So the new Instagram text thing is reported to have ActivityPub support and instead of being happy at all the new labor that could potentially be coming to the standard, Mastodon people are now actively encouraging instances to not federate with any of that stuff. K.
Look, instance admins can block whatever they want for any reason they want. It hurts your users but do you. And I'm not trying to argue that Facebook isn't a fucked up company. But actively working to discourage extremely skilled participants (and love them for hate them, FB engineers are VERY good) from contributing or associating with your open source protocol or community is just peak stupidity for people who claim in the same breath to want to remake and reset the social web.
I agree with this fwiw. I think there is a place for both and I’m not leaving Mastodon. But it is objectively true that Bluesky is fun and Mastodon is much less so. Earnestness has a place but lots of us are online to have fun. https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-is-fun/
@film_girl it won't last, I guarantee it. They failed to build moderator tools first. It's artificial because of the limited invites. Pains me to see that people can't understand this..
@film_girl@anildash While I don't want to argue with you about your definition of fun, I would say that calling Bluesky objectively more fun is going a bit too far. When you're blind like me and Bluesky hasn't made the effort to consider how its interface makes every single thing I do unnecessarily hard by not taking accessibility into account in its initial design phase, it's hard to say that Bluesky is fun.
Apple added #DX12 support to macOS and Apple Silicon via its Game Porting Toolkit. It’s basically a 20k patch to Wine that will make it easy to play AAA Windows games on macOS without using a VM. https://github.com/apple/homebrew-apple
This video goes into more details if you don’t want to read the insane patch file augmented on top of the homebrew formula. https://youtu.be/g3n62FOX1Go
Also, plz appreciate the lengths Apple will go through to avoid sending stuff to upstream. This has to be GPL v2 b/c Wine/Codeweavers, but rather than patch upstream, this is patched inside a homebrew formula. It’s amazing.
Actively pushing against others to adopt your protocol is how you ensure that your protocol won't "win." I'm a firm believer that a decentralized protocol will be the future of social networks/feeds as we know them. I don't know if it is going to be #ActivityPub or #ATProto or something else. But I believe a decentralized protocol will be the future. But the winner will be the one that centralized-acting services adopt. That's a good thing for everyone. It means users have data portability. 🧵
But I'll tell you right now who will not win: the protocol and community that wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to adopt/build-off of and interoperate with. Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and Theora tried to do the whole "open" standard audio and video codec thing. It was bad quality and hard to implement, but “open.” Everyone smart used MP3 anyway. And eventually, MP3 became patent free. Even smarter people started working on things like VP8 and VP9 and HEVC and eventually we have AV1
@film_girl Most Amex users I know pay off the entire card every month. People that want to buy $3000 of hardware at 150-300 a month may see ZERO value in that. You don’t need apple to get a standard Amex.
@Chancerubbage that’s b/c the best cards are charge cards so you have to pay them in full. But they offer credit cards too. But even if you’re right, if you got the free interest as a bonus, even Amex owners might bite. I know I would. I pay all my cards off in full each month unless they give me free financing and then, why not? My money arguably makes more for me over 12 months than if I paid it all at once.
FYI for the few remaining people who pay for Evernote: it’s time to love to Bear or Notion or OneNote (which is excellent and free) or even Apple Notes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609641
For 9 years and 470 episodes, I’ve been the cohost of a podcast called #Rocket. It ended this week. The full episode is great https://relay.fm/rocket/470 but I went ahead and clipped my goodbye message. I mean everything I’m saying/crying through here and I thank all of you for listening and supporting us over the years.
Who the fuck is this asshole? Anyone who wants to claim Mastodon is full of zen needs to look at pieces of shit like this guy who crawled into my mentions to make assumptions b/c I happen to like pop culture. I like art a lot too and if you want to get art snob about it, let’s go .
I’ve been very critical of Apple for how they’ve chosen to abide by various government or court-ordered guidelines but I’m sorry Mozilla, I don’t think that this is an unfair burden. Do I wish this rule would be open everywhere? Yes. Do I think it would be good for Apple, longterm? Yes. Do I think Firefox with its budget is incapable of maintaining two iOS versions? No. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-ios-browser-rules-firefox
@film_girl I sorta think it’s funny to think of like, Apple probably secretly wishes anyone wanted Safari the way they want Firefox or Chrome. Microsoft Edge exists to download other browsers…except safari. This is a (rude) compliment to Mozilla.
Ok, I’m sorry. But this is the sort of drama and virtue signaling shit that will doom this place the same way every Linux on the Desktop effort outside of Ubuntu and SteamOS have been doomed. Getting angry b/c of a UX decision designed to help onboard users is what we call gatekeeping.
I’m a huge fan of FediTips so I don’t want to single them out. But this attitude, I’m sorry, it’s why this place doesn’t have any diversity of users. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233289512157360
Here’s the thing: you can prefer this whole “everyone builds their own car from scratch” world, but you can’t also be mad that no one drives your car on the highway or that the gas station doesn’t stock fuel for your car. If you want something to take off with users, you have to offer sensible defaults. You have to.
If you can’t even do that without people getting angry on GitHub, how do you expect to grow? And if you don’t want to grow, fine. But then don’t bitch that it’s small.
I agree with @gruber that this is a corporate pissing match, but I also understand not dedicating engineering resources (any of them) to a $3500 dev kit masked as a consumer product (it prob will be a consumer product but it won’t be at launch) at launch. Especially when the company who makes said dev kit has gone out of its way to undermine your business. Apple TV+ isn’t on the Meta Quest, for example, outside of the browser. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-17/watching-netflix-on-apple-vision-pro-you-ll-have-to-use-the-web
@feedmd I don’t think the Apple Watch has been gimped b/c a feature was turned off in software for two models. I think it is like @davew said, this was an extremely costly project that felt too expensive to cancel so they are doing the most lackadaisical and bizarre launch of all time. And who knows, maybe it IS the next big thing. I’m happy to be wrong but this launch screams of being too early. Hardware is done. Demos are great. I still don’t know what I’m supposed to use this for.
The one thing I do think the AT Protocol is better at than #ActivityPub is data portability. Being built-in at the protocol layer so that you don’t have to do the migration shit (which doesn’t bring your posts) is better. It just is. I think ActivityPub has more potential overall for the social web beyond just Twitter clones, but that part of #ARProtocol is better.
I think data portability is incredibly important and the fact that Mastodon hasn’t prioritized that, to me, is a failing. And I say Mastodon, not ActivityPub, b/c AP does have some options there. But Mastodon wasn’t designed that way, no matter what people want to pretend. It just wasn’t. My followers/following list is only part of my data. My content is equally important.
I’m very sympathetic to criticism that many of Apple’s policies around the App Store and some of its products are anti-user and anti-developer. Some of them absolutely are. I’m not convinced that that’s something that should be illegal. Otherwise, please explain the existence of Nintendo.
@film_girl Comparing Apple to Nintendo is apt, not just in their closed platform, but also contrasting the two. People assume opening the iPhone is the solution, but I think the bigger problem, arguably, is developer relations. Nintendo and other game consoles court game developers whereas Apple treats them as ungrateful children.
@jann@caseyliss@frankreiff absolutely when in fact it was more like “people on other platforms begged for your product b/c it was so in-demand that you chose to get over yourselves and bring it to the bigger platform.” Sorta like how Excel was a Mac app first. Also the DOJ trying to take credit for the fact that a port happened. When Microsoft would have had to be stupid to try to stop iTunes from coming to Windows in any universe.
Here is my continued discomfort with the Apple Vision Pro and how its announcement/roll-out has gone: In every single way, this is a dev kit, which I think is completely valid and is the proper positioning for a device like this at this stage. But Apple, while somewhat positioning it like a dev kit in terms of price/release/how it can be tried out, continues to market this as a direct to consumer device. You cannot be both, and I cannot stress this enough. You cannot be both.
We don't need to twist ourselves into a pretzel to explain why this launch is odd and feels like it is missing some very important key elements/details, the fact of the matter is that it is. And that, more than anything else, is what concerns me about dropping $3500 on something when I don't have a direct business justification like app development. It makes me nervous about Apple's real level of investment in this category, if I'm honest, if we can't even get a launch event.