Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Finally, it starts washing up on the fringes and reaches people who are not that interested, or actively hostile to your post / interest group.
And I think that's where you get the "reply guys" and toxic comments. Somebody in their circle liked your post for whatever reason, but most people in that group don't.
I can imagine that this is also how racist/sexist responses often happen -- a post gets boosted into a toxic community, and then you get comments (or DMs) from haters.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
The way boosts spread across the Fedi is also interesting. I once heard somebody say that posts "don't go viral on the Fedi, they go fungal" -- the comparison being to mycelium fibers and mushrooms popping up from them, I guess.
Because you have these overlapping constellations of instances, and so sometimes a boost will bring a post to a new audience.
And that often comes with delays, so there will be these little waves and bursts of activity.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
meta, positive, tangentially related to bluesky
I've said many times before that we don't actually need to worry about 'marketing' things like Mastodon or Matrix, we just need to make it good, and then people will organically and sustainably discover it and stick around. That we don't need to play the Silicon Valley game of "making a big splash and growing massively" because that only benefits startups, not community networks, we have different goals and costs.
And the situation with Bluesky is a really good example of this in action. Look at the amount of people on here who were using Bluesky, and with the latest events went "actually this sucks, huh, I guess I'm going back to fedi".
*That* is what I'm talking about. Notice how quickly people realized the problems with Bluesky. And how quickly they returned to fedi! *This* is how you grow a community network sustainably. You don't need or want to be the 'hot new thing' that's popular for a month and then drops off. You just need to be the reliable rock in a stormy ocean and people will slowly accumulate over the years and rarely or never leave.
Focus on making fedi better and better. Don't waste your energy and goodwill trying to play a corporation's game on a shoestring budget.
(And one of the most important ways right now to make fedi better is to improve moderation tooling and actually listen to marginalized folks.)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
fun fact: in SVG, "1mm" isn't guaranteed to be 1 millimeter
(1mm is 3.543307 "user units" which is "the parent environment's notion of a px unit", which might be a physical pixel, instead of an abstract DPI compensated size)
meta, positive, tangentially related to bluesky
I've said many times before that we don't actually need to worry about 'marketing' things like Mastodon or Matrix, we just need to make it good, and then people will organically and sustainably discover it and stick around. That we don't need to play the Silicon Valley game of "making a big splash and growing massively" because that only benefits startups, not community networks, we have different goals and costs.
And the situation with Bluesky is a really good example of this in action. Look at the amount of people on here who were using Bluesky, and with the latest events went "actually this sucks, huh, I guess I'm going back to fedi".
*That* is what I'm talking about. Notice how quickly people realized the problems with Bluesky. And how quickly they returned to fedi! *This* is how you grow a community network sustainably. You don't need or want to be the 'hot new thing' that's popular for a month and then drops off. You just need to be the reliable rock in a stormy ocean and people will slowly accumulate over the years and rarely or never leave.
Focus on making fedi better and better. Don't waste your energy and goodwill trying to play a corporation's game on a shoestring budget.
(And one of the most important ways right now to make fedi better is to improve moderation tooling and actually listen to marginalized folks.)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
mechanical keyboardists first went wrong when they decided the model M was the best keyboard ever made and the new ones ""don't count"
but the second way they went wrong is by calling a full keyboard "100%", so they can make smaller ones and call them 60% or 40%. That's wrong. They're going in the wrong direction
personal, body, 🥴 (2), medication
@quality@urbanists.social Hah, no. The transplantation has been postponed...
Sven Slootweg
boosted
my new shoes are comfy in a weird way.. Like, they're comfy on the top?
personal, body, 🥴 (2), medication
The 'easy' answer to this question is that one of my medications (due to anemia) is epo, the stuff that's also used by eg. cyclists as doping. So clearly that's the explanation, right?
Except I've been using that for almost two years by this point, and I wasn't able to pull myself up before during those two years...
personal, body, 🥴
So I am apparently somehow suddenly able to pull myself up by just my arms, on a pull-up bar, almost effortlessly.
I was only barely able to do this before my kidney disease treatment, and haven't been able to do it at all since. But now it's effortless. I have barely done any exercise in that time.
What?
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@joepie91 I would like to know where my nearest bomb shelter is, and who is responsible for dealing with holes in dikes. As long as the govt has no such lists for me, I don't take this shit seriously.
This stuff is meant to prepare folks for higher military spending. And it's working. 😑
@serapath A specific example of what I was looking at today was Gleam but unfortunately it has flat dependencies again
@serapath For example, strict typing without explicit type annotations, pattern matching (which seems to be stuck in spec hell essentially forever), but there are a lot of things that can't be implemented in JS or only in a compromise-filled way because it would break some pre-existing characteristic of the language
Sven Slootweg
boosted
A society which cannot manage to feed and house its poorest members while there is no material shortage of food or housing is a failed society
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I think there's value to dedicated support groups, but I also think that it solves a different problem (capacity) than what I was describing (awareness of common user experience).
Probably both should exist in a sufficiently large project, though you can get by without dedicated support folks for a surprisingly long time, especially if you otherwise have your community management in order, as there are usually volunteers who take on that work unprompted 🙂
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I think that's a good idea. I've written a couple of things to that effect, and so have others, but I don't think there's anything really comprehensive in the right tone yet, at least not that I've seen.
One of the many ways in which I think "healthy community moderation" is not really being taken seriously by anyone: the canonical way to design a "you are banned" screen is to simply tell people they are banned without any meaningful information, explanation, option for appeal, nothing.
An actually well-considered ban screen might look something more like: "You have been banned from <thing> for <reason>. You can click this link to learn more about why we do not accept this sort of behaviour in our community, where you will also find a guide on different, healthier ways to deal with situations like this. Once you feel that you've understood the problem and can commit to doing better in the future, this (link) is where you can find the appeal instructions and the conditions for approval."
But I have literally never seen a single social platform, game, or anything else with a screen that even comes close to that.
re: Discourse: What does it take to make FLOSS good?
@Angle I feel that there is a frequently-overlooked option that doesn't necessarily increase work, but only *feels* like it does: developers interacting more directly with users, and providing non-judgmental assistance.
Very often developers take an attitude along the lines of "I don't want to have to deal with users, that's somebody elses job", or if they *do* provide support, it's often in a very patronizing way that scares people away and obscures a lot of the details of the problems that they run into.
I feel that if developers learn to change their attitude on this, and provide end-user support from the perspective of "if someone has a question, that must mean there is a problem with the UX or the documentation somewhere", that could meaningfully improve things.
This *seems* like it's demanding extra work from developers, but in practice I've found that it mainly helps to catch problems early and keep them from spiralling into problems *at scale* - by doing a bit more work upfront, it prevents a lot of confusion, miscommunication, remediation work, redesigns etc. down the line, and the end result is that in the long term it *reduces* the total workload.
The biggest hurdle here, I think, is actually convincing developers to change their attitude in these matters, because that "don't want to deal with people" tends to run pretty deep. The flipside is that this is a change that can be made today, in existing projects, without any extra organizational complexity or costs.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
https://www.jennyboot.nl/ode-black-girl-with-pearl/
This photo is a beautiful riff on 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' by Johannes Vermeer. #art
@jon Huh. I wonder how enforceable that actually is.
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
