• 76 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • it’s on us the fediverse for really failing to communicate the value of instances as well as making them easy

    A bunch of people came over to Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter, but they left because it was missing features. The big ones I saw were

    1. a lack of “trending” list - that means journalists and other people who want to know what’s happening right now didn’t have a way to find events
    2. no suggestions for follows. As a new user, how do people know what to follow?
    3. no suggested posts. Once I scroll through all the posts from the people I follow, the system doesn’t provide me with new posts.






  • I thought those were for only when shit is seriously wrong and execution can’t continue in the current state.

    That’s how it starts. Nice and simple. Everyone understands.

    Until

    some resource was in a bad state

    and you decide you want to recover from that situation, but you don’t want to refactor all your code.

    Suddenly, catching exceptions and rerunning seems like a good idea. With that normalized, you wonder what else you can recover from.

    Then you head down the rabbit hole of recovering from different things at different times with different types of exception.

    Then it turns into confusing flow control.

    The whole Result<ReturnValue,Error> thing from Rust is a nice alternative.








  • Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.