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Text-Only Social Network

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Re: Text-Only Social Network

#222
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much want a Facebook for coding friends clone. Lots of solutions out there but I for whatever reason I don't like any of them Slack/Discord and similar interfaces are effectively chat. I want topics and replies. I know you can start a topic on both of those but it just feels less conducive to friends talking to me than talking on Facebook. I could make groups on facebook. I can't put my finger on why this does…

If all you want on top of Discord/Slack is proper topics, https://zulipchat.com/ is worth a try. See, for instance: https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platfor... https://www.ponylang.io/community/ (both use zulip for their main chat platform, AFAIK)

I want the social graph. I post, only the people I added as "friends" get to see my post, not everyone who signed up for the discord/slack. I also only want to see posts from my friends. But of course, we all have different lists of friends. Discord/Slack don't seem to be about that. But thank you for the recommendation. I'll still take a look

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#223
post #208

Tried registering, I usually try the username luc on sites to see if it's still free. But that is an "invalid username", no explanation given. So what, do I need to add numbers and special characters? Is my legal name too short? Is it already in use? This tells me nothing. Also, the about page is contradictory: > [brain][muscles] one or two emojis instead of avatars > [...] > ASCII only because it works everywhere Hm…

> ASCII only" is not meant in the sense of "plain text only". Any non-US ASCII is converted (ç->c, ÿ->y, ś->s, µ->u).

wow... way to give the finger to the majority of the world.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#224

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 HIS site. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. Not everything needs to conform to everyone.

So... I'm not allowed to critique anything ever?

It was MY comment. Don't like it? Don't respond to it.

See? Not a very useful way of going about things. ;)

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#225
Was thinking about a dating app where you only get to reveal a few photos/ability to message after answering a short multiple choice quiz managed by the user. The questions can be arbitrary but the point is that the pursued gets to control which pursuer can get to their profile via question navigation. This could help throw off unwanted pursuers.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#226

Bringing back social isn't about getting rid of images and focusing on ASCII text, it's about getting rid of URLs and article snippets, and refocusing solely on user created content. Remember when streams were only filled with updates from old friends and family with things like birthday parties, vacations, graduations, concerts, restaurant meals, etc., and nothing else? (Sort of like Instagram still is, but with tex…

> Sure, the same thing could be conveyed by a selfie wearing a MAGA hat

Everyone wearing a MAGA hat is "gullible, racist, sexist, homophobic, sociopathic or worse"? Maybe you're the one in an extreme echo chamber.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#227
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you want on top of Discord/Slack is proper topics, https://zulipchat.com/ is worth a try. See, for instance: https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/about/chat-platfor... https://www.ponylang.io/community/ (both use zulip for their main chat platform, AFAIK)

I want the social graph. I post, only the people I added as "friends" get to see my post, not everyone who signed up for the discord/slack. I also only want to see posts from my friends. But of course, we all have different lists of friends. Discord/Slack don't seem to be about that. But thank you for the recommendation. I'll still take a look

Sounds a bit like a description of Google+

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#228
I would like to see a video-faces-only social network.

Setting aside the topic of lookism and other bias issues,

I assert that the apparently intrinsic and inevitable degradation of low-bandwidth communication into tribalism and discord,

would be greatly retarded by a universal requirement for real-time high-bandwidth messaging.

Yes, this would break a lot of other qualities/features; but I'd be willing to give it a try.

(Stretch goal, looking-the-camera/image-in-the-eye as an additional requirement...)

I know this is counter to the frictionless, skim and summarize and react many-parallel-sources sipping-from-the-stream relationship we have evolved with out various extent social media platforms....

...but it's about time we tried something really different, in pursuit of finding a better balance between our technologies and our humanity, to put it grandly.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just say "said nobody ever" to someone who literally just said that? There is clearly at least one person who feels that way.

I made a minor but critical small edit to what the person just said. I switched "unknown artist or developer" to "unwanted company or brand" - which to me at least, is a super accurate change in majority user base between Twitter 2010 and Twitter 2020. Now ask yourself if anybody ever said what you're responding to?

Man, I did not see that change... I read it a couple of times, too, to make sure it was the same.

Re: Text-Only Social Network

#230
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode includes a lot of features that aren't universally desirable in applications that handle text. "Zalgo" text (many stacked combining subscript and superscript characters) can break out of the box it's contained in. Emoji characters render as distracting full-color icons that are easily confused for UI. Directional overrides let you plop an "everything after this should be printed backwards" control character i…

Thank you I was in a camp with many other comments here, that this is 21st century and supporting UTF-8 should be a default. But that malware example makes me almost do a 180. Who in their right mind thought that full Unicode should be allowed in file names? Is there a middle ground? Text-only bits of Unicode?

It's genuinely pretty tricky. There seems to be a valid use case in filenames if it needs to include both an English and Arabic or Hebrew component, for example. Which, if you work with bilingual documents between countries, is not unusual.

It's part of a broader question of visual strings having multiple unexpected Unicode representations, including Cyrillic letters masquerading as Latin, etc.

I've never heard of any solution, except for when a text component is supposed to be machine-interpretable (e.g. a file extension or domain), for the computer to display its interpretation in a special way (via icon, showing the extracted extension below the name, bolding the domain, etc.).

They're not great solutions, but there don't seem to really be any alternatives either.

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