n8 Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦

I care 100X more about *how* you argue and how you treat the people you disagree with than I care about what you think.

Formerly of: LWN, Linux.com, OSTG
Currently of: Type design research
Texas: Linux Fest
Just interested in, you know, in,: uh, Principles of Modern Banking and, History of Piracy. Paintings of Orozco. Modern French Theater. The... Jurisprudential Factor of Mafia Administration. Diseases of Horses and novels of Joyce Cary and... Ethnic Choices of the Arabs. Thing

Last Notes

2026-04-06 09:29:44 UTC

- reply

That having been said, the underlying goal of things like ActivityPub are still genuinely interesting and incredibly worthwhile, specifically because they are a lot more powerful than Mastodon itself is. If AP was just the Mastodon source code, that would be meh.
So, more power to the smart people like Evan who see a lot more ambitious things out there — and do the work to bring them within reach.
But Mastodon itself is a group of people, and it is what it is. It's not some other group.

2026-04-06 09:05:59 UTC

- reply

For context: to me, the value of participating in Mastodon as a social network is that there are a lot of people here who discuss (intelligently and with a sense of humor) subjects that I'm interested in , like FOSS and type design.
But that's also true of many other online services, like web-based discussion forums, which are also very bubble-ish. I use those, too.
But the notion that Mastodon itself was not going to operate in that same manner, frankly, fully evaporated super quickly.

2026-04-06 08:56:44 UTC

- reply

Personally, I might use the term "bubble" rather than "echo chamber," because so much of Mastodon's design focuses on giving server administrators tools to block things they don't want to see, and "bubble" emphasizes the barrier-forming aspect.
"Echo chamber" IMO put more emphasis on the "other people will tell me I'm correct and we'll all convince ourselves there are no significant divergent viewpoints" and I don't really think that's true. It's certainly not dominant.
Hashtag nuance.

2026-04-06 08:52:49 UTC

RE: https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116352522288234148
Huh; I didn't realize it was possible to *not know* that Mastodon is and has always been an echo chamber.
#note17rf…2uc0

2025-07-28 07:26:08 UTC

Neato. A rampaging Deletionist wikipedian ran across one of my most-frequently-referenced pages and erased like 10,000 words of information.
And because they have thousands of edits (presumably many of the same ilk), they are able to bully everyone on the talk page who has been registering their complaints about the destruction.

2025-07-04 08:30:30 UTC

Pronunciation #poll
In English, the vowels in the words
"woof"
and
"goof"
are:

2025-05-22 08:51:07 UTC

- reply

That is not the same feature, but I do appreciate you pointing me towards people who are interested in somewhat-related topics.

2025-05-21 09:24:19 UTC

- reply

I keep thinking that I need to write up a feature request for @npub17lf…3uhj to enable that specific usage scenario, but it just gets longer every time I try.
I mean, it's basically a different way of listening to podcasts (the daily-news-brief feeds often only have one episode in the RSS at a time, so you have to check them and download ASAP at a specified time; not sure Android makes that easy. Plus you don't want to download yesterday's ... probably ... etc etc etc....).

2025-05-21 09:18:28 UTC

- reply

(pun intended)

2025-05-21 09:18:15 UTC

- reply

That's a plus in that it's public, but I've usually preferred the as-short-as-possible options. With those, you can kind of stack up five or six different publishers (and from different regions) and get a wider swath of info as you wake up with alarm.
It's also slightly less appealing to queue up longer feeds on a regular basis. Because who has ten whole minutes.

2025-05-21 09:14:38 UTC

Today in #newsNews ... Reuters used to have some form of "3-minute headline brief" podcast feed. I could never find the URL in any public index, but it was accessible through Google's "routines" (i.e., scheduled automation sequences that you could attach to an alarm on an Android phone. Possible also doable through smart speakers etc, but I've never used those).
Anyway, as of today that feed seems to have disappeared. On the plus side, Reuters now has a 10-minute newscast feed, which is public.

2025-02-27 11:36:40 UTC

So far, I have not seen an actual lawyer give an analysis of the newly-announced #Firefox #TOS thing and, to be frank, the hottakes that I have seen boosted by all yall here have not met my standard for "this person is doing a careful assessment".
Instead, there is a whole lot of "this undoubtedly verifies what I always secretly expected" or "everything in these sorts of statements in a trojan horse intended to cause harm."
So, please: If/when you do see some analysis by a lawyer, boost that.

2025-02-06 12:37:29 UTC

Does anybody create their own custom, possibly local-only XDG (or not, I guess) URL-scheme handlers?
I know it's doable; I just never hear about it.
The Calendar app thing has reminded me that I meant to do that for a handful of #selfhosted applications.

2024-12-09 10:46:46 UTC

Morning coffee thoughts: font file formats are like 75% technical debt plus 75% corner cases.