Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

(i realize that people who are new to mastodon are in a place where they are not yet a part of the community but still want to contribute and that enthusiasm is why we keep getting things like this. what i wish these people understood is that the best way to integrate oneself within a community is by doing the kind of work that the community does. new mastodon admins for example acclimate extremely fast. people who contribute to the forks quickly find themselves in productive conversations with experienced people who can help educate them on how things are done here and why. people who build software toys on their own and then blast them out there “for discussion” are doing none of this. they are not meeting people where they are. they are not performing the labour of the masses. they are doing what is easy and fun and fulfilling for them and then expecting everybody else to embrace or at least tolerate their genius. this is not how software should be built)

(not one of these people has shown any interest in actually contributing to the community beyond toys and discussions and experiments that they entirely control and which are done entirely for their own satisfaction and pleasure. i have, as a rule, very little patience and tolerance for people whose approach to computers begins from a premise of fun solitary genius and not difficult solidarity work. insofar as computers are information technology their job is to bridge and facilitate communication across space and time. meaningful communication depends on social context and community. software therefore should also flow from social contexts and communities, not simply be thrust upon them one day by a stranger who thinks they know what is right)

(the real reason people keep trying to implement moar text search on fedi is because it is mind-numbingly easy to tell a computer to search for a thing, whereas building actually beneficial tools for users requires design and planning and thinking about human interactions and is generally quite hard)

sometimes i do want to find posts which i didn't bother interacting with the first time. the posts are never more than two weeks old and i usually can narrow down who shared it to a handful of people. i can just scroll through their timelines until i find the post. i don’t need a computer for that.

build me tools for things i CAN’T do

if you want to fix something broken in mastodon, make lists work better lol

let people sort, organize, and annotate (for personal usage) bookmarks, and let bookmarks be exported/migrated between accounts

add better notetaking capabilities beyond just shooting yourself a DM. make it easy to write notes no matter what you are doing or where you are in the timeline. make it easy to attach what you were looking at to the note

add a reminder functionality to remind yourself to look at something again later

add a hiding functionality to clearly mark and collapse things which you have already read

and idk i work in libraries, i write XSLT and weird yaml metadata files and raw RDF as a hobby; the kind of person who views digital space as, ideally, an uncurated mass of raw data to sift through is not somebody i will ever understand

the tools i want are not search tools but organizational tools

the absolute bare minimal action of favouriting or bookmarking a post that you might want to see again is the bar which is too high for these folks

literally any active effort or curation is too much of an ask, it has to be entirely automatic

“funnel my entire home timeline into a massive bin that i can have a computer run a full text search on” is, to be clear, entirely the latter

my most pretentious take is “you should learn how to cultivate your own digital space instead of relying to tools to avoid having to”

if you can't identify at least one of the types of at least 95% of the pokémon have you really been successful or are you just fronting

so is cat gonna start writing pokémon fanfic now or

choose your fighter

“LEARNING OPPORTUNITY” IN NAME ONLY, FOR IT IS NEITHER

i see a lot of people talking about COVID-19 being the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer

what i don't see those same people discussing is how heart disease and cancer are both conditions whose prevalence is also inflated as the result of economically-driven policy and communities deciding to take on a certain level of “acceptable risk”

COVID-19 is not worse than cancer. so why is it that people get extremely up in arms about that one but remain utterly silent about the other “big C”?

if goblins invented social media it would be more broken but it would also actually work

does mega evolution exist in my fanfiction universe? idk lol it doesn’t fuckin make any sense so probably not

on the other hand like half of the games have been retconned out of existence so there's that

there are a few fixed reference points and a lot of relative references which mostly link up with those fixed reference points and not much wiggle-room besides

i do not think the pokémon company has a timeline which is as good as my galaxy-brained pokémon timeline but the numbers do keep working out pretty nicely which is good