Wesley Moore @wezm@mastodon.social

I wrote an article about the redesign of MNT Reform https://mntre.com/media/news_md/2019-05-20-reintroducing-reform.html

I should be angry that the market for homebrew game consoles is getting so crowded, but instead I can't help squeeing seeing this beautiful design.

I also love how they contracted actual game developers to make actual games, instead of counting on the community to make them for free, or including an emulator like most others.

The 400x240 reflective screen looks beautiful, and the whole thing is really well designed. I hope it will be an open platform.

https://play.date/

What are good #Pleroma instances to check out? Last time I looked at Pleroma I had a bad time, but I think I'm ready to test it out again

After years of hard work, WebRender begins shipping in Firefox stable 🎉 https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/graphics-team-ships-webrender-mvp/

Got my custom backlit #Gnome and Oops! keys from Max Keyboards.

Still looking for a new job. Any leads on #rustlang work y'all?

What does not necessarily make sense to me is the urgency and fervour with which this issue has been discussed. Although it is not uncommon for Mastodon--for whatever reason--to frame every feature request as a question of life and death, when Mastodon is ultimately a place where we make a meme out of someone's name for a day, and then someone posts a picture of What Must Not Be Named

Unless you seek to emulate every system you interoperate with, you have to draw lines. And drawing the line at what Mastodon was designed to do, kind of makes sense to me. The text is the most important part, and we've got that.

There's another angle to this. The fediverse is large, and its participants who are not Mastodon have different ideas and design philosophies. Some of them are publishing all sorts of lists and quotes and strike-through items. And when those posts show up on Mastodon, those visuals are lost.

That is not ideal, when it happens! But interoperability between systems with different goals and capabilities can't ever be full, it's a spectrum.

Right now, there is not a whole lot of ways that individual posts can escape their boundaries to affect the whole experience. They can use lots of line breaks or a wall of text, but it's limited by a maximum height. They can use caps, but they don't stand out that much. Custom emoji are one of the weaker spots when people use them as fonts, and that's annoying.

But adding more elements to the mix? More control over visuals? People WILL make it look ugly, that's a guarantee.

A social network is also a kind of common playground. Individuals have the capacity to spoil it for others. For example, when there was a bug in Mastodon that allowed you to make links spin, many made use of it for fun, which spoiled the experience for people with motion sickness. The more vectors there are for how information is transmitted, the more pronounced this is.

Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone but it was made to fill that exact niche. Short posts with mentions, hashtags, and URLs. Such details give the feel of a platform. The velocity, the atmosphere. On a personal level that's just what I like. And I think it would be reasonable to assume many of those who signed up do, too.

the way folks treat eugen is basically the reason i realized years ago that i never want to write community software

Inaugural Post for Lemmy, a decentralized, easily self-hostable #reddit / link aggregator alternative, intended to work in the #fediverse:

https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/

#activitypub