Here's backfilling posts from profiles on the first time someone on your instance follows them, i'm trying to sneak up and close issue number 34 , which has been open since 2016. wish me luck: https://

jonny (good kind)

i'm procrastinating writing a paper lmao

jonny (good kind)

and also i'm trying to make masto, the entrypoint for many to the fedi, a little less bewildering and make it so we simply don't need to explain why things feel sorta lonely, quiet, and nothing behaves like how they expect it to when they first join

jonny (good kind)

i would like for the fedi to feel like you're exploring it. entirely in a way that respects people who don't want to be found/etc., but if you do happen on someone and like what they're thinking about, you can see other stuff they wrote, see who they hang out with (if they want to be found too), and so on. often on masto->fedi it feels like you 'can't get there from here,' and there are a lot of dead ends when you're on a small or even moderate server.

jonny (good kind)

i think it makes sense for when you are looking at something, to expand the world around it a little bit. 'what's over there' is a very normal thing to wonder. that's wholly separate from algorithmically crawling around or mass scraping - i'm talking about people navigating around a network and making active choices and requesting and receiving (or not) consent along the way.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] I remain confused as to why this kind of isn't considered a like... fundamental requirement of front end clients for fedi stuff. Like I get why maybe it wasn't the highest priority but it just seems so strange for a piece of software that wants to promote conversation and connection to leave out vital parts of it?

jonny (good kind)

@aud there are lots of reasons but you're right the number of lines of code that need to change here are surprisingly small

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] yeah. Like I've been thinking about how to implement my own AP stuff, and the idea that a user should have hunt to down the entire thread by clicking on various instances seems just so wild.

Admittedly, maybe that's also because I'm informed by the experience of today and can see what a massive social problem not having replies automatically populate contributes to (which is perhaps context/knowledge that was previously lacking).

This is sort of an unrelated point and I'm definitely not pointing fingers, but it seems weird that we split things into frontend/backend and not so much backend/"actual fucking experience of using the goddamn software" or maybe just "interaction".

jonny (good kind)

@aud yeah, like it's a hard problem but there are definitely many clear points where the server could respond more intuitively to my intentions as i'm using the thing

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] That kind of brings up something that bugs me about that split as well, which is that there's a shit ton of feedback between "frontend" and "backend" that inform decisions on either side and they're not really separate. I don't think all that marketing shit about "fullstack" really understands what they're asking for, either.

(I'm probably focusing a little too much on these points since I had to look at a ton of linkedin crap today). But the idea that backend people don't have to worry about user needs and interactions or that frontend people don't have to know about the data/architecture requirements of the backend is just... misguided.

I dunno; maybe I'm just being weird. I find software to be a very iterative thing, and I don't mean in the "add new features or remove old ones" sense that VC-addled outfits seem to think of it as.

Anyway, I would love for more AP/fedi stuff to do what you're doing. Sharkey (and all the Misskey stuff, I assume) also has this issue. I wonder if GoToSocial does...

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] UGH I even said "user" instead of something less corpo-tech-speak. Sorry.