Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 2

@devurandom Sounds like a Service Worker bug. You may need to clear the stored site data and reload. And/or unregister the service worker.

As a diehard web nerd I would love to believe that PWAs are "just as good" as native apps, but honestly for 99.9% of iOS/Android users, I'd bet that if it's not in the app store then it might as well not exist.

I'd love to see the stats on how many Mastodon users on mobile prefer 1) the default web interface, 2) a native app, or 3) an alternative web client like Pinafore or Halcyon. My money would be on #2.

For a long time I've resisted the idea of publishing Pinafore to an app store, but I'm starting to reconsider. https://mastodon.technology/@pinafore/102938886400335485

PWAs are great, but I worry they're low on discoverability. On iOS you have to dig into the settings to add it to the home screen, and I bet 99% of iOS users do not know that this feature even exists. Plus, push notifications do not work in iOS PWAs.

Even on Android, I wonder how many people tap the "house" button to add it to their home screen.

@southking Yeah if you clear the browser cache a lot then it doesn't work very well as a web app. I can see the argument for making it a native app, but it's a lot of extra work, it costs me money, and it runs the risk of getting banned for opaque reasons, so I've been reluctant to do it.

@southking Thanks! In most mobile browsers you can add it to your home screen. On iOS there is "add to home screen," on Chrome or Firefox on Android there is usually a little house icon which will add it to the home screen. It's basically like a native app at that point. :)

"I spent a week being wrong online" by Kevin Donnellan https://theoutline.com/post/8084/i-spent-a-week-being-wrong-online

Lighthearted exploration of Cunningham's Law. I enjoyed it.

@estoricru Yeah this sounds similar to my experiences. I don't know if I'm just looking at it with rose-tinted glasses, though. Also back in ye olde days there were a lot fewer people on the net - e.g. my friends were there, but my parents were not.

@pandora_parrot Yeah I've joked that Mastodon is like my social media nicotine patch.

@wohali Fair point, although I'd always kinda hoped that the decentralized model would lend itself to smaller communities that brush against larger ones. Maybe Darius Kazemi's hometown fork is the best compromise.

I find Pinafore engrossing from a technical perspective, but my past experience with OSS tells me that if I spend more time working on a project than on the thing it enables, my interest will inevitably wane.

I've also been super BDFL about Pinafore (I haven't even given write access to anyone), but I'm starting to think it's time to move it to a GitHub org, give more people write access, and make plans for the day when someone else is spending more time maintaining it than me.

Every time I go on vacation and I'm away from a keyboard for a few days, I'm reminded of how much more joy I get from non-internet environments these days (family, friends, shows, concerts, movies, outdoors) than from the internet. Sometimes I feel like I'm growing away from the internet in general, and social media in particular. It's just not that exciting of a venue for me anymore.

I was hoping Mastodon/the fediverse would be a big breakout social media app, but it seems the biggest breakout social media app these days is TikTok, which has all the problems of the old platforms (centralization, ad-supported) plus some new ones (Chinese censorship). It's Vine where you're not allowed to talk about Hong Kong. It breaks my heart that this is what's popular with the young'uns these days.

I love Mastodon but I admit I've been a bit down about it recently because there hasn't been a big wave of new users for a while. It was most fun around April 2017 when people I knew IRL and from Twitter were actually excited about decentralized social media and were hanging out here.

Working on Pinafore gives me the most motivation to hang out in the fediverse, but honestly I spend more time coding Pinafore than actually using Mastodon these days.