Threads is a thing. Testing it mostly to see how they end up doing ActivityPub integration. So far it feels a lot like a React Native Twitter clone (just like Bluesky), but with the massive boon of onboarding straight from Instagram/Facebook.
If Google were announcing Gmail today, there would be a movement among email admins to block all users of Googleโs service because it could post an existential threat to the emailverse.
@arsdeficiendi self-hosting is hard because spam is hard. Itโs technically easy to self-host but so many spammers do it that everyone has to have high thresholds to let your messages through. This is not โbecause Gmail,โ though.
Iโve spent a long, long time thinking about ethical software, the challenges we necessarily give ourselves compared to closed competitors, and crucially, how to overcome those challenges.
Four and a half years ago, I wrote:
>respecting your privacy is the ethical thing to do; users have a fundamental right to the utmost privacy, even from companies and products they trust.
I hope this can serve as the beginning of the ecosystem coming together to solve this unique challenge in a way that is objectively superior than any proprietary systemโall with privacy as the fundamental principle.
@cassidy do not get me started on Apple and privacy. The rubes they've convinced through nothing more than marketing buzzword bingo bullshit and massive ad spends. The hypocrites should be ashamed, but they spend enough money they get to be associated with a word they do nothing to evangelize or practice.
If you use content warnings for posts, first: thank you! A lot of folks appreciate it whether itโs about potential triggers or just specific interests.
Iโve also found that itโs more helpful if you spell out the warning rather than using shorthand. This is especially true for franchises: not everyone will read an sw warning as a Star Wars spoiler, or suf as Steven Universe Future, for example. Itโs also helpful for common ones like โeye contactโ or โmental healthโ instead of ec or mh.
Much shorter little blog post today: recoloring SVGs on the web. Thanks to @jimmac and @razze, I learned you can include prefers-color-scheme support directly in an SVG used as a favicon! ๐คฏ
I've started writing little plugins that automatically turn a folder of SVGs into a sprite that then gets inclined into my website. That way I have the convenience of just uploading a newly drawn icon with the benefit of being able to style them via CSS. ๐
And SVG favicons are just awesome. ๐ I love the modern web. ๐
On the contrary, the Mastodon API is super nice, and ActivityPub means there is virtually no limit to what interesting things you can do on the Fediverse. Developers, you are welcome here!
@cassidy Nitter keeps working. ๐ค
It allows me to convert tweets into RSS and follow a handful of interesting people there in my news reader. Once that stops working, I'm done with it for good.
After designing the layout for comments on my site*, I lightweight want to make some sort of social feed or more interactive UI for Mastodon. Maybe my most recent posts displayed in a sidebar on my website? ๐ค
I have to look into if/how to support actions other than just linking to the original post. Maybe I can do something like @micahilberyโs https://share-on-mastodon.social/ and remember the userโs instance in local storage, then use instance-relative links? ๐ค
I bought a lifetime subscription to Plex to help support them, and I hope other folks have as well because they provide a great service and delightful software.
While yes, there are alternatives to the self-hosted media server space (and some decent open source ones, Iโm told!), Plex has consistently been the easiest for me to set up and have non-tech folks use.
I also hope Plexamp remains unscathed because I love it so much more than other music apps!
I'm using the Pixel Tablet w/Android as a "computer" today, and yeah, it still falls short in a few ways.
For touch-based multitasking, I love the new split view, taskbar, and overall setup. But for a mouse and keyboard, it's not there yet, which, fair, they don't advertise it as a laptop replacement!
For anyone curious, here's what I've found so far (thread). I hope this can help inform some good/bad for people designing adaptive experiences.
First, keyboard. It works mostly as I would expect, automatically hiding the on-screen keyboard by default.
But... how do I discover shortcuts? No apps seem to expose them because physical keyboards are an after-thought. The OS itself doesn't seem to have a shortcut sheet except one buried deep within settings.
There's also a bug where I get a dimmed focus scrim of some sort over the app I'm not typing into, which seems to be a holdover from the on-screen keyboard behavior.
Context menus aren't really a pattern on Android anymore, and while in many cases that's a boon for discoverability (contextual on-screen actions are usually better than hiding things away into a menu!), it does feel like a gap. Especially when SOMEtimes a right-click triggers the same menu as a press-and-hold touch would, but sometimes it does not. I feel like they should just be the same, always. Press-and-hold for a menu with a mouse when there is no right-click menu feels broken.