Marco Rogers

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek

Web developer, movie buff, and pretty much the best guy you know. Married to
@operaqueenie

website: https://marcorogers.com/
github: https://github.com/polotek
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcorogers/
Personal website: https://polotek.net/

Public Key

npub1pk75jpjz8jgu7tjn4et353u56qyk9ajd2y69j92pvaglhfcwlg5qkly877

NIP-05 Address

polotek_at_social.polotek.net@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqm02fqepreyw09ef6u4c6g72dqztz7ex4zdzez4qkw50m5u8052qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt80aklr

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1pk75jpjz8jgu7tjn4et353u56qyk9ajd2y69j92pvaglhfcwlg5qkly877

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Last Notes

2025-11-17 22:28:06 UTC

I usually use nvm to manage multiple node versions. But I can't get it working with fish shell. Anybody done this before?

2025-05-21 18:52:40 UTC

Anybody who is a freelance developer/engineer. How do you find work? Where do you go to find opportunities? If I had an opportunity and I needed to find someone, how would I find you?

2025-05-04 22:11:30 UTC

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I may be confused. Yes it has taken a while for all of the parts of the atproto system to be ready to run independently. Not subject to the policies of the bsky company. That has always been the stated goal, and the post I shared says they're very close to that. I assumed you were pointing to some kind of technical concerns.

2025-05-04 21:06:20 UTC

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I'm still not sure you've explained what you think is different about atproto. I'm a little confused at the censorship issues as well. If you run an independent server, you can send out whatever you want. The receiver also gets to decide. And part of that might be accepting some tradeoffs from the policies of whatever server they decide to reside on.

2025-05-04 18:55:13 UTC

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virality I mean.

2025-05-04 18:54:57 UTC

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I'm curious what you see as fundamentally different between activitypub and atproto. IMO, atproto is the one designed to have access controls involved whereas AP is having a hard time layering that in after the fact. I'm not sure what you're referring to in terms of vitality.

2025-05-04 17:03:55 UTC

Remember when I said Bluesky was part of the fediverse and everybody got real mad about it? They're pretty close to enabling fully independent self-hosting.
https://bsky.app/profile/bad-example.com/post/3loe7iy2gdc2c

2025-04-18 19:24:09 UTC

Interesting question from a friend. I didn't have an answer.
"Designing Data-Intensive Applications is the bible for scalable (backend) systems and platforms. Is there something like that for frontend?"
https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321

2024-12-05 06:23:49 UTC

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is there a problem they actually solve?

2024-11-22 02:06:25 UTC

The key word in this post is "allow". In the fediverse most of us say we want, it shouldn't be necessary to wait on one person to "allow" anything.
https://social.coop/@graue/113523873101355124

2024-11-18 18:38:29 UTC

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I'm sure something like this exists. But it's one of those things where the UX details are really going to matter to me. Feel free to recommend things, but don't take it personally if it doesn't look like what I want.

2024-11-18 18:36:03 UTC

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The best way to think about it is that I want a curated newsletter of my own content. I save links about various topics as I come across them. Then later I may want to sit down and go through the stuff I've saved in the last week related to AI or the labor movement or tech topics.
But my first barrier is that these things are all scattered based on when I saved them. I want a page that collects a topic.

2024-11-18 18:32:36 UTC

Okay it's time for another "give me what I want and I'll pay you money" conversation.
I'm drowning in saved content. Across multiple platforms I've got 100s of links that I'm supposed to come back to at some point.
I know I can't get to all of it. But I really need some tools that are going to help me make a dent. I want something that organizes and categorizes my saved content, so I can choose when and how I want to consume various topics.

2024-11-14 17:36:39 UTC

So Bluesky is having problems right now. So it feels like a good time to come here and feel good about the fact that I'm running my own mastodon instance.

2024-11-01 18:07:23 UTC

I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
In the past I wanted it this way. Because I believe getting notified created bad incentives.
"Is this person talking to me or about me?"
"Is this a dunk? I don't know, but I better assume it is."
Anyway, right now I'm thinking about the tradeoff. I think I'm missing a lot of discourse because I don't get notified of people commenting on my posts.

2024-10-31 18:45:22 UTC

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People might say "everybody's doing it". But that's the judgmental version. The reality is that people want to be where other people are. That *is* part of their interests. So it might more sense to think of it as people making tradeoffs.
We can still be judgmental if we believe it's not the right tradeoff. I'm just saying that the network is only as valuable as the people who show up.

2024-10-15 15:51:55 UTC

Does anybody on mastodon have a single user instance where they maintain multiple profiles? I've been thinking about that as a way to post different kinds of things. Like you can follow only the account where I talk about tech or only the account where I *don't* talk about tech. And there's an account with everything. There are some tradeoffs though. I'm not sure it makes sense in practice.

2024-10-14 19:45:57 UTC

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What's the right way to love each other? And what's the right way to love ourselves?

2024-10-14 19:43:50 UTC

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So today I'm trying to understand the difference between asking our loved ones for care and support vs asking them to fill our deepest needs.

2024-10-14 19:11:04 UTC

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These days, I think about what binds people together. A lot of it is needs that we have within ourselves. And unfortunately, I've come to believe that many of those needs can't be filled by another person. Each of us has to work to become whole. But we are taught to try to find others to fill those holes. We are taught that another person will make us complete. We put tremendous burdens on those we love.

2024-10-14 19:02:04 UTC

It's okay to be a bit broken sometimes. I believe we all are at various points in our lives. It's not a permanent state. We can work on healing if we want to.
It's not okay to be unaccountable though. When you won't take responsibility for your words and actions, that's when you do irreparable harm to those around you. That's when repair takes a back seat and people have to protect themselves from you.

2024-10-11 19:45:25 UTC

I don't think I've ever regretting setting up push-button deploys on a new project. It always feels like overkill. But once you get it set up, there are huge benefits in your ability to iterate quickly.
I've definitely gotten too far down the road and regretted that I didn't make it easier to deploy early on.
I'm thinking critically about these lessons as I get into helping people start new projects. Some things you don't need. But this one still holds up.

2024-10-02 23:25:25 UTC

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I always thought of this as the fundamental technical problem to solve for distributed social networks. And we're just... not solving it. People are talking about everything else besides this. And it's so weird to me.

2024-09-28 23:52:25 UTC

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I was being sarcastic. But I wasn't being snarky. I not suggesting I want them to fail. I just feel like people keep trying this when we have ample evidence of how unlikely it is to be sustainable. Maybe there's something more that I'm missing there. But simply being optimistic doesn't make it more likely to work.
Either way, I got the message. You all wanna hear cynicism. It's understandable. I'll try to keep it to myself.

2024-09-28 23:06:23 UTC

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that's pretty uncharitable.

2024-09-28 22:17:54 UTC

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I didn't sound optimistic to you?

2024-09-28 17:18:23 UTC

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“We aim to cover the running costs of our public instance through donations.”
Sounds like a solid plan.

2024-09-27 21:33:57 UTC

This is the kind of thing I think about whenever people say "managers should trust engineers and leave them alone to do their work".
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/meta-slapped-with-101-million-fine-for-storing-passwords-in-plaintext/

2024-09-24 20:41:50 UTC

I feel like I'm gonna get into a lot of trouble if I keep asking this question. But fr fr. If this is taking up a significant portion of your time such that you can't make ends meet doing other things, is it really "volunteering"?
Many orgs that do have money still accept volunteer hours. Maybe we should be using a different word for the people who need to get paid in order to keep doing this.
https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/4e4c1368-59b8-4223-8b4b-3278314b737c

2024-09-21 22:46:17 UTC

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What's weird to me is that federation should mean that you have your own space. Does it feel like most of the people who complain about who they don't wanna see are on mastodon.social? Because it's closer to a centralized melting pot than an instance with a personality?
https://social.wedistribute.org/objects/b309b8aa-2794-4f86-91cf-a1d61fcd7188

2024-09-21 22:41:34 UTC

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Sorry. I can see the post. I was saying that I can't see the vast majority of replies. I follow [@mekkaokereke](https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke ), so I see him. The majority of the conversation is invisible to me.

2024-09-21 22:07:38 UTC

I can't see anything on the quoted post. Because I have my own instance and I haven't actively federated with any others, my mastodon is relatively quiet. It's interesting. There is enough activity that I don't feel like I'm invisible. But I can tell I'm missing quite a lot.
I'm going to start exploring what it means to bring more content into my sphere.
https://glasgow.social/@sue/113177793366570689

2024-09-20 17:07:34 UTC

Okay this is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier this week. You're building a web browser. One of those most sophisticated pieces of software you can imagine. But meanwhile you bolted this little firebase thing onto it that executes arbitrary code in everybody's tabs. And those folks weren't experienced enough with security practices to understand how potentially dangerous that was.
https://flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-tj3a91j8z/-/a-PE98y0ECTFOOTE0EgUjWSg%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0
https://flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-tj3a91j8z/-/a-PE98y0ECTFOOTE0EgUjWSg%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

2024-09-20 14:09:59 UTC

Telling people that the job is to eat shit from people and never admit that it has an impact on you. Somehow I doubt this strategy is likely to attract our best and brightest. Instead, it's likely to result in a higher percentage of people who are unaccountable and unphased being the ones to survive as leaders.
https://mastodon.social/@jaderubick/113170238765663778

2024-09-17 22:07:03 UTC

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This is something twitter never really took seriously. Or more fair to say they only took it seriously for celebrity or "noteworthy" accounts. Once you get to a certain follower count, your needs as a user change quite a bit. You need more tools to manage who gets access to your attention.

2024-09-17 22:04:29 UTC

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The thing is, I appreciate that there's a set of people who have been following for a long time and seem to get a lot out of what I post. They're free to do so. Some of those people like to argue with me because they disagree with something I said. Also fine. But for some people, I get to a point where I realize we're just not gonna see eye to eye and it's probably best for both of us if we skip it. I don't want to invisibilize them. But I also don't want them to take up so much of my attention.

2024-09-17 22:01:29 UTC

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Yeah lots of people asking about muting. I'm also envisioning something that's different from muting. But I'm not exactly sure how to describe it. Or maybe I'm just describing a different way to implement muting.
So for example, Twitter settled on something I liked for DMs. You have two separate inboxes. One of approved people, and the other is "message requests". People who are trying to reach you, but you can ignore them if you want.
https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/113155129934897924

2024-09-17 21:51:39 UTC

Here's an example of a feature request that the fediverse could give me but corporate social media probably never will.
I want the ability to put a follower in "lurker" mode. I don't want to block them just because they're a little obnoxious. That's too strong. But I would filter them so I don't have see their messages. And they can assume I'm just ignoring them. That may seem harsh as well. But honestly most people tell me they would prefer that to me telling them they're being obnoxious 😅.

2024-09-17 19:41:05 UTC

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This is fascinating. You know private companies do this all the time. Stack ranking is a whole thing. And everybody says they hate it. Are you making the case that police specifically should be held to this standard because of the nature of their role?

2024-09-16 00:28:17 UTC

So one of the things that is important about social media is that you can use it to really broaden your exposure to lived experiences out side of your own.
One of the many reasons this is important is because sometimes your life changes. And those lived experiences that used to seem far away from you suddenly become your own actual life.
For me, this was hearing people talk about disability.

2024-09-15 23:05:40 UTC

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A friend of mine asked me to help with her website just last year. It took me a while to figure it out. It was an old cpanel install with static html files updated over ftp. It offended my dev sensibilities.
I asked if she wanted to upgrade to something like squarespace. Then I realized that didn't make any sense. She didn't care about any of that, and the website she had only cost her $15 per year. So I just made the simple edits she needed and then let her move on with her life.

2024-09-15 23:00:07 UTC

Sure there is. Nobody says you can't use the exact same software in perpetuity. If you build on a platform that's going to change out from under you, then yes you're creating software the needs to be maintained. But there are websites from 1997 that still work just fine.
https://mastodon.social/@Archnemysis/113144038240837171

2024-09-15 22:13:57 UTC

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It's really okay to pay money for things that you want.
It's really okay to tell people that you'll only pay them money if they build the thing you want.
It's really okay to tell people you'll only build what they want if they pay you.
It's really okay to make people pay you for the thing even if you enjoyed building it and would've done it either way.
It's really okay to stop working for free. Even if the people who decided to use your free work might be unhappy it.

2024-09-15 22:07:32 UTC

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I talked about this a while back. So many devs who are working hard to remain gainfully employed building shit that they hate. And in their "free" time, they toil at making free software for users that are perpetually ungrateful and don't wanna pay for it. Meanwhile, there are millions of other people willing to pay good money for software that corporate interests will never give them. All of the parties involved are unhappy. And yet nobody can see any alternatives.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112492234408125161

2024-09-15 22:03:51 UTC

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This is what I keep trying to talk about in different ways. I believe I'm still doing a poor job of framing it.
I think there's a very strong culture among devs that says the only work that should make money is work that we all wish did not exist. If it's stuff we actually want and actually enjoy doing, then it should somehow magically be "free". Both in terms of money and labor. And that is wild to me.
https://kolektiva.social/@aredridel/113143016020333128

2024-09-15 17:59:28 UTC

The more I talk to people about how to make software sustainable, I'm reminded that most people haven't spent time thinking about how anything gets paid for. Most employees haven't really considered exactly how it is that money ends up in their paychecks every two weeks.
It's weird that people have all of these ideas about how the world should work, but they aren't actually grounded in anything.

2024-09-14 17:29:29 UTC

I agree with this thread for the most part. Except for one important thing. We really have to stop convincing ourselves that the only alternative to extractive capitalism is people overworking for free and burning out. It's not better. In fact it's worse in *almost* every way. This approach might push back against extractive capitalism. But for the people who are actually burdened, it makes their real lives under capitalism worse.
https://oliphant.social/@oliphant/113136636513087913

2024-09-13 21:10:19 UTC

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It's meant to be this one, which is a staple of mine. I need set up a decent gif search to make this easier when I'm on a laptop and not a phone.
https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExZDFzMWV5bnFxdnQ2bjkwbTFsN2h0Z2s2bm1lenE0bWs2eXV6cXFidSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/tyqcJoNjNv0Fq/200.webp

2024-09-13 21:09:19 UTC

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Interesting. The file I uploaded was a webp, not a traditional gif. I guess phanpy doesn't like it.

2024-09-13 21:08:33 UTC

https://mastodon.online/@parismarx/113131940709494081
https://cdn.masto.host/socialpoloteknet/media_attachments/files/113/132/287/475/113/118/original/c961d784105fa6b6.webp

2024-09-13 01:21:35 UTC

What's the easiest way for me to pull up a pdf on my ipad and mark it up with an apple pencil? It can save as another pdf or an image. Either way is fine.

2024-09-11 14:17:51 UTC

This is already happening in a bunch of areas. This one is just more publicized. People are going to try this, because people try everything if they think it will save money. Hopefully we're entering the phase where we start collecting high profile failures and everybody learns a valuable lesson.
https://theblower.au/@david/113116686637768092

2024-09-09 21:39:47 UTC

Looks like #cohost is shutting down. I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of questions. But today is probably not the day to talk about it. I respect any and all attempts to bring software to the people that is not wholly owned by capital. I hope we're able to figure out how to make it sustainable.
https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down

2024-09-07 18:36:05 UTC

Oh shit.
https://alaskan.social/@seachanger/111228936610170237

2024-09-04 20:28:32 UTC

Oh.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/03/ai-worse-summarising-information-humans-government-trial/

2024-08-30 21:57:00 UTC

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What I'm saying is that a lot of American Exceptionalism™ is based on sacrificing people. It is a very long tradition. And up until very recently, Black people were the default sacrifice. That was our explicit role in White American society. As soon as you understand that, a lot of American history starts to make way more sense.
And today starts to make more sense too. This is an America we're it's not so easy to designate groups for sacrifice. And we are finding it harder to get things done.

2024-08-30 21:36:22 UTC

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I remember being so upset talking to people about prop 22 a few years ago. This was the vote in California to decide if gig workers like Uber and doordash have to be treated like employees instead of "independent contractors". I thought this should've been an easy decision. You wanna make these big tech companies pay right?
Nah. All they had to do was tell you that your rides were gonna get more expensive. And it actually became something we have had to fight tooth and nail for.

2024-08-30 21:28:51 UTC

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A lot of the things that Americans are complaining about today are because we are slowly making it harder for America to sacrifice people.
@npub1ay2…exel talks a lot about how football is changing because we decided maybe it's not okay to watch Black men destroy their bodies for our entertainment.
College basketball is changing because we decided maybe it's not okay that Black men hold up this billion dollar industry while being legally barred from making any money from it.

2024-08-30 21:15:41 UTC

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The way you got police put into our schools is that they signaled to everybody that they were really there for the Black people. Because somebody needs the prison pipeline to stay full. Some of the goods and services that you want can only have that low price because some percentage of people are working for slave wages. Not to mention a new prison will bring "good jobs" to your area.

2024-08-30 21:12:25 UTC

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Even if you start to get this part, there's yet another societal hurdle ahead of it. Many Americans don't realize how many things they take for granted start to break down if America stops sacrificing people in order to make it happen.
Part of the reason places like SF are deadlocked on building housing is that they can't figure out who they can sacrifice. SF already fucked up and drove out most of the Black population. So that's not an option.

2024-08-30 20:58:29 UTC

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People like to think about racism as if it's full of malicious intent. But often it's much more banal. Most of the time it's nothing more than "if somebody has to get hurt, let it be them. Because who's gonna complain about that am I right?"

2024-08-30 20:56:00 UTC

What's wild is once you actually start paying attention, you find out what we mean by "systemic". There's a story like this in every major city. Once somebody figured out this particular strategy of getting infrastructure built in a way that white constituents would accept, it spread all over.
We talk about how white supremacy requires a visible and identifiable underclass. Part of it is so that there is always a designated sacrifice so you can get what you want.
https://urbanists.social/@getalifemike/113052876190442664

2024-08-29 16:22:57 UTC

There's something I've been thinking about for a long time. I'm not sure how White Americans think about the white supremacist system they inhabit. For example, what happens when they go out of their way to change the system and realize that they don't have the power to do that? White supremacy definitely uses white individuals as foils. And that confers some indirect benefits to make it more palatable. But white people don't control what the machine does in their name.
https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/113041415400128398

2024-08-25 20:21:40 UTC

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sounds great. You should get started.

2024-08-25 16:46:45 UTC

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But once you decide "I'm not gonna install vite", you're left with a pretty big void. What do we do instead? What's the way to start a project after you've made the key decision that you're going to stick close to web standards and low JavaScript solutions? And how do you set things up so that you can thoughtfully expand into js solutions in the future as needed, but without making a mess of things?

2024-08-25 16:44:20 UTC

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Just as an example, I find that I can't even get started in the same way. For a long time now, setting up a new project meant installing a build chain. Webpack, create-react-app, esbuild, vite. Whatever thing is in fashion at the time. But the first thing you do is make a bunch of assumptions about your development environment.
But what we're realizing is that those assumptions lock us into a particular path. And we're realizing that we may want to have other paths available to us.

2024-08-25 16:39:34 UTC

Does anybody else feel like they're relearning web development? Once you decide you wanna get off the The Frontend Treadmill, you realize you need to completely reorient your process for building web sites and applications. I think all of the tools and practices that you reach for need to change pretty significantly. It feels like starting over.
https://polotek.net/posts/the-frontend-treadmill/

2024-08-19 14:17:54 UTC

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Terence I'm not confused about what you said. I'm a developer. I understand code. I still think an example to look at would be helpful. You can just say you can't be bothered to do it. It's okay. It was just a suggestion.

2024-08-19 06:50:56 UTC

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understood. I'll do that if I remember later. At the risk of being obnoxious, I would urge you to consider putting up an example somewhere. It really does help people decide if they want to investigate further. Thanks either way. It's an interesting project.

2024-08-19 06:43:06 UTC

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I'm asking if you have a link to being used somewhere I can see.

2024-08-19 00:58:42 UTC

On a related note, we are very much in danger of going back to a world where parts of the web only work in certain browsers. Google spent a lot of time and money making Chrome the gold standard. But the result is people build their website to Chrome rather than to general standards that will work everywhere. I went to back to using Firefox as my default a while back. It's mostly okay, but I'm back to a world where sometimes the website I want to use just doesn't work.
https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112985517287743690

2024-08-18 21:58:31 UTC

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do you have an example of a published post that I can check out?

2024-08-04 21:46:23 UTC

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You can't be a special snowflake that is indispensable and unfireable and also be like "I can't solve this because I can't find a good react plugin".
If your job is grabbing the same stuff of the same shelves as 90% of other devs and gluing them together using the same tutorials... ?
Listen. I'm gonna get myself in a lot of trouble. Let me get back to what I'm supposed to be doing. Don't mind me. 😂

2024-08-04 21:41:52 UTC

This is a longer convo. And I don't think I wanna fight about it today. But I will say that, in my experience, many engineers are very happy to give away their autonomy and become "interchangeable cogs". These features are sold precisely because they promise a magic incantation that "just works" so devs don't have to work as hard. And the result is devs also don't know their codebase.
But we're not allowed to talk about how that actually plays out. People get real angry.
https://ingenthron.social/@louis/112905903567910746

2024-08-04 17:42:04 UTC

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I mean we know there was ostensibly a reason for every esoteric “feature” in these frameworks and ungodly toolchains. But I’m also pretty sure it wasn’t based on problems that most teams were actually having with any real frequency.

2024-08-04 17:31:51 UTC

My frontend villain origin story was when I started asking people why we needed this complexity. People agreed it was complex. But when I asked people to tell me what we bought for ourselves, the answers were vague and unclear. That’s when I knew we had gone astray.
https://mastodon.social/@tef/112903811292290724

2024-07-31 02:56:13 UTC

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they're going through some changes I guess. But not disappearing.

2024-07-31 02:06:25 UTC

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I think you can find lots of people interested in joining. It's much harder to find people interested in doing work to make it happen. I think it makes a difference if you can show that you have budget. Maybe we just need to raise the money first.

2024-07-31 01:49:37 UTC

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I wasn't being facetious in the slightest. 😂

2024-07-31 00:52:40 UTC

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To be clear, I can be lazy and skip that work because it's just me here. If I was an admin for other people, it would be irresponsible of me to avoid educating myself about these features. I still plan to do so at some point. But as I like to point out frequently, I made the conscious choice to run a single user instance precisely so I can skip these headaches if I choose.

2024-07-31 00:50:18 UTC

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I'm also still learning how mastodon works for admins. And I feel like I get surprised every time. Like this report doesn't come from a particular user. It's submitted from the instance as a whole? Does that mean it's from a person with admin or moderator privileges on that instance?
Or maybe it is an individual user. But it just looks this way in my UI because they've chosen to be anonymous? I don't know. It's not clear to me, and I would actually have to do work to find out.

2024-07-31 00:43:23 UTC

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I can't imagine what it's like to be an instance administrator who is not prepared to navigate these cultural issues. Especially when you've actually agreed to be responsible for other people's experience on here. That's not a small thing. And a big part of the current discourse is that the mastodon ecosystem hasn't given instance admins and moderators enough tools and support.

2024-07-31 00:33:38 UTC

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Somehow, the thing that bothers me the most is how sloppy this is. If a real person had spent 2 seconds looking at who I am, they would see that I'm Black af, and non of that shit is likely to fly here. But they are sending these reports out indiscriminately. They can't even be bothered to be intentional about it. To me, that is the biggest indicator that this is bad faith rather than just them being misguided.

2024-07-31 00:19:55 UTC

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The thing to understand is that this is politics. This Black user is not a member of that instance. They could block this user and go mind their business. But that's not what they want to do. This instance instead chooses to follow this person around the distributed fediverse and actively influence other instances against them. That is a choice.

2024-07-31 00:18:09 UTC

I wish I could give more people some perspective into how things change on here when you are an instance administrator.
I just received a report against a user who isn't even a member of my instance. Remember, this is a single user instance. I am the only user.
This is a person of color who has been vocal in the current drama surrounding anti-Black racism on mastodon. The report comes from a very large and very prominent instance focused on LGBTQ+ communities.

2024-07-30 19:50:23 UTC

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funny how it's often people who aren't paying any money who are the loudest.

2024-07-30 18:44:29 UTC

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I'm done fighting with white Europeans who are committed to willfully misunderstanding and downplaying racism. I honestly do not want to spend another second trying to get them to care enough to change their priorities.
Instead, I want to know how I can find and support people that are aligned with my values. I want to enable those people to work on a platform that I can use. And we don't need permission from the mastodon team to do so. They're not in charge.

2024-07-30 18:39:19 UTC

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The fediverse is a lot of work. And right now, it doesn't make anybody any money. In fact it costs a lot of money ab free labor.
Investing in the fediverse only makes sense if it *actually* gives us control of our own destiny.
I'm gonna repeat this a lot. Because it's going to take a while for people to unlearn what we usually do and instead create new dynamics.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112480816034536846

2024-07-30 18:34:13 UTC

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The second thing is well worth more discussion. And I'm gonna take a hard stance on this. If people of color still find ourselves dependent on a small team of white devs to get what we want, that is a failure of the principles of the fediverse.
I understand why it still feels like we have to ask the mastodon team for things. I'm not dismissing the reality of where we are. But our goal should be actively move away from this dynamic. How do we do that?

2024-07-30 18:29:27 UTC

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Could we have better moderation today if they had committed to working on it a year or more ago? Sure, maybe. But at this stage, it's going to take a lot of work to get there. And the core team is underfunded. To me that means asking them to engage with this issue isn't actually a good use of energy. Whether they are aligned with our requests or not, they just can't do what is needed.

2024-07-30 18:26:31 UTC

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The first thing is really basic. The mastodon dev team is very small. Regardless of whatever decisions they are making about what to focus on or not focus on. They can't do a whole lot. I believe they have been up front about that to anybody who will listen. So I don't think it pays to expect them to be capable of meeting these large issues.

2024-07-30 18:21:32 UTC

I see a lot of the drama that is happening between people of color on the platform and the mastodon dev team. I feel like I need any to help, but I'm not exactly sure the best way to do that. I'm more wary of making things worse tbh.
But I feel like there are two important things that feel clear to me. I want to say it out loud and have people either correct me or help me understand better.

2024-06-30 18:47:10 UTC

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Paul I think it's nice that you want to defend your work. But it would be better if you started from a place of acknowledging that what we see in front of us doesn't exactly convey a commitment to user friendliness.
Maybe you can explain more about who works in these things in the project and how you try to improve user-facing experiencing.

2024-06-30 17:59:33 UTC

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yeah this is fair. I definitely think the text could be way better.

2024-06-30 17:23:39 UTC

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or maybe I'm mussing something about what your expectations are. Maybe all I should say is that I don't expect third party APIs to return error text that is suitable for end users.

2024-06-30 17:22:18 UTC

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maybe my brain is just irreparably broken. But this feels like a reasonable error to say "there's already a record here". It's just not meant to be displayed directly to users. I think error translation is always something the user of a tool needs to be responsible for.

2024-02-03 19:04:36 UTC

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I can't entirely back this up, but here's what I'm feeling. Bluesky could grow to be a close approximation of what Twitter was. That will be cool for those who miss the golden age of Twitter. But mastodon has the potential to be something new and different. It's not constrained by what came before.

2024-02-03 19:04:04 UTC

I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months. They're very different experiences, and I like them both for different reasons. But I think they are headed in different directions. They're going to continue to diverge in terms of what they offer.