Alright!

Steph (they/them)

@aud I am far too exhausted to fully comprehend what you are doing here but I trust that it is valuable and good so I am boosting and hope I remember to look at it properly later!!

Asta [AMP]

also I'm pretty psyched at the user CSS and eventual Zotero/biblatex integration. That'll be fun!

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I appreciate that! I hope it's valuable and good too if it's not, well, I expect people will tell me about it.

It's what I've been working on for the past month and it's what I wrote the fellowship proposal for but I want this kind of "why the fuck shouldn't people be in charge of their presence?" thing to move forward, so it was a good time to copy/paste some of the proposal into more natural language and stuff.

I also think that if I'm going to start designing privacy features... well, I've read a lot about what people have to say and the things they've asked for and thought a lot about it myself, as well, but I need and want input on that too.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] There's other really great projects that do this kinda stuff too but I'm also focused on creating tools (and a server) that allow end user customization and can import/export from as many places as possible, which I don't think anything is doing right now.

(also! performance! if I had my druthers I'd want it to run the first fucking raspberry pi. Who knows if that'll happen. But it's a good sort of target)

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] (this started happening because I wanted customization levels like Tumblr or Wordpress but without ... that guy, and open, and also was fucking shocked as hell to hear "opt-in federation is against the spirit of mastodon" and am sick of the "let's just be twitter!" AND irritated that a lot of what I've written exists in like, three totally fucking incompatible databases. I wanna export my stuff from Misskey and Wordpress (and if I had access to it, Mastodon)).

Unfading

@aud yes, fuck- let people share templates like old-old Twitter and Tumblr. make accessibility easier to implement than the alternative. give the tools to use it like a lightweight art gallery and a carrd maybe?

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] yeah! That’s exactly the kind of stuff I want. I hope to eventually have it be customisable ala tumblr or Wordpress, although hitting that functionality level will almost certainly take a minute. But I think it’s important that we shape the software to match our discourse and not the other way around.

Steph (they/them)

@aud Okay, I am SUPER interested. This is very much the sort of thing I would like to a) support and b) make personal use of.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I am planning to integrate citation models, too, because I think it should be easy to just... be able to cite shit. That thought only occurred to me the other day but it's just a technical problem. It would be convenient, I feel like, for people to just be able to be able to insert citations in a blogging framework? Like, a global one (or set of global ones) for your profile, so that you could make citations across different posts.

That's gonna be a hot minute though... still at the early stages

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] One of the first things I want to do (and have the framework in place for! Just need to spend time fleshing stuff out is) is building the tools to export from Mastodon, Misskey, and Wordpress into ActivityStreams (ActivityPub's like... primitives). Mastodon can already do that, so that's no big deal, but Mastodon can't import (rolls eyes) and part of what I'm doing is to enable importing, as well.

Admittedly that won't help people migrate from Mastodon instances to other Mastodon instances but.

Steph (they/them)

@aud As a fellow scientist the notion of easy citations does appeal. Honestly it would be fun to be able to encourage scientists to blog semi-informally about their work and be able to cite each other and form their own networks.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] RIGHT? That was exactly my feeling. Like, existing software shit is designed for "engagement" (or, in the case of publishers, maintaining paid access) and I'm like why don't we just... build some tools to help communication and we'll see how that works, huh? I love the idea of people forming the networks they need and want and not restricting themselves to extractive models but instead just working with each other.

So. yeah! Right?!

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] and the semi-informal! I feel like a lot of communication is unnecessarily bound up with the idea of what formal language is, and it's this way because, oh, you know, we have to use style X to communicate and blah blah blah. But there's value in conversational language. A lot, in fact.