Nolan @nolan@toot.cafe

New blog post: "Introducing Pinafore for Mastodon" https://nolanlawson.com/2018/04/09/introducing-pinafore-for-mastodon/

Also none of what I'm saying should be construed as a slight against the Mastodon maintainers. They put this stuff out for free and have no obligation to do any work for me.

I just like to occasionally commiserate with other admins and swap advice on how to deal with tricky updates.

Also as a side note, this is why I've historically used rebasing instead of merging, even if it requires force-pushing to the master branch of my fork. However I got lazy recently because `git merge` was faster. I may have to backtrack and go back to rebasing.

Also if any git aficionados have any advice, I'm all ears. I have used Git for over 10 years and I still basically fumble my way through everything because Git makes my brain hurt.

#MastoAdmins

Just tested out v2.5.0rc1 on malfunctioning.technology, which is a 100% vanilla instance with no modifications running v2.4.5.

git merge v.2.5.0rc1

resulted in 3 merge conflicts:

both modified: Gemfile.lock
both modified: db/schema.rb
both modified: lib/mastodon/version.rb

This is gonna be a fun upgrade. 😅 #MastoAdmins

So apparently there is an unofficial API in glitch-soc and Pleroma to show an instance's character limit, in case it's over 500. It's called "max_toot_chars", which makes my eye twitch because

1. Pleroma doesn't even call them toots
2. Nor does the rest of the API – in the API lingo they're called "statuses"

Adding it to Pinafore tho ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://github.com/nolanlawson/pinafore/pull/495

Also arguably the payoff for all this work is pretty small. A social media app is inherently network-bound; when the user is offline, the best I can usually do is show the last known state in a read-only mode, and provide a gentle "oops, you can't do that" when they try to do something that's unsupported offline like boosting, favoriting, etc.

Then again I already did all this work to make it offline-capable, so I might as well maintain it lol

For years when working on PouchDB, I'd tell people: "Synchronizing state between the client and server is a non-trivial problem! It's a distributed system; you need something that can manage all the complexity for you!"

Now with Pinafore, I'm running headlong into all those problems I used to talk about. To make it work offline, there are parts of the code where I have to synchronize 1) in-memory state, 2) IndexedDB, 3) IDB cache, and 4) network state. It's really hard!

Great talk from @slightlyoff on the mobile phone landscape and why it continues to be so hard to build a fast mobile website: https://youtu.be/VpixmppRbZU

Interesting talk from Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering) on luck vs skill in games and why games often reduce luck over time https://youtu.be/dSg408i-eKw?t=16s

I'm a bit on the fence about the new reply count feature; I may or may not even add it in Pinafore. But at the very least I appreciate that Eugen went with "0/1/1+" rather than showing the full reply counts. It's an inherent anti-virality feature.

BTW if you haven't read it yet, this is a great paper on why virality may be bad overall for social networks, even if it's driven by what users want in the moment: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3132758

On Twitter, I always felt like my eyes were darting towards the retweet/like counts even before I read the tweet. "Do my peers approve of this?" "Is this controversial?" "Is it okay for me to like this?" On Mastodon, you have to explicitly click on the toot to see the counts, which at least forces you to read the thing before considering what others think of it.

It bears repeating that it's the subtle design decisions that make Mastodon a kinder, gentler social network. For instance, there's no technical reason for toots *not* to have the boost/favorite counts in the timeline, but by not having them there, you're encouraged to interact with the post on its own merits rather than what the crowd thinks of it.

toot.cafe, freedom.horse, and malfunctioning.technology are all upgraded to Mastodon v2.4.5 now. Release notes: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/releases/tag/v2.4.5