Lady @Lady@cat.family

@alyssa i only like blueberries in things, in like small pieces

whole blueberries i'm not fond of

who's a good dog?

dog

@maya in case you aren't aware, OStatus (what preceded AP) was built on Atom feeds. they were still Also Push, because that's the only way to get "real-time updates", but they could also hypothetically be pulled.

i can't speak for the AP designers but the biggest immediate problem that posed mastodon was followers-only posts. obviously you don't want those to be public, in a easily accessible feed…… so they were implemented as push-only. they couldn't be pulled

you might wonder, but surely we can just authenticate before responding with sensitive information! and:

1. we didn't have those authentication mechanisms at that time

2. we maybe still don't have them in a way which is safe against, like, replay attacks? not sure on this one

3. the amount of bookkeeping required to generate a specialized feed for a specific request is much bigger than the amount of bookkeeping required to just send a post to everyone on a list and then forget about it

so that's basically the crux of it. if every post has public access then pull is feasible, but it's a lot harder if posts have limited audiences. and since you have to do pushes anyway if you want real-time notifications, adopting a purely push-based model was simply easiest

if meowing is a learned behaviour does that mean we can teach other animals to do it too

“does that mean… i’m being cared about… right now?”

but note: « Even in the election year of 2016, politics was not a major field of Twitter for our respondents. In that year, among the four fields, the mean weight of politics is only .04, indicating on average less than 5 percent of the tweets were related to the politics field. Correspondingly, among 579 active Twitter users, only 5 percent (n = 29) were Pundits, whose tweets mainly emphasized politics. […] While a minor field, political engagement on Twitter increased in both weight and numbers of users in 2016. These numbers continued to increase in 2017. This finding seems counterintuitive to the omnipresent political tweets driving American news cycles. However, this field is likely a narrow one, with content dominated by elites and capital not easily obtained. »

well, i guess things DID change in 2016, huh

(from <https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/11604/10748>)