Sandro Hawke @sandhawke@mastodon.social
Works at W3C/MIT on Social Web. Grew up in Berkeley, settled in Boston. Father of four. http://hawke.org/sandro
Joined Nov 2016
Sandro Hawke
boosted
@jordigh Ok, so we're just talking random users on some instance, not the development team.
You could say there's a left/right split in the Fediverse, or considerate-speech/free-speech split if you like, and the left side uses more Mastodon and the right side uses more Pleroma, and GS is originally largely left but got an infusion from the right the year before Mastodon. But then there are Nazis on Mastodon instances too, and communists and anarchists on Pleroma. Gay and trans people are spread throughout the platforms.
A lot of us are still here mostly for the free software discussions.
So I think the software is a pretty bad proxy for pre-screening people.
You could say there's a left/right split in the Fediverse, or considerate-speech/free-speech split if you like, and the left side uses more Mastodon and the right side uses more Pleroma, and GS is originally largely left but got an infusion from the right the year before Mastodon. But then there are Nazis on Mastodon instances too, and communists and anarchists on Pleroma. Gay and trans people are spread throughout the platforms.
A lot of us are still here mostly for the free software discussions.
So I think the software is a pretty bad proxy for pre-screening people.
Finally a kick (personally) back to Mastodon...
Sandro Hawke
boosted
I'll be giving an invited talk at Web Conference in two weeks on social web protocols with a segue to my new credible web group.
In talk abstract I invite folks to join W3C.social . Should be interesting. https://www2018.thewebconf.org/program/w3c-track/
Sandro Hawke
boosted
@maiyannah Dogfooding is great, but what if the use case of collaboratively creating software is different than the use case for a social network?
Sandro Hawke
boosted
@stitchxd @sandro the reply_to field is particularly prone to breakage because you may not have the referenced post because federation didn't send it to you. You can see this happen with pA on small instances (like mine) where the reply_to field is empty because I don't follow all the people involved.
Sandro Hawke
boosted
Next meeting of Social Web Community Group (which you're welcome to join) is tomorrow (via mumble). Agenda: https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-06-07
Sandro Hawke
boosted
If anyone knows a service similar to Hetzner's StorageBox, but based in the #USA, please let me know.
basically, I need a few TiB of space accessible via SFTP/WebDAV/NFS/CIFS/whatever that does not cost too much and preferably has no costs per GiB downloaded down the line.
Reference:
https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/storagebox-produktmatrix
Really missing search. I was in a conversation here about two days ago where I said something completely wrong, and I'd like to delete or reply-to-correct, but I have really no practical hope of finding it. (It was about the concept of "subtweeting", which I'd naively misunderstood until today.)
Sandro Hawke
boosted
The number of users on Mastodon is stabilizing around 700k users. We've seen only a 10% growth in user count over the last month.
Fewer users are joining us, and some instances are even disappearing from the network.
We don't necessarily *need* growth, though, but remember to keep this place warm, welcoming and open, as new people means new blood, new ideas and more fun 😺
Cheers to all of you !
Sandro Hawke
boosted
Is #xkcdsplaining a thing yet? If not, why not? It's clearly more real than all the other *splainings. https://mastodon.tetaneutral.net/media/FgKV1shN6EyEMiPv0cI
@Halycon I'm so impressed with your work. I'm wondering how hard it would be to install it side by side with a mastodon instance, on the same domain, with a user settings flag for which UI they get. No need to auth or anything. It looks like the URIs dont overlap except for /. But maybe the URIs should be the same. Hrmmmm.
Sandro Hawke
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things i wish was in the matrix
Neo: "Doesn't harvesting human body heat for energy, violate the laws of thermodynamics?"
Morpheus: "Where'd you learn about thermodynamics, Neo?"
Neo: "In school."
Morpheus: "Where'd you go to school, Neo?"
Neo: "Oh."
Morpheus: "The machines tell elegant lies."
Sandro Hawke
boosted
I thought of a way to deploy this safely. It would also work for the #Mastodon private message problem. In the websub subscription process, the subscriber can included a flag that it implements these extensions. Then hubs can send these extension messages only to appropriate subscribers. Sometimes extensibility points actually work!
Sandro Hawke
boosted
I want the fediverse to be much more than microblogging. I want to grow it to decentralize uber, runkeeper, yelp, doodle, youtube, steam, mint, etc. The biggest problem I'm seeing is context collapse: we don't always want to see all this from each other.
A pretty easy solution is opt-in hashtags. A post with one of these is only seen by folks who opt-in. Naive proposal: leading underscore means opt-in. Any reasons that wouldn't work? As an admin, would you be willing to try it with me?
Sandro Hawke
boosted
"If Facebook’s a media company, then it’s up to them to dictate the standards of their content. If they’re a tech company, then they need to open themselves to custom frontends.
So, which is it, Facebook?" via dat://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/not-media-companies
Sandro Hawke
boosted
My new project, I think: build a microblogging-based decentralized meeting scribe tool. All the meeting would be in a reply tree. And the tool would present it like some 2017 version of https://www.w3.org/2013/meeting/sparql/2012-06-26. In v0.2 you'll be able to scribe/comment/vote inside the tool (where it's just posting to your timeline for you). It wouldn't keep any data that wasn't in the timelines of participants, so it's not centralizing.
@maiyannah Is pA a single-page-app like Mastodon, or is the HTML all generated on the server? I see merit to doing it on the server, but in the end I think it makes sense to have a clean separation, with lots of possible UI apps talking to a client API. And have one of those apps pre-render for folks without JS, I suppose.
So, poking more at my problem of how to make a few hundred posts without flooding people, but so they can see them if they want. #Mastodon's algorithm I think lets me do that by 1) start thread with some kind of announcement, 2) quick reply by a bot no one follows, 3) I reply to the bot, 4) then I (and others) keep replying, and the whole chain never shows up in anyone's home timeline (except sometimes maybe). Have I got that right? Is there a better way?
So far, after one day of trying to have two Mastodon accounts, with one being more work-persona, I think I use the wrong persona about 30% of the time, and have no idea which is the right one about 40% of the time. Not promising. I'm sure it would help if I wasn't following the same people, and if I had clear location and/or color distinctions.
And making posts editable, especially so one can add tags one forgot. And making the 500 char limit be advisory (as it really is, given the federation), so there's no reason to leave off tags. I'd suggest "show more" breaks defaulting to 140 and 500 chars, but reader configurable.
Works at W3C/MIT on Social Web. Grew up in Berkeley, settled in Boston. Father of four. http://hawke.org/sandro
Joined Nov 2016
