@necedema I was at the Ralph Nader rallies in 2001 (I didn't vote that year) (4 months too young). I've tried a lot of things in the last 25 years. None of them worked. But the Ralph Nader thing really, really, *really* didn't work.

I've been involved in left activism of various kinds a long time. I've never seen protest votes move Democrats left. The ONLY things that influence Ds are (1) primary them (2) show up en masse nationwide at yearly dem party meetings and take over local party chapters. Protest votes are a "weak signal". Democrats don't know *why* you don't vote, or whether you're reachable. They're not incentivized to seek your vote next time.

I have been making a conscious effort to Post About Politics less post-Twitter. I no longer feel convinced blasting fancy words to people who don't care, already agree with me, already voted, or are German citizens, is helpful.

But this election is making me feel torn apart (if Harris loses, it may no longer be safe for me to move back to the USA) so if you feel personally open to listening to someone's pitch on the election, here are some spoiler-tagged tiny arguments for the night before:

A thing I don't like about Mastodon is (at least in firefox) when you CTRL-F the page it for some reason doesn't find text in content warnings (like, in the content warning subject).

A good thing to do during the early betamax era or early laserdisc era or I guess Selectavision era, anytime when there is a video format that hold exactly thirty minutes, would be to sell Rashomon blind boxes, where your tape/disc has exactly one of the segments from Rashomon but you don't know which

Trains are so great. Someone should invent trains

@charlag There will bean arms race where eventually ARM will release aaaaaaaarch64 and Loongson will release Loooooooongarch

@caesar @onyxraven @whitequark maybe urls shouldn't be an intrinsic part of posts then? Alternately if we assume all moves are one way we could imagine a directory of dead urls and what new url domains to map them to

*Me, frustrated with my microcontroller* This aarch is too short… I wish there was some way to make it loonger

@evan Theres a limit tho, like, one of the things I want is a image browser app tailored to my needs and that would need to integrate into Android api in a specific way. Like PWAs are great for many things but as operating system utilities they may not work

@evan Considering it

I feel joy writing React for web with TS

I feel joy writing TUIs in Rust. I think if I ever learned Iced I'd find joy in this too*.

Kotlin I admire elements of the design but it feels slow to write and the idiosyncratic Android API I feel like is constantly fighting back at me

* Feel free here to convince me I'd be happier using egui

I wish there was a method of developing software for Android that brought me joy

There are some types of software development that I will do them just to do them

Android I cannot get myself to dev for unless either I'm being paid or I think the task is so important to be worth it

This is a problem because I use Android *constantly*, many days I spend more time in Android than a desktop OS, and there's a certain amount of software I'd like to write

@julian @MrCheeze I don't think there's a systematic infrastructure for it. Bluesky on the other hand is built around a systematic architecture for that exact thing (although as I mentioned it has other decisions I don't like)

@MrCheeze this is a feature… until server X goes down. But server X going down is exactly what we are afraid of

@glyph @evan Like if that were the standard way of organizing instances we'd still have the normal nonprofit problem of Evil Boardmembers taking the thing over and doing something bad, but this only increases the value of a set of best practices and instructions for how to organize a cooperative instance governing body with representation from the users. (Then the big threat just becomes cliques, and instances have this problem already.)

@glyph I think my argument would be that the documentation for the mastodon admin interface should begin with instructions on how to start a co-op

Like, fundraising is only one problem. The problem is the trust relationship is with one operator. If more instances were run by organizations, like mastodon.social, there would be continuity AND the ability to rotate staff

I dunno, maybe this would be a good @evan project. Create a co-op-in-a-box "restructure your instance as an org" package.

@whitequark It depends on the usecase. Is this a publishing system or a chat system (yes, I know one of your major projects is persistent logging for chat systems but I haven't been awake long enough to frame this better)

- The fediverse is almost optimized for tricking people into starting instances without realizing how the resource/moderation burden will scale as it grows

- The fediverse therefore makes the single chief operators of a server a single point of failure

- Offers those operators no options for dealing with overextension/burnout/cost growth other than shutting down

- And offers the users no facility for saving either their usernames or their post histories when the shutdown inevitably happens

This is, in my opinion, the most severe problem with the Fediverse. People were warning about this issue as early as 2016 and we still don't have a solution. I'm shocked more people don't quit the Fediverse entire when this happens to them

RIP botsin.space

(muffinlabs.com)

I'm not saying the operator of botsin.space made the wrong decision here. But it's broken we have a network architecture where making this decision inherently means the fediverse permanently losing a domain name and a block of history