Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al

I don’t know what’s worse: a relative handful of psychopaths running the show or their having convinced masses of people that they too can be psychopathic if they work really hard at it.

Centralised → Federated → Peer-to-peer

#progress

#ItWasNeverYOURTwitter #ButItCanBeYourMastodon

https://joinmastodon.org/

#BreakingMyTwitter

@zacbir @aral @bigzaphod @saper @piraino Exactly :)

Fuck you, Erdoğan, fuck you very much.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-germany-arrests/turkey-arrests-german-citizen-source-idUSKBN1L11HO

PS. I stand by every word I said. Tyrants come and go. I will visit the land of my birth again one day. https://2018.ar.al/notes/my-speech-at-general-assembly-in-berlin-november-2017/

PPS. Remember this next time you feel like booking a holiday to Erdoğan’s Turkey.

@actuallyalice Was it for the right reasons? If so, awesome :)

@zacbir @bigzaphod @saper @piraino I mean as in commodified. The more privileged nodes we have, the more those privileged nodes become centres in an increasingly centralised system.

@bigzaphod @saper @piraino And if that model was to succeed, we’d just have a bunch of mini-Zuckerbergs to deal with. Multi-tenant instances must be as unopinionated as possible. Federation is a bridge to peer to peer; would love to see more incentives for instances of one.

@bjoern @aral @gnome Will open an issue for that, thanks :)

@chpietsch @aral Ah, I see what you mean. Gotcha!

@drequivalent @chpietsch Oh, by all means, use proper logging for logging. Print is a dirty tool for quickly spiking stuff. It’s not meant to be checked in.

@dredmorbius Haha :)

Introducing Gnomit: a simple Git commit message editor for @gnome, inspired by the excellent Komet app on macOS

https://ar.al/2018/08/15/introducing-gnomit-a-simple-git-commit-message-editor-for-gnome/

@laura @LiamErven @switchingsocial @Gargron Given @LiamErven is the one personally affected by this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it if, you don’t mind sharing them. Liam, if you were designing/developing Mastodon, how would you design it?

I don’t know what your development processes are like but I like to introspect what I’m building and use an empirical approach to shape my algorithms. All that scaffolding is then deleted, though, so if you just see the resulting code it can look like someone worked it all out in their head somehow. I wonder how much this contributes to the perception of code as some cryptic “magic” art. Maybe we should be sharing the “ugly bits” and our processes more to lower the perceived barrier of entry.

@laura @aral @LiamErven @switchingsocial @Gargron Is it forcing or is it about ethical defaults? Currently we have inaccessible by default. Should images be accessible by default? (Same argument is used for privacy. Mozilla says Google is popular so it's the default but you have the choice to pick a private search engine so it's OK. Yet surveillance by default is the antithesis of private.) So how is inaccessible by default different? Surely accessible should mean ‘accessible by default’… no?

@LiamErven @switchingsocial Here's an idea: Mastodon should, by default, have a modal dialog that takes you to each piece of media you’re trying to toot to enter a description if you haven’t already when you hit send. Why should accessibility be optional? It should be by default.

CC @Gargron @laura