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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 6th, 2023

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  • word clouds will find when a corpus of hashtags is similar in meaning. If you use only hashtags, that’s like experiencing a grocery store or farmers market via an ambassador who cannot see the serendipitous shops that are nearby, the things frequently seen together. It’s like shopping in an app and never visiting the grocery store itself. Having a precision following list means you can’t experience going to a library and browsing shelves until something catches your eye - serendipitous search is fundimentally different from subscribed/reposted delivery, or even keyword search.

    computers and digital space don’t natively have the metric for which hashtags are closer, so they have to crunch the numbers to help figure out which books are closer to other books. Otherwise it’s like entirely separate universes that you’ll never ever find, like if you never knew a word that would lead you to a community of much more words and concepts and free thought.











  • Two examples:

    when you’re browsing your follows on mastodon, and click on their follows, the list is not true to their follows (because your server hasn’t fetched them).

    and, when you first subscribe to someone’s posts, you can’t see older posts (say they’ve got 100, but you see zero).

    I’m aware that there are technical reasons (you weren’t subscribed), and open source reasons (nobody has the time to volunteer to fix it), but these are insufficient to help an anxious new user who’s undecided about the platform.

    That’s only Mastodon, which has 7 years of refinement. Don’t get me started on the litany of federation-related edge cases of Lemmy’s UX failings.







  • In person conversation and online conversation are very different. Just like the mechanics of picking a lock and hacking computers in another country are very different.

    Online conversations can be unintentionally published with mistakes (even the best of us make typos or post to the wrong chat), and the blast radius is much worse.

    Online conversations are much easier to misinterpret due to lost context.

    If it’s a public figure or a company doing something shady, yes, it’ll end up on Internet archive.

    If a user wants to remove their selfie; you let them, because it’s their content.