This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with […]
@Edent you are describing the #geekproblem with the blindness to good #UX how can we communicate the "problem" to our #geeks as have been trying to do this for 20 years and they still don't want to hear it
@Edent "But I hope it will give open source and open standards developers a little jolt towards designing user experiences which are fun and easy to use." A big problem is that open, multi-implementation standards are in some tension with good UX work, which requires regular experimentation and prioritizes UI over inflexible implementation details.
@luis_in_brief Hmmm.... I sort of disagree with him.
At a base level, ActivityPub is pushing HTML around. Voting on polls, inline links, attached images - it's all just HTML.
Once you have solved the 1-1, 1-N, N-N passing of messages (a big task!) it doesn't really matter what you're sending as long as you can be sure it's somewhat valid HTML.
Hell, if Mastodon wanted to send the ❤️ 😠 😔 reactions like Facebook, a recipient could just receive fallback HTML if it doesn't know what it is for.
@Edent timely post - yesterday I had drafted a snarky toot about how the true hardcore open protocol Reddit alternative wasn’t lemmy, but Usenet. (Like most my snarky posts here, I didn’t click send because I’m trying to be better 😀).
@Edent If you're missing usenet then https://www.eternal-september.org Eternal September offer free access to text groups. Every couple of years I get all nostalgic and dive in again only to recall that is a bit of a wasteland these days.
@Edent Gah I miss the uni days and in particular our local ukc.misc group! We had “MiscMeets” and all sorts of fables and friendships came of that! #ukc#ukcmisc#newsnet#nntp
@Edent@davidgerard a few thoughts from someone who was all too there at the time:
Spam expands to fill available space, and this interacted very poorly w/ usenet's lack of anything other than client-side moderation. getting value out of usenet took ever-increasing work for everyone, and everyone had their breaking point
(Okay, slight lie: Usenet did have one server-side moderation mechanism: CANCEL messages. Boy oh boy did that scale extremely poorly. Hilariously poorly.)
@Edent@davidgerard
2. The core technical contributors continued to treat the shibboleths and ad-hoc preferences of early adopters as holy writ even after the userbase expanded 100X. There was incredible resistance to client-side MIME support until netscape forced the issue (just for example).
Everyone joked about “eternal september" but in retrospect that was the dying reflex of a bunch of poorly socialized nerds (I very include myself) who saw control of their little fiefdoms passing away.
@doboprobodyne@Edent@davidgerard Honestly, I don't think you can fix any of these problems at the individual server level in a federated system, unless interoperation/interaction with users on different servers is explicitly a non-goal.
You're right of course regarding many fundamental problems, for there we err into the cybernetics of sociology and of the endless race that federated networks have with spam and so forth.
And yet we can build advertising in our model to gain resources, and a clever mind automate to some degree spam and other poor content reporting, and indeed automate to some degree acting upon those reports where they might cross thresholds of concordance +- of other measures. Indeed already this is seen to be done by those running email servers.
So hopefully there are other things we might consider that I just have not the wit to see on my own!
@Edent I knew someone who was horrified when Google integrated Deja News into search results - they had a respectable job in finance, but suddenly the top results for their name were Usenet posts made when they were 17, mostly enthusiastic replies to offers of porn
@Edent@mattround I am of the last generation to have their youthful online indiscretions scrubbed from the internet when Google set Deja News alight and even though I hate them for doing it, it’s also kind of a relief.
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