Atomic 🦌 @atomicbutterfly@awoo.space

Joining #mastodon has reminded me how much #UX is a form of community politics. Discussions over usability, searchability, federability (sounds awkward but you know what I mean) -- these reflect debates we are having right now in many aspiring democracies. Where do we want people to live? What will we build to make it easy to get around? What kinds of social services should be available? How do we manage borders? UX choices are political choices, and it's important to treat them as such.

Timeline cleanser. My kids made a new friend. Meet Larry the Squirrel. Every morning he comes and knocks on our back door eagerly waiting for food. My kids feed him and he scurries off. 😅

@jon One of the big problems with "the algorithm" for me and many others is that we simply STOPPED seeing content from people we want to see, and started seeing MORE content from people being reactionary, fandom drama, call-outs, and the like.

The algorithm made the experience a lot worse for me and others, and turned our timelines into a shit show.

I'm okay with some subtle algorithmic sorting, but rather then bringing conflict forward, to bring accounts forward we frequently interact with.

I swear to god, journalists have become Big Social's PR department even as Big Social puts them out of business.

I've said this previously. With the old startup model, you might be able to capture significant marketshare for 20 years. You might even be one of the most valuable companies on the planet during that time. Hence, Meta.

But if you want something people will use indefinitely, you need to build a protocol.

Guess what? Corporations don't want to build protocols. Hence, a startup-driven version of the Fediverse will probably fail.

A new start

This holiday season Twitter fires 4K workers, Amazon fires 10K workers, & Facebook fires 11K workers—all while US Billionaire pandemic wealth increased an absurd $1.7T.😳

A reminder that billionaires don’t create jobs—they exploit workers. Tax billionaires. Unionize workers.

Google developed a new text editor that allows you to steer a story by asking questions ("tell me more about the fairy's day job") and got 13 well-known writers (Robin Sloane, Allison Parish, etc) to write a book of short stories with it. Stories and model demo: https://wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com/

A spooky misty morning here in Garching. #photography #blackandwhite #goodmorning

Good morning all ☀️

If you're interested in running your own single-user instance, follow @darnell

Not only does he run one, he runs multiple—and has learned lots of lessons in the process!

Great news, @internetarchive is now the official Internet Archive Mastodon account. Accept no substitutes! We also have @brewsterkahle , the ever-fascinating founder of the place, and more coming soon. Hop on!

Read this NOW. Learn it NOW. Try it NOW. It's easy & could save you a lot of grief or worse. & let me emphasize this part from this very short article…

“How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad” https://daringfireball.net/2022/06/require_a_passcode_to_unlock_your_iphone

Hey I found an open source menstrual cycle tracking app called Drip that doesn't call home to anyone and encrypts your data on your device. It's gender inclusive and it has a prebuilt version Android that you can get either on F-Droid or on their site here: https://bloodyhealth.gitlab.io

They have an iOS version but it's not pre compiled. I'll be working on that today so you can get loaded onto your Apple devices, along with the instructions to install it on said Apple device.

Please boost so others can see this!