Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@pingiun Heh. It wasn't always that way: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/177

Anyway, this mini-rant brought to you by me frustratedly manually renumbering video files to the S00 format and getting the exact episode numbers wrong at least twice, because apparently it's not even a contiguous sequence

@pingiun I prefer telling people "it does matter what instance you use, but not right away - just pick the first one you see, and move it later if you want, it's easy to move"

The TVDB *almost* gets it right, categorizing specials by type: https://thetvdb.com/series/doctor-who-2005/seasons/official/0 -- but they then still number everything as S00, even the specials that are clearly an important part of a season narrative!

Like, some of the specials belong to seasons, some of the specials *are* seasons, some of the specials are "behind the scenes" stuff and so don't fit into the main episode flow, and some specials are wholly stand-alone. You can't just glob all of those together into a huge S00 Specials category!

How has nobody in the TV piracy scene figured out how to deal with Doctor Who specials numbering yet? It feels so broken in literally every piece of TV show management software I've used

Since there have been a number of comments that boil down to "but people should be willing to learn stuff", this thread (not by me) is a pretty good explanation of the difference that I see between "improving UX" and "catering to one's every need", and where the boundary lies: https://eldritch.cafe/@AgathaSorceress/109296512790347301

@lethargilistic@kolektiva.social "Capture" here refers to the capture of an *ecosystem*, not of individual users, it's a collective issue. And there's a huge difference between "being willing to try something new" and "being willing to put up with unnecessarily obtuse systems because nerds only build for themselves". I expect the former from people but absolutely not the latter, it has to come from both sides.

(And obviously actively harmful UI design choices are excluded from this. I'm talking about "UX" in the original sense, ie. improving the overall experience of the end user, and that includes not causing them harm.)

@pingiun Right, I think I'm on exactly the right size instance for it to be useful - there's a bunch of users on here, but not *massive* amounts, and this instance is pretty loose on the trigger for instance blocks. So I get a new toot on the federated timeline probably... every few seconds? Which is manageable, and it's often in some way relevant or interesting.

@pingiun You mean the federated timeline? Because at least that's not outrage-ranked (though probably still a firehose on most instances)

@pingiun Plus extremely toxic social dynamics; because outrage 'sells' in an algorithmic environment.

Keep in mind that almost all of the fediverse (including almost all Mastodon instances) is run by volunteers!

You should adjust your expectations accordingly - nobody is trying to sell you anything here, but that also means that you cannot make the sort of demands that you might make of a corporation.

And don't forget to send a donation to your instance admin!

#FediTips