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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

blog.danpetrolito.xyz

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Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#91
Fun story. This reminds me of the summer my friends and I were all still around our small town — we used the Yo! app the same way, as a bat signal to meet up and get into nonsense. Someone would start Yo!ing and then once there was a critical mass of return Yo!s we'd switch to text/phone and link up.

Good times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#92

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something lik…

I've not looked at this space - but with flexible control software, such devices could serve a very wide variety of use cases. And perhaps multiple uses cases simultaneously, far less intrusively than dealing with a variety of alarm & alert systems.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#93
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default. People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to…

The Internet used to be semi literally a place you went - a desktop in the corner of some room, not central on a desk, not in your pocket. And with a ritual to access it on top of that and the dial up sounds and all. It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.

honestly ive been thinking about this stuff too. a hypothetical forum you could only log on to read if you idled on a certain page for 15 mins or something would probably have a lot higher standard of discussion and be a lot better for peoples lives, for example.

The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#94
post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

Furries are keeping this dream alive on Telegram

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. The point is the impact it has on lives, not the tools used to build it. I would enjoy it if more people focused their writing on the impact their work has on people, and less on the tools and processes used. Or at the very least, clearly delineate the build from the impact.

I see where you're coming from, but I like the way the story is formatted. There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line. It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or somethi…

It sounds like we agree. I wasn't dissing the article - I was saying that I like this article's writing and want to see more of it, and that I appreciated the title not being about the tech stack.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#97
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can treat whatsapp as an irc client, it's all in your head :) I have multiple friend groups on whatsapp - i just check them once in a while to see if anything interesting was posted. All the chat apps I'm on are muted and the mute is muted again to make sure.

Yes, If you purposely turn off all notifications on your phone, and/or live on DND mode 24/7, you quickly learn to adapt to this world where using the internet is a deliberate action. Sanity sets in: you are deciding when to use your phone or computer, not an algorithm, or other people. You’re back in the driver’s seat, like it’s 2002 again! It’s very freeing.

In 2002 i was still turning icq notifications off i think :)

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#98

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something lik…

My partner is disabled, and my home office is far enough from the bedroom/her work desk that I sometimes can't hear her when she could use, wants, or needs help. These very different priorities make messaging me difficult for her sometimes, not to mention that I can't know what the urgency is if she messages me over SMS/Signal/etc. As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED sign…

If you have Apple devices and share your locations in Find My, she could use the Find My app to make your devices beep loudly and optionally show a message. Great for urgency, since the beep is really loud and doesn’t stop until you tell it to.

Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#99
post #18

s/something/a Discord bot/ to unclickbait the title..

genuinely unbelievable that the story is so highly voted with such a vague title

The clickbait makes you click, and the story is about a cool hack, so you upvote. I don't see how this is unbelievable
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