@aral why #node_js to build #kitty? To lower the bar for end-user?
Of course you must start from a solid foundation, but are not tying yourselves to #GAFAM for foundations?
I don't want to polemic, just understand
@paoloredaelli You have to pick somewhere on the stack. I thought that was commodified enough and compatible with what I need it for. We do the best with what we have. If I wanted to go for ideological purity across the stack I’d need several trillion dollars so I’ll settle for pragmatism that gets us off the ground and which we can evolve as we go. That said, I don’t see this particular decision becoming a pain point anytime soon.
Several of the major social media platforms - Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter - have effectively declared war on linking to things and I absolutely hate it
"Link in my bio" / "Link in thread" / "Link in first comment"... or increasingly no link at all, just an unsourced screenshot of a page
Sitting outside on a rare sunny day at a lovely pub in Bray, refactoring Kitten* to pull out the settings page sections into their own pages (and use Kitten’s new Streaming HTML workflow**) and enjoying a yummy pint of Tundra IPA.
If you design a system such that you cannot differentiate people from corporations and bots and that’s your defense for calling all of them “users”, you’ve designed a system that conflates people – who are mortal, have feelings, can feel pain and be hurt and who have human rights that must be protected – with the very entities that oftentimes exist to exploit them.
Design for people. Call them people. All else is secondary.
And we can (and must) go beyond “static”. The Small Web vision is that people can have a dynamic site that can be (at least one of) their online identities. Protected by public-key encryption so that we can interact with each other privately (end-to-end encrypted) without Big Tech intermediaries and also be public as we please.
Here’s an idea: let’s call people “people” on the fediverse instead of “users” whenever we can.
Compare:
“There are 42 users on this instance.”
vs
“There are 42 people on this instance.”
Which acknowledges our humanity more?
Language matters. We don’t need to perpetuate mainstream technology’s othering/colonial framing of “us” – designers/developers/other “clever folks” – and “them” – the users (usually one step removed from “dumb user” and usually the ones who get used).
@jasonemiller If only there was a word we could use to denote different accounts that a single person might have on a system. I don’t know, maybe something like “account?”