^ Back to Multiapp Idea for #devRant, 2

What's with the groups and the cost of their administering? Let's just say, I don't wanna get in these logistics here. What I want is to propose an alternative before such things are required.

Here's an idea: let's make an app that has a select few hashtags open in the home feed already. There are no levers, no buttons to remove some bad actor's posts for everyone else (definitely not on remote instances). But anyone can block or mute whoever they don't see fit just on their end. It's that one simple feature I was missing in devRant, which has place in #skyRant.

Everyone is on the same page, as far as their federation goes. Your instance's got to have interconnections with multiple other instances to provide a better coverage.

When time comes to gag someone, for everyone's safety, maybe delegate it to instance administration. Send a report, forward it, they can do something about this.

^ Back to Multiapp Idea for #devRant

Plans on moving platforms entirely are merely that, the plans. Right now, archiving their own content from devRant looks like something that everyone could use more than change a place of commute altogether.

From my limited knowledge, it is possible to make an app that bridges the gap. Why even worry about where your thing gets discovered, when you can have it in all places? Imagine: an aggregator, Mastodon app that integrates neatly with devRant and gracefully falls back to Fediverse.

If focus is on the engagement, you can opt-in to mirror posts and collect upvotes/favorites for your personal statistics. If focus is on backwards-compatibility, check how post will be parsed down to devRant. How about automatically linking back to Fediverse for better media quality? Sure, why not! Pleroma reactions come alive on devRant? Maybe we can play with plain text in comments.

Possibilities are huge: just keep them real and useful to people, maintain.

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 8

There is no user rating system natively written down into ActivityPub, so it's pretty safe from number boasting. Now, to some it might look like a letdown, but think of the advantages, how it changes the way people interact with the content. It's a place where every post shall be seen by its own merit and authors as (somewhat nuanced) individuals.

Posts can be favorited and boosted, with all counts visible on original instance. Users of one instance don't see favorites count made by users of another. Favoriting is more of a peer-to-peer appreciation, signal of nodding. Boosting matters more as it repeats the post in your followers' feed.

Here, you are simply encouraged to make reference links, whether it's your blog, documentations, downloads or news you found.

Feed is filtered by users themselves: following right persons, muting, temporary boost-muting, blocking bad actors. They can report content that violates server rules, as well.

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 7

Platforms here are distributed, but have a lot of features in common. One being the protocol, ActivityPub. You can even integrate its implementation into your blog! Flipbook and other previously separate platforms cross the barrier and unite.

What does posting on Fediverse look like and how different it is from devRant posts and comments? Post can have plain text and rich media. Particularly neat thing is that you are presented with ability to add an alt text to image/video/audio, making it accessible to visually impaired. Orphaned post published without a context already acts as a "rant"/"story" of sorts, you just should remember to add categorization hashtags to it for clarity or hide the entire thing behind CW (content warning), which is handy for... hard or boiling hot topics. Post made in reply to another can act as a "comment". Nevertheless, each post is an individual piece that can be boosted without context.

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 6

Promoting the group on Fediverse is easy enough: let Fedi.Tips and few other big groups know about it. Outside? Direct link to bot account. Extra points if account has a good description and a nice manual in extra field: this might guide users new to Fediverse to sign up with understanding of who they entrust their content to or what to do next. If people got used to mentioning the group, too, that would work better than plain hashtags, and people would find it by just clicking at the handle in the stranger's post.

Controlling the group is, again, a matter of who you trust to provide the service and money. Be current with the developments of your host, read reviewes, back things up.

Monitoring is the hardest of them all. Do you monitor manually or delegate a permission to other parties. What tools are available for that? How can abusive post be reported? Do you keep moderators responsible, too? How is volunteer incentivized?

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 5

We're back to moderation. Only that now the burden is both on instance administration and bot account owner. Former sees what bot posts/boosts and checks against their rules and jurisdiction. Bot can intentionally or unknowingly go haywire if the administration is offline. All it takes is random person uncontrollably spamming same hashtags that trigger the bot.

Bot owner should have the power to define what gets posted under bot's display name, (un)boosted, or ignored. But let's say they made it through external instance. Obviously, its administration has ultimate control over all that plus federation. So, bot owner must be mindful of where they create a bot and how much real control they have over it (external dashboard with just a few features or full-blown home-made CLI).

Automating a group on Fediverse seems like a straightforward task, much unlike promoting it, maintaining control and monitoring content. How to do all this?

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 4

To make yourself at home on fediverse, you are encouraged to subscribe to a lot of people and interesting hashtags. Once a week, challenge yourself to some new hashtag you were roundabout and unsubscribe if the flow is too much. Explore, research, boost what you want followers to see in their home feed. Write your own posts, toot!

During this journey, you might have already picked all that you like, such as: nixCraft, #opensource, #devhumor, #rant, etc. But how do you go about filtering and even finding old folks?

#devrant hashtag is open for use, so why not include it in your posts and subscribe? You can hide posts that include certain words. But I don't know magic app that would allow something more sophisticated yet.

"Group" can be made: it's a bot account that boosts anything seen with certain hashtags. Everyone can subscribe to it and receive posts made by devRant community fast.

How do we automate this and who can control?

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 3

There is something to be said about moderation, for sure. First of all, if you think that all of the Mastodon is the safe harbor and the bubble, I will need to pop yours. Never doubt that Fediverse can be unhinged, especially with slacking administrators and orphan instances.

If you can't host your server or care about moderating it, simply find one that you can trust. It takes time listing through options and even reading between the lines, but main part for me was that server doesn't disappear on me one day and take my posts away. I chose #TechHub because of its transparent description of costs and donations and, most importantly, iron clad rules that administration was, is and will be known to enforce! Second reason being fun stuff and people I discovered in the local feed (it may be cluttered nowadays).

Then, having account and all, how do you make yourself at home? Where are my rants and lulz?

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative, 2

One can host a server. In fact, some devRant member can make a special instance with its own rules and cool backend things. People can sign up there, on the subject of finding a pack of fun folks and being able to communicate something back. Conveniently enough, the instance itself would accumulate a lot of content relevant to it, which include dev rants and memes. Cultural overlap with other communities is as big as federation, that server has means of regulating.

So, this will work out as a devRant alternative? I'm not so sure, since power is in hands of some individual that will have to also sustain the thing, cover the costs. Yeah, it's not like we can trust devRant to be alive forever by #HexicalLabs paying bills either (not with subscriptions broken, anyway), but all administrative burden is not going away.

Do YOU want to be on such server or do you prefer to trust another? Do others? How much moderation is really needed?

^ My Musings About #devRant Alternative

Having a tool that conveniently migrates your old posts and maybe even bookmarks from possibly dying platform to a Mastodon/Pleroma/whatever instance of your choice - this should be neat, right?

The conundrum is: what is to come? The way I even found such place exists was pretty random and there are more stories to hear about everyone else's introduction to devRant. It will certainly be something else with instances being spread out and search engines only-only catching up to this.

What, there are 10 Fosstodons in the wild? 100 kawaii coder instances? Thousands of other kind? Where to sign up? Where can more dev rants and memes be found? Can cultural clashes be avoided?

So, you're telling me there is an #opensource utility called #Volkswagen on the loose that lets "software developer" to relax by detecting when tests are running in #CI environment, only to make them pass and ignore the problems these tests were supposed to prevent in the first place?

https://github.com/auchenberg/volkswagen

# Give my threads back, Discord!

Oh, what a dummy, sweet summer child me... Entrusting one feature (that goes astray from #SynchronousSoftware and VoIP nature which this piece of garbage was supposed to keep focus on) with link aggregation and presentation: I'm speaking of Discord's forum threads.

After a week of quality time with #Matrix, I return to #dRCS "server" (Discord's term for group) to check up on #forum channels. Lurking, scrolling through this joke of a bulletin board in search of older posts proved futile. Most of the #threads are simply gone! It took me long enough to make these pretty cards, now for them to evaporate without any communication from Discord...

You know what? I'm done with #CentralizedPlatforms that bite more than they can chew, all the while trashing my content! #Discord, #Reddit - shut the front door!!!

I could post this showcase of links on #Kbin or potential #PersonalBlog - now I know this better. Hello, #devRant. Welcome #dRBB, my cool abode!

For example, finding out what geometry types are present in a vectortile source, is like throwing a dice.

It depends on:
1) whether the tilevector source supports providing this information
2) and if it does, whether the tilevector provider has actually configured it to include this information.
3) And if he/she has, it's hopes and prayers the attribute actually has a meaning value.

I mean, geometry_type: "No geometries", come on.. I can see polygons on my map.