Lady @Lady@cat.family

@gaditb i think you're assuming that ontologies are being made from people outside of the community and my point is the opposite, that in a federated context communities can express themselves directly to their audiences using the language they both have agreed on, instead of needing a third party to wrangle that language into a globally-recognized form

@gaditb oh, i think we disagree about the purpose of tagging then

i think the primary purpose of tagging is aiding discovery systems, and i think this stance is strongly evidenced by how tags are used for search and filtering on AO3. i question why “Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy” is being entered into the “tags” field and not the “description” field if the purpose isn’t associating the work with other works where Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy

if that association IS desired, then it’s to everyone’s benefit if that tag is suggested to authors, for example, if they have already tagged the work with “Peter Parker”, so they don’t recreate the tag with a different spelling and require wrangling work to smooth over the differences (assuming user-suggested tags are even an option)

i don’t want to foreclose the idea of tags that aren’t discovery-oriented. i think you’re right that it’s a use case. but i also feel that users might want works tagged “Peter Parker is a Nice Jewish Boy” to appear in tag listings for “Peter Parker”, “Nice Jewish Boys”, “Jewish culture”, et cetera, even if those other tags weren’t supplied… and it’s an open question whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that this can happen even when a creator is primarily in a communicative frame of mind

@gaditb ah well i think part of that is just the lack of implementations

the design goal is something that can be hosted as JSON files on Github pages. i think that's the right level of necessary technicality but has the flipside of being utterly unopinionated about how you generate those JSON files and get them in Github pages. i have my own opinions here but i don't think there SHOULD be an opinion, generally, at a schema level

i don't think there is a NECESSARY lot of work around getting a basic tagset. i think it can be really simple. (i mean, i think you can do it by hand.) but i also think that there are plenty of fannish librarians who love categorizing things and i’m really frustrated in the lack of tools they have to DO that right now, so this is growing a bit out of that frustration

i also think you might be underestimating the advantages of structured data: if you ARE working with a limited tagset of known values, it is FAR easier to find the tag you want by going “Comics > Superheroes > Marvel > Spiderman” than by trying to remember if the correct tag is “Spiderman” or “Spidey” or “Peter Parker”. fuzzy text matching offers a better experience over a structured knowledge system if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but a typically worse experience if you do, because people remember a concept’s location in a hierarchy much better than they do its exact name. in both the case of people assigning tags to works as well as that of people looking for works, i think they can generally be assumed to have familiarity with the tags they are using, so i want to design for the system which works best for them. that means emphasis on structured relationships and text labels can be thrown to the wind (which is to say, left to authors without consequence)

(this is better for internationalization too)

@gaditb more friendly discussion here: https://blog.ladys.computer/2023-05-26/federated_tagging/

@gaditb is this an intentional or unintentional rep for https://ns.1024.gdn/Tagging/

fix THAT and then maybe we can start talking about building good software

the secret nobody wants to talk about is that EVERY developer of a major fediverse software, yes even that one, has a habit of excusing assholes as a matter of professional practice. it’s impossible to “be a good fediverse citizen” without doing it. without having conversations with the people who make the software that the nazis use, or, less extremely, with the numerous missing stairs running instances that you can’t make a big deal about without that stance coming to colour your entire project.

that professional obligation becomes a personal habit. don’t trust anyone who writes a fedi software used by more than five instances. they will not back you up in a pinch.

it doesn’t fucking matter. i want every person who wants to fix the fediverse to go and read “Thoughts about Community Support around Intimate Violence” <https://archive.org/details/zabalaza_2009_intimate_violence> and then really reckon with how far away we are from ever implementing ANY of those practices in this space. there is not the will or maturity here to tackle any of the really difficult conversations that an actual community platform would have to grapple with on a regular basis, and technologies of community organizing delivered to a social context where people are more worried about losing their parasocial relationship with some popular account than they are about actual abuse doesn't create communities, it creates cults. and mastodon is a space where time and time again i have seen people pay lip-service to “restorative justice” as a way of justifying allowing abusers to continue sharing a room with them while making those same spaces unsafe for all of their victims. conversations about this never happen because the people who get hurt are forced to leave.

nobody wants to talk about this. there is zero will to do the hard work of fixing it. but you think maybe by distributing posts a little differently, things would improve? the beef between myasstodon and PV would have been ten times worse if friends of myasstodon were in charge of formal networks of federated instances instead of just informal ones. “but then you could just block them all in one go” literally when has federation drama ever been this simple

i’m not saying we can’t make things better. i’m saying the social change has to come FIRST. stop trying to build technologies for a community which doesn’t exist and can’t effectively use them. look at the communities we actually have and the actual history of this platform, and take a scientific approach to creating a space which is better. organize and build political consciousness. people will fucking make the technologies they need in their free time if you can get the communities and social support in place for them to do it; we’re not lacking in tech whizzes here

wait fuck when did this die??

there’s nothing to do but get hoisted

anyway i signed a lease today

i figured this wasn’t universal but i thought it had (a) been legislated and (b) also in other states

“wait, Delaware doesn’t have [thing which was wholesale invented by the Washington State Supreme Court]?!”

hey if you ever wanted to change a tera type now is a great time to do blissey raids

the key gimmick is after the first two gyms you decide whether you want to do the east half or the west half of the state, then once you beat the championship the routes open up to do the other one

the east half contrasts apocalyptic flooding in the past with contemporary irrigation and dam projects

the west half contrasts lush greenery and urban development with apocalyptic volcanism in the future

yes the legendaries are kyogre and groudon

i’ve been jotting down ideas for a fangame based on WA state for a while now and i think it has potential