[fluffy]It tried really hard to be a modern stack with a separation of frontend and backend, but never offered a user-accessible API or any real auth mechanism other than their username/password thing. I don’t think you could even get a permanent access token using that.
[fluffy]There was a long-active bug where if you visited a page while not logged in, then logged in, then went back to the page you logged in from, an uncaught error would happen and the whole page would turn blank. I had to keep reopening the bug because the devs never tried to reproduce it and assumed it just went away on its own because people didn’t keep pestering them about it every time it happened.
[fluffy]There were also a lot of persistent complaints about annoying things in their stylesheet, and their response was always to blame whatever CSS framework they were using, which tells me they didn’t know how to write CSS.
[fluffy]Yeah, I feel bad for them, but these are persistent issues I constantly ran into as a user of the site. And the nature of most of their bugs, as well as their response to those bugs being reported, left me with no confidence in their technical abilities.
[fluffy]like their Atom feeds were formatted by an external library, and their <category> tags would get invalid characters in it because they didn’t know how to escape entities, and when that was opened as a bug they just blamed the library.
[fluffy]The draw to cohost was the community they attempted to foster, although a lot of *that* was in the form of them stating good intentions which they weren’t able to back up with action as the site grew and moderation burden increased.
[fluffy]But it’s like they purpose-built everything to have their small LLC as the bottleneck for all technical and community decisions going forward, and I’m amazed they lasted as long as they did.
[fluffy]Having a proper API would have been great. Having community-driven moderation would have been great. Having decent feed support, or at least a way for people to generate their own feed from the mythical API, would have been great.
[fluffy]What’s infuriating is all of the discussion on Mastodon and Cohost and so on where people are just like “wellp guess there’s no social media left” as if there aren’t plenty of options for, y’know, running your own website, often for free.
[fluffy]People are so conditioned to think that their entire social experience needs to be looking at a single dashboard on a silo. Anytime someone mentions RSS it gets dismissed out of hand as being “just for nerds.”
superkuhIt's too bad notabug.io died before it was finished. He was working on integrating external RSS/Atom feeds into the lens system for mixing/aggregating the notabug.io equivalent of subreddits.
[tantek][mattl] yes RSS is for nerds, a particular subset, nostalgic nerds from the early 2000s. Technology moved on. RSS2->Atom->Atom+AS1->AS1/JSON->AS2, or another fork, RSS2->Atom->JSONfeed
[tantek][fluffy] RSS *should* be dismissed out of hand because it's literally only fora narrow band of nerds who are willing to put up with all the bad UX, and yet somehow completely missed the fact that entire communities iterated and evolved beyond RSS into better more well-specified standards, with test suites, eventually with more modern features.
[tantek][fluffy] and unfortunately "feeds in general, including Atom and h-feed" is not what all the RSS nostalgia posts mean, or when people bring up the good old days of RSS and are dismissed mean
[fluffy]well anyway. my point is just that feeds, in general, are a nice way to do things that involve subscribing to infrequent updates, and I am still a heavy consumer of feeds and it’s infuriating that feeds are usually seen as an afterthought by anyone building a new thing.
[snarfed]that's a different question. which, fine. but AS2 _evolved out of_ feed formats feels like a very different statement to me than AS2 _is a_ feed format
[tantek]at this point both "RSS reader" and "feed reader" are niche terms that mostly just nerds and maybe a few journalists recognized who were actively using web things 20+ years ago, so there's a generational break
[tantek]so unless you want to only appeal to a elder millenial / gen x and older demographic, you really should stop saying "RSS" or "RSS reader" or "feed reader"
[tantek]might as well be going on and on about NNTP Clients and News Readers which is about the same sort of limitation except you probably lose all the millenials too
[tantek]this is why those terms are in /jargon and why Loqi nudges people in #indieweb to this channel that use them. they are effectively dev terms even if a very small handful of folks here see them in a handful of user interfaces
[jacky]That does mean that there's no real way to talk about alternatives _without_ first having to come into here (not sure if that's bad or good; might be case by case)
[tantek][jacky] alternatives to what though? IMO it's like worrying about discussing alternatives to vi or emacs. Typical users have never heard of those and would not understand why anyone was talking about alternatives to vi or emacs.
[jacky]I mean, there's definitely a pool of folks who've moved from network to network in lieu of administrative changes. Even the scare of the TikTok ban had (some) folks considering where (if anywhere) to go next (though that's tied more to their ability to make money on those platforms and less on community building)
[jacky]I'd guess I'd like to get to a point where folks aren't scrambling around (or worse, apathetic to things b/c of the in-built switching costs that came with these platforms providing "ease of use")
[tantek]it does users absolutely zero good to "pitch" or otherwise claim various technical jargon are "alternatives" to social networks that they're using
[tantek]yes, you might be able to use copper pipes to build a network of public bathrooms that actually are alternatives to toilets in MacDonalds and Starbucks, but they are not the same, and telling the public, "just get some copper pipes!" does absolutely zero good to people who want to go to the bathroom
superkuhIt certainly takes a lot of time an effort. With ~1700 RSS/Atom feeds in my rss reader I now usually see what's going to be on hackernews, lobsters, or other aggregators before it appears there. But I don't think the social network versus feeds tech is about completion or ease of use. I think it is about having the infrastructure required to move money around legally.
superkuhFeed technology doesn't offer people a way to make money so it is not an alternative. At least with governments KYC laws squeezing out all possible monetary transaction alternatives.
[jacky]Like the billions of people stuck on Facebook, for example, began with private fiscal incentives and now has made it _more expensive_ for people to leave (it's critical for more modern family reunions for example, since we're more accustomed to using a computer to mediate those relationships)
[jacky]Don't think you can organize a family reunion on Strava (the point I was making that's more applicable to folks using over a distributed region versus individual interests)
[tantek]I saw organizing with FB events hit a peak pre-pandemic and then crash to near zero during the pandemic, and then switch to other tools like partiful.
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[qubyte]I love the idea, but I’d be concerned about python. (to be clear, I like python, but unless you’re a daily programmer in it the dependency management and venv side of things will definitely bite eventually)
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pcarrierI'm personally happy to not know about alternatives because those topics are of very little interest to me and my employer had already chosen, but there might be better setups for your needs
[qubyte]What got me started on the static site path was lab software. We used LabWindows/CVI and later LabVIEW/G where I worked, and much of what I would write was designed to stream lines to CSV files, read files in, etc. Various unix CLI utilities would be piped together to slice and dice and post process the output (I didn’t know about SQL yet). It got me used to the idea of slinging files and lines and thinking in terms of flow and dependencie
[fluffy] There was a long-active bug where if you visited a page while not logged in, then logged in, then went back to the page you logged in from, an uncaught error would happen and the whole page would turn blank. I had to keep reopening the bug because the devs never tried to reproduce it and assumed it just went away on its own because people didn’t keep pestering them about it every time it happened.
[mattl]2 This is a shame. It could have been avoided probably
[jacky] https://browser.pub/https://todon.eu/users/jalcine something like this for mf2 (like to parse that of a page and render it back to help with authoring) would be nice 🤔
[tantek] [fluffy] RSS *should* be dismissed out of hand because it's literally only fora narrow band of nerds who are willing to put up with all the bad UX, and yet somehow completely missed the fact that entire communities iterated and evolved beyond RSS into better more well-specified standards, with test suites, eventually with more modern features.
Loqi [preview] [[tantek]] On another topic, this seems adjacently relevant to our interests: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/08/goodbye-tinder-hello-strava-have-hobby-apps-become-the-new-social-networks — as in, whatever is motivating people to migra...
capjamesg[d] This tool looks pretty neat for static site generation: https://www.getlektor.com/
[qubyte] What got me started on the static site path was lab software. We used LabWindows/CVI and later LabVIEW/G where I worked, and much of what I would write was designed to stream lines to CSV files, read files in, etc. Various unix CLI utilities would be piped together to slice and dice and post process the output (I didn’t know about SQL yet). It got me used to the idea of slinging files and lines and thinking in terms of flow and dependencie