who are active
Notices by Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 05:56:07 JST Brian Dear
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Jun-2024 05:14:45 JST Brian Dear
History repeating itself.
Why, I’m old enough to remember when the RIAA sued my then-employer, MP3•com, in 2000–twenty-four long years ago—for exactly the same thing. $67 billion lawsuit I think it was.
Record labels won in the end. Vivendi Universal wound up owning what was left of MP3 after that debacle.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 03:36:25 JST Brian Dear
Understood. Let’s stipulate that all these facts are accurate.
But I’d postulate that by making search opt-in, search is pretty useless. It has hurt discoverability, and to compensate, put awkward burdens on individual users who stuff their toots with character-count-wasting hashtags in an effort to boost discoverability.
And I’d argue the Network Effect, so crucial to helping social neworks grow and thrive, has been weakened on Mastodon in large part by the search policy.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 02:32:24 JST Brian Dear
As a user I don't care how search functionality is implemented on the back end. I search, and as a user I get nothing, or very little. All I get is the confidence that Mastodon didn't find what I *know* is out there. And that's because of the policy decisions that were built right into the design and architecture, right into the DNA of Mastodon, decisions which essentially guarantee a disappointing search experience for users, regardless of how beautiful the code is.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 02:22:33 JST Brian Dear
Put another way:
If I search, I want to search *MASTODON* as in the whole damn thing. Across all instances. With sorting ability--relevance, by date/time, etc.
If there are "blocked" or "hidden" results, I wanna see a count of them as in "Here are 1834 matching results, including 920 redacted results" with an explanation as to why they're redacted, as in, by individual user choice, or by instance policy.
This place needs TRANSPARENCY.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 02:16:36 JST Brian Dear
Oh, anything? Everything? Like, for example, I see something in the fast-moving river, and ten minutes later I think, I shoulda clicked on that link, and I try to search for it but no, it be gone, gone, gone, down the river and over the digital waterfall.
Search is always the single most consistent, most predictable, disappointment in Mastodon. In fact its lack may be the only disappointment in the overall Mastodon experience since I joined in 2017.
I wish it were not so.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 01:42:04 JST Brian Dear
And that is why Mastodon is stuck at 15 million accounts, only a fraction of which are active in any meaningful sense.
The lack of search functionality, blocked by a purist ideology held by another fraction of the user population, may be elegant (in the nerdy Linux sense) but it is an architectural form of pre-crime censorship and control, which has had clear and obvious effects on the “community” and on these so-called “conversations,” turning Mastodon into a fast-moving river.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2024 05:29:14 JST Brian Dear
Yes, I loved it as a kid. But in the past 20 years, as attention spans have shrunken to flea-size, I can't stand NOVA and refuse to watch it. The editing is rat-a-tat machine-gun style, as in "ooh! look at this! NO! look at this! NO THIS! ahhh hey this! and what about THIS! and check THIS out! did I mention THIS! and THAT! look at THIS! here's something! and more! more! more!" I mean it's effing nuts, as if the show is scared to death someone might aaaaaaagh flip the channel aaaargh 😱😱😱😱
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-May-2024 03:08:19 JST Brian Dear
That does it.
My next band name is UDM 14.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 02-May-2024 12:31:47 JST Brian Dear
I’ve been a Netflix customer for 22 long years. I miss their DVDs and Blu-rays. I will never see an ad on Netflix, and the closer they get to mandatory ads with a paid subscription (you’d have to be insane imho), the sooner I get to quitting their service. Ball is in your court Netflix. Whatcha gonna do.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2024 08:15:22 JST Brian Dear
@Gargron Well the editor’ look and feel obviously changed today (in mobile Safari at least). When I tried to add an image all it did was replot the screen. So I posted just text without an image then went back in to edit the toot, and add an image then, and still couldn’t. Since then, like 90-120 mins later, I tried again to edit, and this time I was able to add the image. 🤷♂️
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 27-Jan-2024 08:10:31 JST Brian Dear
#Mastodon web-based toot editor all messed up. Can’t add images anymore.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jan-2024 10:25:38 JST Brian Dear
It’s happened more than once in the past month or so. Will keep an eye out for any more occurrences.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jan-2024 09:51:58 JST Brian Dear
This keeps happening. Is it a bug? or what?
Every now and then in my feed I see a toot by someone I do not follow. The toot contains no hashtags I follow. Nor is the toot boosted by anyone I follow. It just shows up in my feed.
Why?
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 25-Dec-2023 16:17:46 JST Brian Dear
It’s crap posts and comments like these that makes me think, exactly how is Mastodon different from Twitter, eh? Because it sure looks like it’s home to the same kind of pile-ons of ignorance and cluelessness by a tribe of hooligan know-nothings seeking others of similar mind that made Twitter such a waste of time.
(And if you think this toot is defending Musk, no, this toot doesn’t mean I’m defending Musk, you ignorant git.)
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Dec-2023 04:59:05 JST Brian Dear
@arstechnica Way to go Arse Technica, promulgating inaccurate information just as well as the mainstream media. Just once, I’d love to see a reporter get the story accurate. Just once!
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 23:23:23 JST Brian Dear
It screams climate crisis denial and climate inactivism on Toyota’s part. They’re so set in their old fossil ways they believe, or insist that?, their customers are too, and there’s fear to change from the comfort of the polluting, mecganical past. So they waste money and time on gimmicks like this instead of trying to beat Tesla to market with a ~$25K EV, which imho should be their priority.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Oct-2023 10:12:09 JST Brian Dear
@wonderofscience Anyone interested in spinner dolphins and open to a novel written about them could do worse then check out the book POD by Laline Paull.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Oct-2023 00:51:28 JST Brian Dear
@Ruth_Mottram @feditips @micron
"Choose a server and sign up" is the great barrier to entry for mass adoption of Mastodon, imho.
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Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 08-Sep-2023 02:22:41 JST Brian Dear
@arstechnica Reason 28746 why you could not pay me a billion dollars to use Autopilot or Full Self Driving in a Tesla. If he won't pay bills for rent, or other vendor goods and services at Xitter, who knows what he isn't paying bills for in the software and hardware teams at Tesla. (Plus, phantom braking is an ongoing problem for 3+ years with no fix, or even an acknowledgement from Tesla that it is a wildly dangerous ongoing issue.)