121–130 of 149 posts
I was thinking something like Mastodon could be it: as a combination of Twitter + Discord.
They need to support create guilds and channels like Discord.
I'm not very optimistic about the technical direction of Mastodon. Mastodon had a minimal HTML-only interface before, you could read posts and replies of each profile. They removed it some time ago, now you just see a blank page if you don't have JS, and I think it's a huge mistake; it was a clear albeit small advantage over mainstream social networks.
Here is a client you can use to avoid turning on JS: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser.
Doesn't that just move the JS from the browser into the extension? What's the benefit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mullenweg, Zuckerberg, Musk, whoever runs Reddit now... there's no shortage of CEOs happy to enshittify their platforms.
Have you seen Reddit's recent stock prices? Bemoan enshtification if you want, but management's decision to include many long term users in the IPO and decisions since then have made many loyal redditors a lot of money ($34 -> $164.82).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is a client you can use to avoid turning on JS: https://github.com/jwilk/zygolophodon I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser.
> I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser. Doesn't that just move the JS from the browser into the extension? What's the benefit?
The benefit is that you don't need to enable arbitrary code execution in your browser. A variety of benefits flow from that; static pages, almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls, smaller attack surface etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm working on adding a WebExtension that would let you use it in the browser. Doesn't that just move the JS from the browser into the extension? What's the benefit?
There is just a small JS shim from the extension to the Python code, but yes. The benefit is that you don't need to enable arbitrary code execution in your browser. A variety of benefits flow from that; static pages, almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls, smaller attack surface etc.
I'm not sure I agree that it's a static page if there's a web extension running JS involved in the page render. I guess it's a grey area.
> almost no advertising, fewer working paywalls
We're talking about Mastodon, right? I thought it would not have those.
> smaller attack surface
This one I'll give you, but what kind of attacks would you expect from a Mastodon instance?
If all of this is a big enough issue to make you disable JS in the browser, wouldn't it be reasonable to whitelist Mastodon instances that you use?
I've been thinking of how to disrupt the Discord market. I really, really, don't want Discord of all things to succeed. I was thinking something like Mastodon could be it: as a combination of Twitter + Discord. They need to support create guilds and channels like Discord.
I really don't want Discord to succeed either, I want something that is fully E2E encrypted (except for guilds explicitly marked as "public", which should be able to provide the chat history to new members, and moderation tools).And something that isn't bloated as heck promoting Nitro any chance they get, to a point that it gets ridiculous.
Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.
> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots w…
Another problem is how opaque they tend to be; people have a mental model of how a feed should look like (not gonna describe the entirety of it, but a basic example would be "only the people I follow"), and most of the pushback tends to come from when an algorithm decides to break that mental model. (Such as for example showing you a random person you don't follow because the algorithm thinks you might like them, since someone you actually followed has engaged with their posts, to piggyback from the previous example.)
I think a really basic "no more than the X highest engagement posts from each followed user from the past 24 hours" option could do a lot as a basic heuristic to prevent people who no-life their social media from taking over the feed of someone who also wants to see what other people they follow are posting. (X can be any number but should probably go down the more people you follow.)
For a global feed, you don't need an algorithm, mostly because no amount of algorithmic curation can fix what's essentially looking into a firehose of posts - you'll probably find something you either like or conclude that it's not worth looking at to begin with.
[0]: Because anger and outrage is way easier for people to spread organically, algorithmic social media tends to overfocus on spreading it even more as that's what drives up engagement the best and that's what advertisers want. The fact that this creates a paradox where ads (that want lots of engagement) often risk ending up next to really heinous shit on those social media (what actually gets engagement) is an interesting side effect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mullenweg, Zuckerberg, Musk, whoever runs Reddit now... there's no shortage of CEOs happy to enshittify their platforms.
Have you seen Reddit's recent stock prices? Bemoan enshtification if you want, but management's decision to include many long term users in the IPO and decisions since then have made many loyal redditors a lot of money ($34 -> $164.82).