Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 39

Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 22:01:14 EST Nolan

Instances are a necessary part of federation, but it's a technical detail that most users really shouldn't have to care about. If we want decentralized systems to survive, we have to learn to make them as user-friendly as the centralized systems.

In conversation Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 22:01:14 EST from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 21:24:46 EST Nolan
in reply to
- Alq
@crimsontentacles Mozilla folks are aware. I talked with a Mozillian at W3C TPAC who said they are working on some form of custom scrollbars. It might need a new web standard because Chrome's/Safari's are proprietary.

In conversation Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 21:24:46 EST from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 14:20:41 EST Nolan
- Christine Lemmer-Webber
Hey look whose business card I nabbed at W3C TPAC 😁 (@cwebber) https://toot.cafe/media/pAJ_vEFjkMgm_JIIbDQ

In conversation Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 14:20:41 EST from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 11:59:26 EST Nolan

New blog post: Why I'm deleting my Twitter account https://nolanlawson.com/2017/11/15/why-im-deleting-my-twitter-account/
In conversation Wednesday, 15-Nov-2017 11:59:26 EST from toot.cafe permalink
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  Why I’m deleting my Twitter account
  
  By Nolan Lawson from Read the Tea Leaves
  
  When I first got on the Internet back in the 90’s, it felt like a cool underground rock concert. Later on, it seemed like a vast public library, maybe with a nice skate park nearby. Today it feels more like a shopping mall. The transition happened so gradually that I barely noticed it.
  
  Hanging out with your friends at the mall can be fun. But it can also be tiring. You’re constantly surrounded by ads, cheery salespeople are trying to get you to buy stuff, and whatever you eat in the food court is probably not great for your health.
  
  For the past few years, I’ve subsisted on a media diet that mostly came from Twitter, consisting of “snackable” news articles with catchy headlines, shareable content with wide appeal (baby koala cuddles baby cat, how cute!), and righteous outrage at whatever horrible political thing was happening that day.
  
  Twitter was often the first thing I looked at when I picked up my phone in the morning, and the last thing I browsed late into the night, endlessly flicking my thumb over the feed in the hope that something good would pop up. The light of the smartphone was often the only thing illuminating my bedroom before I finally turned in (always much too late).
  
  All of this content – cat pictures, articles, memes, political hysteria – came streaming into my eyeballs in a rapid and seemingly random order, forcing my brain to make sense of the noise, to find patterns in the data. It’s addictive.
  
  But the passivity of it, and the endless searching for something good to watch, meant that for me Twitter had essentially become television. Browsing Twitter was no more edifying than flipping through channels. At the end of a long, multi-hour session of Twitter-surfing, I could barely recall a single thing I had read.
  
  Social media as public performance
  
  Twitter is unlike television in a few crucial aspects, though. First off, the content is algorithmically selected, so whatever I’m seeing is whatever Twitter has determined to be most likely to keep my eyes on the screen. It’s less like I’m surfing through channels and more like the TV is automatically flipping from channel to channel, reading my eye movement and facial expressions to decide what to show next.
  
  Second, Twitter has become an inescapable part of my professional life. My eight thousand-odd Twitter followers are a badge of honor, the social proof that I am an important person in my field and worthy of admiration and attention. It also serves as a measure of my noteworthiness in comparison to others. If someone has more followers than me, then they’re clearly more important than I am, and if they have less, well then maybe they’re an up-and-comer, but they’re certainly not there yet.
  
  (This last statement may sound crass. But any avid Twitter user who hasn’t sized someone up by their follower count is either lying to themselves, or is somehow immune to the deep social instincts that mark us as primates.)
  
  For the kinds of professionals who go to conferences, give public talks, and write blog posts, Twitter serves as a sort of “Who’s Who,” except that everyone is ranked by a single number that gives you a broad notion of their influence and prominence.
  
  I’m sure many of my friends from the conference and meetup scene will look at my announcement of deleting my Twitter account as a kind of career suicide. Clearly Nolan’s lost his mind. He’ll never get invited to a conference again, or at the very least he won’t be given top billing. (Conference websites usually list their speakers in descending order of Twitter followers. How else can you tell if a speaker is worth listening to, if you don’t know their follower count?)
  
  Much of that is probably true. I used to get a lot of conference invites via Twitter DMs, and those definitely won’t be rolling in anymore. Also, anyone who wants to judge my influence by a single number is going to have a hard time: they’ll have to piece it together from blog posts and search results instead. Furthermore, my actual influence will be substantially reduced, as most of the hits to my blog currently come from Twitter.
  
  Why I’m done with Twitter
  
  Thing is, I just don’t care anymore. I’ve spent years pouring my intellectual and emotional labor into Twitter, and for countless reasons ranging from harassment to Nazis to user-hostile UI, platform, and algorithm choices, they’ve demonstrated that they don’t deserve it. I don’t want to add value to their platform anymore.
  
  To me, the fact that Twitter is so deeply embedded into so many people’s professional lives is less a reason to resign myself to keep using it, and more a reason to question and resist its dominance. No single company should have the power to make or break someone’s career.
  
  Twitter has turned a wide variety of public and quasi-public figures – from Taylor Swift to a dude who speaks at tech conferences – into brand ambassadors for Twitter, and that ought to worry us. Despite what it claims, Twitter is not a neutral platform. It’s an advertising company with a very specific set of values, which it expresses both in how it optimizes for its core constituents (advertisers) and how it implements its moderation policies (poorly).
  
  Well, it may indeed be career suicide for Taylor Swift to abandon her Twitter account, but for a (very) minor public figure like myself, it’s a small sacrifice to make to knock Twitter down a peg. My career will survive, and my mental health can only improve by spending less time flicking a smartphone screen into the late hours of the night.
  
  That’s why I’m deleting my account rather than just signing out. I want my old tweets to disappear from threaded conversations, from embeds in blog posts – anything that’s served from twitter.com. I want to punch a hole in Twitter’s edifice, even if it’s a small one.
  
  I’ve backed up my tweets so that anyone who wants to see them still can. I’m also still fairly active on Mastodon, and as always, folks can follow me via my blog’s RSS feed or contact me via email.
  
  This isn’t me saying goodbye to the Internet – this is me saying goodbye to the shopping mall. But you can still find me at the rock concert, in the public library, and in the park.
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 10-Nov-2017 14:26:14 EST Nolan
in reply to
- DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@djsundog get along
get along kid :blobpats:

In conversation Friday, 10-Nov-2017 14:26:14 EST from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 28-Oct-2017 11:40:01 EDT Nolan

Bought a new monitor, and I have to spend about 5 minutes turning it on and off, plugging and unplugging it from my Mac, and closing and opening the laptop lid just to get it to work.
I love that we're off building AI to pilot spaceships or whatever, and yet basic shit like projectors and monitors and printers still don't work worth a damn

In conversation Saturday, 28-Oct-2017 11:40:01 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 23-Oct-2017 20:04:12 EDT Nolan
- moved 2 @sikkdays@ourempty.pub
Great review of Mastodon 2.0 from @sikkdays : https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mastodon-2-0#comment-535986
In conversation Monday, 23-Oct-2017 20:04:12 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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  Mastodon 2.0 - Product Hunt
  
  from Product Hunt
  
  Mastodon 2.0 - Social networking, back in your hands. (Open Source, Twitter, and Social Media Tools) Read the opinion of 6 influencers. Discover 2 alternatives like Tsū and HumHub
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Oct-2017 12:04:03 EDT Nolan

We're working to finalize Mastodon v2.0.0, so if you have time, please join https://malfunctioning.technology and test this commit which should fix the issue where you can't see dropdowns that stretch offscreen: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/5434
In conversation Tuesday, 17-Oct-2017 12:04:03 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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  malfunctioning.technology
  
  from Mastodon hosted on malfunctioning.technology
  
  This is an experimental instance for testing potentially broken code before pushing it to a production instance. I make no guarantees for the security, durability, or reliability of the data on this instance.
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  Fix scrolling of dropdown when offscreen by nolanlawson · Pull Request #5434 · tootsuite/mastodon
  
  from GitHub
  
  This is a very small fix, but it appears to allow the body to scroll for both the status dropdown and the emoji dropdown when they extend offscreen: Here's a video showing what it looks like in F...
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2017 10:03:00 EDT Nolan

This captures a lot of my feelings on where Twitter is right now: https://medium.com/@monteiro/one-persons-history-of-twitter-from-beginning-to-end-5b41abed6c20
"There was a time where Twitter was a place you went to fuck around, and accidentally made friends and got smarter. It’s been years since I’ve felt smarter after being exposed to Twitter, but trust me, those days were real. They happened."
In conversation Monday, 16-Oct-2017 10:03:00 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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  One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end
  
  from Medium
  
  At some point in 2006, or possibly late 2005, Noah Glass walked into our office all excited about something. That in itself isn’t news…
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:59:31 EDT Nolan
- Eugen
- 🦄 Thomas Citharel (en grève)
@tcit @Gargron Yeah I think for now maybe just a shared fork would make the most sense. Each theme author could maintain one branch per theme. Or someone could just make a list pointing to all the various themes out there (in the spirit of https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome).
In conversation Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:59:31 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  sindresorhus/awesome
  
  from GitHub
  
  :sunglasses: Curated list of awesome lists
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:51:21 EDT Nolan
in reply to

Added cybre.space theme because why not https://toot.cafe/media/loSh2fU7xHhTWAIgE3w

In conversation Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:51:21 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:43:22 EDT Nolan
@aparrish You can thank @chr who made the Win95 theme and @mlcdf who made the toot.cafe theme. 😊

In conversation Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:43:22 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:37:26 EDT Nolan

On https://horribly.malfunctioning.technology/ you can now switch between default, toot.cafe, and Windows 95 themes, and I am very pleased with this https://toot.cafe/media/yHTanF025nWx9OO_5a8 https://toot.cafe/media/deSvo-AGCKv_ZHLhbUw https://toot.cafe/media/80yaLKtCvaKQuoQ7Ijc

In conversation Tuesday, 10-Oct-2017 12:37:26 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Friday, 06-Oct-2017 10:03:26 EDT Nolan

"The tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia" – this captures a lot of my own worries about how social media is reshaping society https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
In conversation Friday, 06-Oct-2017 10:03:26 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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  'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
  
  from the Guardian
  
  The Google, Apple and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks who worry the race for human attention has created a world of perpetual distraction that could ultimately end in disaster
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2017 19:57:55 EDT Nolan

#mastodonmemory Taking toot.cafe offline for like 2 hours because I couldn't figure out systemd

In conversation Thursday, 05-Oct-2017 19:57:55 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2017 12:57:11 EDT Nolan
- Eugen
mastodon.social goes down, the rest of the fediverse hums on as if nothing happened.
Don't beat yourself up, @Gargron, the system is working exactly like it's supposed to!

In conversation Monday, 02-Oct-2017 12:57:11 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)'s status on Saturday, 23-Sep-2017 13:05:18 EDT Nolan

Performance review of the Mastodon Twemoji PR: everything LGTM, JS size is actually smaller, and the new emoji picker makes way fewer image requests. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/5046#issuecomment-331651624
In conversation Saturday, 23-Sep-2017 13:05:18 EDT from toot.cafe permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  Switch from EmojiOne to Twemoji, different emoji picker by Gargron · Pull Request #5046 · tootsuite/mastodon
  
  from GitHub
  
  Remove redundant PNG graphics Replace SVGs with Twemoji ones Adjust unicode->filename conversion Replace emojione-picker with emoji-mart Make emoji-mart use local spritesheets instead of CDN T...

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Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 39