@fediverse What type of social media do you feel is lacking most in the fediverse?
To elaborate, there are a lot of different types of social media already on the fediverse such as microblogs, regular blogs, image sharing, link sharing and video sharing.
Personally, I'd love to see a gaming-focused social media platform on the fediverse.
A big thing that's lacking at the moment is not so much new platforms, but dedicated instances using the existing Fediverse platforms.
A great example of what I mean is something like Urbanists.video. It's a PeerTube instance dedicated to videos about urban planning, cycling, and transport.
We need more dedicated instances like that for more special interest communities.
Just imagine a PeerTube and LemmyBB instance dedicated to baking. Or Buddhism. Or the global Armenian diaspora. Or folk music. Or quilt makers. Or charity fundraisers. Or particular social issues. Or high school principals. Or a particular university. Or independent short films. Or netball. Or watercolour artists.
The more dedicated communities like that exist, the stronger the Fediverse ecosystem is as a whole.
There has been other websites that have little bits of data like the actors who are involved, but nothing comes close to being as comprehensive as iMDB.
A less messy and equally as comprehensive version of IMDB would be fantastic. I’m not sure what that would look like exactly; instance of something vs a full blown federated platform of its own… But would be cools either way.
Wish it was possible to use existing Hugo / Eleventy blog and somehow add federation to it. It feels like using a whole separate one makes it less worthwhile (and less customizable)
I don't have a mastodon account, and making a mastodon account or instance for this purpose is not the experience I would like. But I understand this is the path of least resistance at the moment, but I wish there was some sort of service that can publish my blog to the fediverse like WriteFreely and Plume do.
@cyclohexane
Longhorn does even more. If you just want to post blog posts automatically, there is an rss service for that. It monitors your blogs rss feed and posts an announcement/full article on the fediverse.
String concatenation with + is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I'm not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn't do this.
Why?
Because +, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.
Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by .. (Lua), by . (Perl, PHP), by || (PL/I, Rexx again), by & (Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading + for no good reason.
I've never bought this argument. It really doesn't take much brain power to figure out that if you are dealing with strings, the left side is going to be on the left and the right side will be on the right. That's incredibly intuitive logic.
I would offer up a different reason that neither should be used. Format strings do the trick nicely and allow you to start including literals, convert other types to strings, etc. as needed.
A whole lot of misdesigns are only a "small amount of brain power" to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.
This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"? What is the result of "string" + 3? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.
For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.
Format strings are better than + as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It's hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.
Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:
See here, & will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that's not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can't accidentally mix types. Further, it's immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:
Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it's very difficult to spot at times. And it's easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.
Just a matter of preference. I hack python, not php. Since I haven't found a zot library yet, and it's a too big a job to write one myself, I can't hack on zot. And I think it might be better than activitypub.
@dave@remcoboerma@petrescatraian@ch0ccyra1n IME, the language is full of footguns. It’s possible to write good code in PHP, and I don’t doubt that many people do, but it’s difficult for beginners to figure out the right way to do things. It doesn’t help that many tutorials teach outdated, insecure ways of doing things.
@luca yeah. Luckily I'm the only user. It's pretty annoying. I've sent the correction to Google but the warning keeps disappearing and reappearing. I've read that it might be down to misconfigured redirects or something. It could also possibly be that I've got middleware injecting stuff depending on the user agent.
It's bullshit that Google are happy to mark my site as deceptive, but won't tell me exactly what the problem is. Seems like it shouldn't be legal.
A recent update on mine has broken something though, so I can't vouch for how easy it is these days. It should be possible to have your own instance set up with a few clicks though.
As long as your internet connection is fast enough to stream the video, it does the job without you having to pay for hosting.
@ch0ccyra1n@fediverse Perhaps it already exists in some way, but I would like it if for example public or official web pages could easily connect their RSS update functionality to the Fediverse, so that I can follow a web page of for example my municipality, and also comment and engage in the Fediverse in relationship to public institutions.
Even better if Fediverse servers could treat any RSS/Atom feed as a “degraded” ActivityPub actor and let users subscribe, boosts and comment posts. We would have de facto a comment platform for everything that has a RSS/Atom feed.
@post@ch0ccyra1n@carl@fediverse
Ah thanks didn't know "gracefull degradation" but reminds me of other IT alignment processes in which a customer (me) asked for a "slim/thin" service level instead of a full blown SLA.
But going to use this one instead 👌👌
A good metaphor to be used for UI/UX could be Fediverse users as friends in a room commenting TV shows/news that are RSS/Atom feeds: friends can hear each others’ comments but TV is just a one-way communication medium.
@post@me@fediverse That was indeed a good metaphor. I think that kind of interaction in the Fediverse would be very interesting to see. Cultural institutions, civic environments, public actors and so forth being able to use their ordinary web to tell of their activities, but where the choice to engage is on the receiving end.
If this was possible, you could be absolutely certain that at least #Friendica and #Hubzilla would have had this very feature implemented since long before Mastodon was even launched. But they don't, although they federate with just about everything that moves otherwise.
@jupiter_rowland@fediverse I see, and realize the complexity. Given this, it would be awesome with that kind of connection, some kind of tool that could take any web page and make a two way connection in the style of RSS. Something easy to install or connect to a web, and provide interaction.
@Carl Heath @Fediverse That'd require changes to both sides, both whichever Fediverse project you're using and whichever site with an RSS feed you want to interact with.
You will never be able to use Mastodon to comment on a post on a blog with a backend that has last change at some point in the 2010s or the 2000s. The blog doesn't even have a back channel in any shape or form. It'd have to pull a WordPress and install a proper ActivityPub connector.
Even Friendica or Hubzilla devs would have to take ONE blog and hackney themselves directly into the backend of that one particular blog, directly into the SQL database. Much like Friendica established federation with Diaspora* back in the day when Diaspora* had nothing even resembling an API. They had to reverse-engineer the Diaspora* protocol and crack the encryption. It took literal months. And when they were done, the connection was established by latching directly onto Diaspora*'s database with no actual interface at all. It was akin to connecting a piece of out-board hardware to a computer using a drill and a soldering iron.
At least, Diaspora* was a whole network. Here I'm talking about ONE (1) website. And when they're done, they'll have to move on to the next one. And so forth.
A federated #forum software. But most likely there are a couple in the works. There's The Pavilion cooperative working on a plugin for #Discourse and some time ago a #Flarum maintainer told me they are working on adding #ActivityPub support too. And there's #LemmyBB which has forum-like aspects.
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