Wilfred Hughes @wilfredh@mastodon.social
Programming geek, natural languages nerd, and occasional writer.
free as in the entire day you'll have to have to install the damn thing
I'm at Strange Loop conference! Do say hello if you're around.
Coming from Twitter, a major difference with the Tooterati¹ is that your server matters. You're more easily discovered by users on the same instance.
It's an interesting, different group dynamic. There's more scope for self-organisation and group identities.
¹ This should totally be a word. People use Twitterati with a straight face.
I've seen both #foo and !foo used on Mastodon. How do they differ?
"So the #1 best rule [for going viral] is: Have overwhelmingly awesome content. So good that people intrinsically want to spread the word."
https://blog.asmartbear.com/darwinian-explanation-and-advice-for-going-viral.html
From: Darwinian explanation and advice for “Going Viral”
Mastodon is rapidly maturing as a microblog platform! "Mastodon and the W3C – Hacker Noon"
https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422
Especially impressive because evolving distributed protocols is difficult!
In 1987 we thought the future of entertainment would be people playing interactive movies and TV shows, so they could get right inside the story.
In 2017 the cutting edge of entertainment is TV shows of other people playing videogames so you don't have to.
What are the refactorings that you consider essential? Is there a minimum set? More interestingly, can an IDE be complete, such that there are no extra refactorings that a user wishes to use?
140 chars on Twitter feels so much more limiting after tooting!
From: Richard Stallman
Subject: Changing font size
Date: Tue, 22 Aug **2017**
“It would be very nice to give Emacs commands to make the font bigger and smaller.”
― https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-08/msg00497.html
New blog post:
"Helpful: Adding Contextual Help to Emacs"
http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/08/30/helpful-adding-contextual-help-to-emacs/
Ryan "Icculus" Gordon is looking for new games to port to Linux, pay not required
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/ryan-icculus-gordon-is-looking-for-new-games-to-port-to-linux-pay-not-required.10195 #Linux #LinuxGaming
Why I haven't jumped ship from Common Lisp to Racket (just yet) - Cybernethics / Cybernéthique http://fare.livejournal.com/188429.html #lisp
@Angle "When you're tired of Novelty, you're tired of life."
So, I find an interesting Mastodon host, say esperanto.masto.host. How do I discover users on that host?
Tusky has a feed, but I believe that's my default server? It's got a big cross section of folks tooting in many languages, most of which I can't read.
Back on Mastodon as my impression was that it is steadily growing. Has the tech community stayed, or just kicked the tyres and left?
500 chars is an awful lot.
140 chars is too little (though I have long admired https://twitter.com/MicroSFF writing entire stories in single tweets). 500 chars is enough for me to dither over what I've written.
140 chars enables you to write and edit in a short period. That said, I'm forced to ask 'which abbrevation / grammar fault is least irritating?' regularly.
I *really* like that I can filter my notifications to just mentions.
Responses are interesting. Someone clicking 'like' is not actionable and it doesn't warrant the distraction.
Is it possible to respond to toots on other networks?
For example, I would like to respond to https://mastodon.xyz/@gregbarbosa/70068 but I cannot see how to.
Twitter is being unbundled before our eyes
http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/23/15039062/twitter-unbundling-twitch-reddit-instagram
Another interpretation is that we're still figuring out what a social fabric should look like.
What features should it have? How do we maximise discoverability? What moderation tools work at scale?