Eugen
I will be taking submissions over e-mail at first (I do not expect a lot to come quickly).
If you are a server owner, and you have:
1) A server policy against racism, sexism and transphobia
2) Daily database backups
3) At least one other person with emergency access to server infrastructure
4) Commit to giving users at least 3 months advance warning before closing down your server
E-mail hello@joinmastodon.org with the subject "Server submission". I'll try to figure out the blurb/category
Nolan
@jared I see it less as a destruction and more as a context shift. The set of conditions that gave rise to the old techno-utopian optimism has completely changed, but the culture took a while to recognize it.
Remember the SOPA/PIPA protests in 2012, when internet activists were locking arms with Google, Reddit, and other internet companies? Can you imagine those same folks stepping up to defend poor, marginalized Google today?
Nolan
@Exploratorydruid There's an example of inclusive design from Joel Spolsky that I really like: "Hotel bathtubs have big grab bars. They’re just there to help disabled people, but everybody uses them anyway to get out of the bathtub. They make life easier even for the physically fit." https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-people-who-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-lives/
Exploratory Druid
@nolan Thank you for sharing!
"In the field of design, this is called “inclusive design” for a reason: It helps everyone."
I wanted to highlight this line. When we design anything from products to city services keeping in mind those with special needs, it creates more thoughtful designs that are easier for everyone.
And the point about things like canes being often aesthetically unpleasant shouldn't be overlooked - people everywhere prefer to surround themselves with attractive objects which goes a long way toward feeling at home with daily use items.
Nolan
Some interesting questions that the "John Perry Barlow to Tristan Harris" (as I'll call it) transition raises:
- What does it mean for organizations like Mozilla and the EFF? Is the internet still really a "frontier"?
- What does it mean for science fiction? Does the "Snow Crash" vision of cyberpunk hyper-individuality still seem plausible?
- Is the internet becoming nationalized? Colonized? Partitioned? What's the right metaphor here?
Nolan
"The End of Cyberspace" by Alexis Madrigal https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/the-end-of-cyberspace/588340/
The techlash seems to represent a turning point in what people think the internet "should" be. Which makes sense:
1990s: lots of small players, privileged and mostly tech-savvy userbase, rapid innovation: anarchism is great!
2010s: handful of bigcorps with more power than nation-states, large vulnerable population actively exploited by bad actors, feature stagnation: ehhh, maybe we should give this government thing a shot
Nolan
Ironically that FastCompany page is exactly the kind of page that I will immediately put into Reader View because the font is too hard to read and it's full of popups and junk.
Nolan
I remember reading Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" and kind of having my mind blown. He spends about half the book talking about doors, but after you read it you'll start to notice poor design in doors, and stoves, and other everyday things.
In the Squarespace office we had gorgeous custom-made black lacquer doors that people would accidentally walk into because it wasn't obvious they were sliding doors. Norman railed against this kind of aesthetic over-designing.
Nolan
"I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me" by Don Norman https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me
"Despite our increasing numbers the world seems to be designed against the elderly. Everyday household goods require knives and pliers to open. Containers with screw tops require more strength than my wife or I can muster. (We solve this by using a plumber’s wrench to turn the caps.)"
Nolan
@stevegenoud I found the Surface Book touchscreen okay but not amazing. I used it for scrolling web pages (thumb) and drawing shapes in PowerPoint (stylus). I didn't use the touchscreen enough for it to feel essential, though.
Steve Genoud
Has anyone used one of the Windows laptop with touch screen? Is the touch actually good and usable?
Are there some hardware that should be avoided?
Nolan
Nolan
@sivy Nice work! Full credit to @ashfurrow for the original design. :)
Nolan
Mastodon got a shout-out in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away
"Odell believes that there is another way. She cites, for example, the indie platform Mastodon, which is crowdfunded and decentralized. (It is made up of independently operated nodes, called 'instances,' on which users can post short messages, or 'toots.')"
Nolan
"Bug in French government’s WhatsApp replacement let anyone join Élysée chats" by Sean Gallagher https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/french-governments-secure-chat-app-left-door-open-to-outsiders/
I wonder how many of these bugs were in Matrix itself rather than the French government's fork? Either way, it's good that it's getting put through the paces while it's in beta.
Nolan
"How We Measure Standards (and why it’s sort of a problem)" by John Jansen https://medium.com/@thejohnjansen/how-we-measure-standards-and-why-its-sort-of-a-problem-332eacae6cca (/ht @tomayac)
I worked with John on the Edge team, and I was always impressed with his integrity. This is a good post about how browsers approach "standards," and how controlling the narrative is often as important as actually fixing interop bugs.
Nolan
@npd Advertisers do not want better user transparency and control, so if the performant options were "hobbled" in that way, they would just choose the unperformant ones.
Nolan
"Link Click Analytics and Privacy" by John Wilander https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link-click-analytics-and-privacy/
Good example of the kind of tradeoffs browsers often have to make. "Just turning off the Ping attribute or the Beacon API doesn’t solve the privacy implications of link click analytics. Instead, it creates an incentive for websites to adopt tracking techniques that hurt the user experience."
Nolan
@Eramdam I'm not sure they can, but linter rules would definitely be interesting. E.g. to tell you "You used getBoundingClientRect, which you should put in a requestPostAnimationFrame callback."
Nolan
The fact that the web has taken this long to come up with a sensible way to do basic stuff like "read/write to the view layer without causing excessive recalculations" is kind of bewildering. For a while there were libraries like https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom to fill the gap, or just dead reckoning. But having an actual blessed browser API will make this a lot easier.
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