Slowly redesigning my personal site on localdev tonight. Right now, it’s just a sandbox for experiments, but my hope is to design something that feels unique to me.
Also, something that feels less ugly than what I’m using.
Looking through some listicles for “2024 Web UI design concepts”, and it’s a bunch of crap about AI, Augmented Reality, 3D models in the browser, big fonts, video backgrounds, and motion design.
Like, sure, in a talented pair of hands, that could look good? But where are the experimental things, like unique widgets that do something new, or wild new layouts that people have never tried before?
We’re more capable than ever to make cool stuff happen on the Web, and the big things being promoted are boring, unimaginative, or over a decade old.
I feel like the way #Nostr does apps is superior to how we do it in the #Fediverse.
This isn’t to say that Nostr apps are inherently better. Some Mastodon apps have an incredible amount of polish, and extremely creative features.
Nostr’s standardization on identity and credentials and appended data is really, really good, though. Everything I sign into just works. Whereas, as a Non-Mastodon user with partial MastoAPI support, that isn’t always the case. I often have to cross my fingers and hope it works.
I know, I know, I’m banging on an old drum again. But, I feel like Nostr’s way of doing things is like a sneak peak of what might have been possible with ActivityPub C2S.
We should totally steal these ideas, and turn them into a FEP.
@Qazm Yeah, C2S kind of demands a lot from developers, in that each client has to implement a lot of the logic on its side.
The Masto API is comparatively really easy to work with, but you’re limited to what Mastodon allows. A client dev can work around that with bespoke features, but you’re dealing with whatever data requirements Mastodon specifies.
Part of me just wishes that Pixelfed and PeerTube and Funkwhale could’ve just ended up as clients, instead of full-stack federation platforms themselves. But, we’re way past that point now.
@boris Yeah, I almost wonder whether Open ID Connect could work as a suitable secure layer around the keypair. Even better if your account could easily generate a new keypair, if the old one has been compromised.
Of course, people might just say “what the heck, you’ve just reinvented OAuth!”, but being able to have that same functionality delegated through your identity could be a huge, huge deal.
Do you ever get a sad pang of nostalgia about the place you came from? Do you look back at a town, and get sad about the potential it once had, and despair the decline it met instead?
I feel that way about Peoria, Illinois, and the surrounding area. It was once prosperous. As a kid, it was on the up-and-up.
But, that city has long been a symbol of its own problems: an abandoned downtown, companies that mostly offer dead-end careers, and a frustrated, depressed population that would rather live anywhere else.
After Caterpillar moved their headquarters, there’s been a black hole in the economy there. Cat used to employ thousands of people in the area - blue collar, white collar, you name it. It propped up everything around it - small businesses, restaurants, bars, and music venues.
That place just feels like it’s barely holding on now. It would take a lot of work to improve anything, from starting businesses to making transit more accessible to getting rid of food deserts. Everything depended on one company for like 80 years, and the layout and flow of things required workers to live in small towns half an hour away.
The Midwest in general just feels kind of fucked nowadays.
@cidney I’m sorry, I can’t even imagine what that’s like.
I hope that you are safe and happy where you are now. 🙂 But, I can understand that looking at what DeSantis and his cronies did to Florida is deeply painful.
Are there any #Mastodon API clients that only implement the Private Mentions part?
I’ve been curious about an app that looks and feels like a messaging or email app, but just for PM’s. Having played with the APIs before, I feel like a basic thing might not be that difficult to write? 🤔
@darth It’s kind of a weird use case, but I use Private Mentions on my accounts a lot. Sometimes, the way that timeline gets rendered in various UIs / clients makes it hard to find stuff, and old messages with important info get pushed way, way down into the depths of the app.
I just think it would be really handy to have an easy way to retrieve, search, view, and compose messages.
It’s so messed up that OS vendors just assume it’s okay to throw ads onto your desktop or your phone. My Samsung just started throwing them in my notifications, and there’s no way to turn them off.
I didn’t want to have to root my phone and install a different version of Android on it, but this is downright hostile.
I'll be streaming more Police Quest II in ~10 minutes or so. I'm a bit knackered today so don't expect a whirlwind entertainment spectacle or anything. (Boy, I'm really selling this, aren't I?)
This is how #Mastodon will whitewash their censorship. While #MastodonSocial now actively bans and hides the profiles of people advocating for Palestinian liberation citing “Holocaust inversion” they put someone on their board to appear like they care, who does not in fact, have a mastodon account:
@LALegault While I have my own criticisms of Mastodon as part of the Fediverse, I don’t really see this as being an outcome. If you release a federated, open source platform that people can run themselves however they want, you kind of can’t really put the genie back in the bottle.
As far as the whole “censorship vs moderation” debate is concerned, any instance is free to set and uphold any policy they want. Sometimes, their moderation team will fuck up, or choose the wrong option based on a limited context. That’s not exactly the same thing as what a corporate, centralized system with millions of users does when it blocks someone’s ability to be Heard.
It’s kind of funny to see people freak out about systemd, when Microsoft is building a moment-to-moment surveillance system.
I don’t doubt that this could be a useful tool, but the potential for harm makes it completely fucking dystopian. That it’s also a black box that you can’t examine the source code of makes it way worse.
@gellenburg FreeBSD is pretty great. I’m still in the Ubuntu world these days for convenience, but if Canonical keeps up with the bullshit, I may strongly consider it!