http and dial-up or slower bandwidth in some places. I have a pile of ESP32/LoRaWAN boards sitting here. If I want to maximise the range the LoRa radios can achieve, I'm looking at 27kbps or so throughput. If I want to use these on 433MHz where I live, I can't legally operate them at more than 1% duty cycle (due to .au restriction on the 433MHz ISM band and digital transmissions). I don't have enough CPU to do TLS, I don't have much more than about 255 bits per second of bandwidth. I could _probably_ use the OP's software under those limitations, and build a mesh based messaging network that'd work for anyone within ~ 3-20km of you. Totally niche application, but also possibly useful. Imagine a pocket sized battery powered non cellular non wifi multi mile range comms device that'll mesh with the ones your friends are carrying - at a festival where cellular is crushed or not available. Text messaging style social network gadgets for your camp at Burningman, for less then $40 per user? I'd build that...)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#85

Post by unityByFreedom »

blotter_paper wrote: post #82
jbaudanza wrote: post #60

I wanted to see how it would handle non-ascii text so I typed 안녕하세요 and it romanized it to annyeonghaseyo. (This is "hello" in Korean). I did not expect that. I really like the idea of a text-only social network, so I hope this takes off. I think the author should consider supporting other languages though. Seeing romanized text isn't very helpful to people that actually want to read or write in other character sets.…

From the about section (emphasis added): >Subreply was created by Lucian Marin from the desire of a having a simple to use, English only , public forum that has nothing in common with ancient and untrustworthy social networks. [...] >Limitations >480 characters per reply ASCII only because it works everywhere I could see this being a xenophobic thing, but I could also see it being more about the limited character set…

Where does Unicode not work? It’s been everywhere for years

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#86

Post by jekrb »

andreygrehov wrote: post #77

This is the only JavaScript file they use [0]. It's a pure joy. [0] https://subreply.com/static/script.js?v=6

This takes me back to how we used to write JavaScript on websites for towns/cities at a company I used to work at.

Really a joy to read.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#88

Post by unityByFreedom »

joe_the_user wrote: post #74

When you say "social network", do you mean Twitter Clone? It seems like developers in particular have come to regard Twitter as archetypal social networks despite it's many problems and the way the user doesn't really much ability to define their own social graph. IE, N-character limit is still a determiner of Twitter (poisonous) discourse quality, just for example and Twitter isn't something most people enjoy being…

> I don't think ways of defining one's own social network have been exhausted by all the networks out there

Yeah, it’s fun to build a clone, but what we really need is something innovative.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#90

Post by aahortwwy »

This is cool. I'm glad people are working in this direction.

A common theme that I've noticed among recent upstart social efforts is a focus on platform and/or policy differentiation. I personally believe this is not very important during the phase where a social network is working to reach critical mass. It seems to me that most successful social networks got their start by offering users unique content, by targeting existing, tight-knit communities, or through some combination of the two. Platform and policy help shape the social network, but there needs to be a network to be shaped in the first place - they don't form magically.

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