Doesn’t count if you used to be a reader but MS screwed up your brain and somehow you can no longer finish a book?
I wasn’t a book a day reader, more like 2-3 a week. Now I’m a I’ll try really hard to read young adult fiction book that my kid loves so they have someone to talk about it with, and maybe I’ll remember I was reading it after I put it down.
@aintist@Talia_christine I feel your pain - ADHD brain. 🙋🏻♂️I don’t read a lot of books myself - to the extent I do, I usually listen to them. That’s why I clarified in a subsequent post. It’s the spirit of reading I’m getting at. This is a place where you see something that sparks your curiosity and you want to go learn more. Even just clicking through to read a linked article. I’m much more scrupulous about reading before boosting here, suspect I’m not alone on that…
@misc@Talia_christine I’m good with articles, can’t finish books, hate listening to podcasts/books.
MS sucks but I don’t have to work, know my kids better than I would have and spontaneously developed ability to draw.
My life is very different than I envisioned, I assumed if I had more free time I’d never stop reading, instead I can draw for pain relief, or to mock my kids. I can sleep whenever I want, and always have an excuse to avoid a party I don’t want to go to. Not the worst trade off
@misc one that is way smarter than the default Mastodon web interface, for example: only see the latest instance of someone's boosted toot by the user who boosted it, but your feed isn't full of those same boosted toots; just indicate some icon that there are 45 boosts of that thing by other people you follow and you can see a list of 'em if you desperately need to. Anything to compress a feed. I want to follow as many people and hashtags as possible but I don't need dupes of anything.
@seachanger@misc I'm loathe to install phone apps, even for Mastodon, but I would in a split second if it turned out that the phone apps were much much smarter and thriftier in terms of caching data in the interests of speed and bandwidth-reduction, as opposed to the Mastodon web interface which in Safari on iOS is the most insane bandwidth hog I've ever seen and is regularly pushing me right up to my monthly cellular data limit long before end of month. Grr. Gotta fix that.
@seachanger@brianstorms Yeah the boost issue for me is that I will see the same thing get boosted multiple times from different people, but it’s only represented once in my timeline at any given time. I’m not sure if that’s the same issue, or if Mona is improving what could be a worse annoyance. That said, I think it would be interesting to experiment more with link-centered interfaces, like Nuzzel was for Twitter. There are some fedi Nuzzel clones, but not client-integrated.
fyi @seachanger my posts in this thread today were directly inspired by your thread about journalists. I think it’s easy to imagine tools that journalists and other writers would find really useful, and that would improve discovery, readership, and reach of their work.
On one hand, yeah, reading is reading. Distinctions between articles, blogs, microblogs, replies, comments, and even books, are kind of artificial. Even podcasts and audiobooks and text-to-speech could go into one thing. On the other hand, different forms require different mindsets, speeds, levels of concentration. And on the third hand, context collapse is bad. We need original contexts, defined communities with boundaries. Gotta balance all three of these things.
I guess it’s really the last of these considerations that’s hard to reconcile with the first two. One thought I’ve had is, what if you had a kind of “home community” and everyone you follow from outside of that community, whether pulled in from Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, an instance your instance doesn’t federate with, etc - was treated as more of an RSS subscription. And to interact, you had to click through, get into another interface.
Storify was really great. I want to be able to drag posts around into collections. Go further, make them nodes on a mind map, draw connections between them and articles. Make it playful.
@misc I once hung out at Alan Kay's house, where every room, even hallways, was full of books, and even the Bosendorfer piano was piled high with stacks of books, I mean they were everywhere. So I asked him, hey you read a lot of books, and he said he read one a day. And I said, an entire book, one per day? And he said yeah, and had been doing that since age 10 or something. I doubt it was due to the love of fresh paper, he's always been a fiend for knowledge, but a full book a day?
Add comment