Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 37

@srol This might be my favorite article about Mastodon yet. You captured everything I love about the culture and the community. Thank you for writing this.

As a geek the technology behind Mastodon gets me excited, but the real reason I stay is for the jokes, the memes, the kindness, the compassion, the benefit of the doubt people give you that is sorely missing elsewhere. There's something special going on here.

BundlePhobia - find the cost of adding a npm package to your bundle https://bundlephobia.com

This is a really cool tool. It can show you that, for instance, React has improved their bundle size quite a bit in v16: https://bundlephobia.com/result?p=react-dom@16.2.0 https://toot.cafe/media/FKnCDlU7fcM8y53Xqqc

For an organization like Mozilla, building your own engine is an important choice. It's expensive, but it gives them a bigger seat at the standards table and allows them to fight for things that you just can't fight for if you're merely downstream from the browser implementer.

I've sat in standards meetings at the W3C where the Mozilla rep was the one constantly asking "What are the privacy implications of this API?" and "How could this be abused to leak user data?"

There are currently 4 organizations on the planet that build their own browser engine: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Which one of these is not like the others? That's right, Mozilla is the only browser vendor that isn't a giant tech company that already has lots of money from other sources.

Not saying this excuses installing a rando extension for the sake of a publicity stunt, but I can see why Mozilla might try to find some… creative sources of extra income.

#MastoAdmins

"WARNING: there is no transaction in progress" <--- Anyone else seeing this during the v2.1.0 upgrade? Cause for concern? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6055

Holy cow, column-swiping performance on Firefox for Android is way faster in Mastodon 2.1. Looks like this fix made it in! 🙌 https://github.com/oliviertassinari/react-swipeable-views/pull/372

The jemalloc fix really does seem to reduce memory usage. Details here: https://x0r.be/@szbalint/99128946006465749

On the toot.cafe server, after letting Mastodon run for a day the system is using 2.4GB whereas before it was using 4.3GB.

Switching to jemalloc means we never have to go to swap on a 4GB machine, which is a huge win. Thanks @szbalint! #MastoAdmins

I swear every time we make browsers faster, website authors decide they can use an extra 1MB of JavaScript

Fantastic talk from @jennschiffer@twitter.com about art, accessibility, and ethics in tech: https://youtu.be/LK5e1kRpzrE

We in the tech industry should be asking ourselves what kind of legacy we want to leave behind. Many thanks to Jenn for giving voice to these concerns.

"Comcast is injecting 400+ lines of JavaScript into web pages" https://forums.xfinity.com/t5/Customer-Service/Are-you-aware-Comcast-is-injecting-400-lines-of-JavaScript-into/td-p/3009551

Good time to remember that the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere extension is a great way to avoid ISPs tampering with HTTP pages: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Honestly I probably could have skipped my whole "why I'm leaving Twitter" blog post and just posted this comic instead. (source: http://www.listen-tome.com/wasted-hours/) https://toot.cafe/media/APuvNvSDKV4yyuCFL3k

"Maintaining An Independent Browser Is Incredibly Expensive" by Robert O'Callahan: http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-browser-is.html

Mozilla is the last organization building their own browser engine who isn't also a big tech company (Google, Microsoft, Apple). The work they're doing is incredibly important for maintaining a diverse and vendor-agnostic web.

Social media is like a reality TV show in that we play a character who's sort of like us, but not really us. Maybe it's a more exaggerated version of ourselves (to seem edgy or outrageous), or maybe it's a toned-down version (to be neutral and inoffensive), but either way it's a character, not who we really are.

It's like we're all writing a roman �à clef, a thinly-disguised autobiography about ourselves. And living in it too.

🎺.☕️ now supports audio uploads (mp3/wav/m4a/wav) using a slightly tweaked version of the glitch.social version so that we can have audio files up to ~4min30s: https://github.com/tootcafe/mastodon/pull/13

To inaugurate this new feature, please enjoy some public domain Tin Pan Alley music. 😁 (via https://archive.org/details/TinPanAlley_830) https://toot.cafe/media/WTH2IwbPeyuoCgVx0vA