Oldschool fediverse phrases, from about 10y ago:
- TZAG: Time Zone Appropriate Greeting (preferred over "good morning")
- TZAF: Time Zone Appropriate Farewell
- #contextpatrol : when someone posted a response which wasn't linked to the original conversation, someone might link the conversation with #contextpatrol (the old StatusNet (ie, GNU Social) interface made not doing this accidentally easily)
- #vaguejokes : an obscure joke that was not really worth or more fun unexplained
Something I also miss: threaded conversations were the norm. Yes, in microblogging! Some of the most intense and interesting conversations about free software philosophy and licensing happened in threads that shot way off to the edge of the page
@cwebber
i subscribe to the zen of python:
Flat Is Better Then Nested
@nightpool flat is better than nested for shallow things, but you won't survive traversing deep things as well in flatland
consider how this affects the quality of The Discourse!
@cwebber @nightpool so... basically reddit, then?
@nightpool @trwnh The problem with hacker news and reddit isn't the threaded interface (which *does* help a lot), it's smarmy techbro culture. And Reddit wasn't always as bad as it is today: 10y ago it was a lot more calm STEM conversations. Had a lot of the inherent privelege problems of that domain, but I'd consider it considerably less toxic today. (And many subreddits are not as bad, but anything on the homepage is a disaster... that wasn't always true.) Not sure how to scale good culture
@nightpool @trwnh Well Mastodon's web interface doesn't expose the threads so I'm limited to the UX of the application I'm using ;)
@nightpool @trwnh Sure I agree with that, I'm just giving a data point against what I think is the popular conception of the very point you're making... that current users *want* a flat interface. Whereas I think the reality is that current users want what they currently know and are familiar with... so if introduced to something different, they will usually revolt. So maybe a more useful perspective is: what pros and cons structurally are there?
@nightpool @trwnh With 200+ comments? I don't buy it. I've seen 200+ comment threads on threaded interfaces I could easily follow where people could reply to each other from way earlier in the thread. It takes a *ton of* work to do that in a flat interface, and sometimes is near impossible
@nightpool @trwnh Btw, notably StatusNet removed threading-by-default in StatusNet 1.0 and it was widely considered a bad move by users. It was one of several things that lead to a huge user exodus.