I think their biggest issue was suddenly being viral, while also dealing with server incursion/tons of new accounts, which meant that lots and lots of people are suddenly clamoring specifically for their attention/making requests for said lists/asking what the rules are/responding directly to the post that went viral but without being vetted beforehand or understanding the previous implicit social rules.
While they started with a small discussion with people informed about the differences and server stress became instead a tornado of a much larger discussion while also dumping more stress on the servers, as well as emotional stress of having to deal with all the incoming attention.
So. They are overwhelmed, and everything seems like it needs to be solved with the highest priority, but they aren't set up with enough help desk/sub-admin people to filter/protect themselves.
Basically all mastodon server admins have a need, at least temporarily, for some business style structure. They need a Janine Melnitz (Ghostbusters Secretary) to prioritize server is burning down messages, organize non-server is burning down contact requests, and direct help/press requests to appropriate people. And perhaps someone else available to work on social onboarding.
All personal blog/toot/tweets posted by said overwhelmed server admins should also be taken with a grain (or more) of salt. They may feel differently when things are calmer, or might be able to be more diplomatic in general.
Overall though, it was good to hear about how the Author is feeling, and how self-aware they are about how it was similar to when their cohort joined and had to adapt and how the previous fediverse admins might have dealt with similar things.
"..there are names for the sort of person who makes lists of people so others can monitor their communications. They’re not nice names.”
"All Humble Choice members receive a selection of hand-picked games redeemable via a key for select platforms, when available (Steam, Epic, Origin, GOG, etc.). You can find these games at the Humble Choice Hub after unlocking the current month of Choice. Games in the Humble app for Windows PC, including the Humble Games Collection, are only available to active Humble Choice members. New Humble Choice games are available on the first Tuesday of every month."
Which is good, because I have, ~20 pages of keys to redeem since I've been a long time humblebundler and usually only grabbed things as I was playing. I was worried I'd have to redeem them all before Feb, which doesn't sound like the case. So, business as usual for me? though it might be good to get most things I want redeemed over to steam fwiw.
It does sound (from reading this thread) that Linux/Mac users who want their DRM free d/ls will need to grab them before the switchover.
I haven't looked into it for a couple years, I was initially very excited about the concept. TLDR: Unless the user experience/accessibility/hosting experience is improved, I just couldn't suggest anyone use it.
Last time I really dug in the user interface and accessibility concerns were not great.
I understand the idea was more about the data handling, and that anyone could produce something based off the framework but I had all sorts of issues with the login tokens/usability. (ie, if you logged in with the wrong cert it didn't have an easy way to clear it, and would 'log in' to an error page. ect. )
as far as I can tell, each pod/data host can run different versions of solid, so your experience may vary between them. You can self host as well.
I'd have to dig in again to see if things have gotten better, but I don't have time at the moment.
on quick look, some of my data sites are no longer working. oh! link says it was shut down in oct. https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-solid/2020Oct/00...
That said, the community was pretty nice and willing to answer questions.
Maybe things have improved?
I was hoping that maybe they'd start using DAT as well, because it seemed like it might be nice to dovetail with some of the beakerbrowser/distributed web stuff going on. re @pfrazee
quick followup, after checking my old links and making a new sign up. it does seem like the inrupt.com pod has a bit better /more up to date design. Accessibility, while not perfect, does seem to be improved. (quick WAVE tool check)
Things are still fairly confusing for new users though. And some how tos I wrote down from then no longer work. Which is not the worst thing, as some of the tutorials required you to hover over and wait to be able to edit things.
Much easier to look at though. ymmv
for historical/hysterical reference, I uploaded my old solid adventuress file, it is not up to date, and some of the css is not always showing the right colors, ect.
Note: it was only the old solid.community domain that shut down; the same servers are now reachable through solid.community. But yes, the default UI used there is very lacking and slow to develop.
I also built a more developer-focused interface that allows you to view the data in your Pod, and that should be more accessible. If you're interested, you can try it at https://penny.vincenttunru.com
Have you tried Adafruit's make code? https://makecode.adafruit.com/ Visual programming for javascript with options to interact with their Circuit Playground hardware.
It's, of course, not an entire ecosystem for everything, but they do a lot of visual things that may be worth evaluating. I like the colors/shapes of the code pieces, and the ability to switch between the visual code editor and the plain js.
I think generally it's easy to know you won't be needed by other patrons in a coffee shop, or that their chatter won't require you to weigh in or judge, so your brain just keeps an ear out for normal danger noises.
At work, headphones off, my brain is subconsciously trying to keep me informed about the noise around me in the workplace, so that I can respond if needed (generally I'm not) not helpful, brain. :P
On top of that, it does everyone good to understand web accessibility concerns and implement them from the start of each project (far easier than trying to retrofit things later).
Once you have a firm handle on those things, you can better evaluate frameworks and libraries. You may find that you won't need all the overhead that comes with helpful libraries if you have a specific use case that standard js/css can solve.
I spend a lot of my time reading documentation/github issues for a variety of things (node, drupal, wordpress, hugo, frameworks, php, javascript, docker, vagrant, bash) and parsing how that info can help me integrate the tools and programs I use everyday.
If documentation doesn't exist, I try to create my own barebones doc with links to info I've found and a list of questions to research later.
Web Dev, for me, has been all about solving puzzles, finding solutions, and sometimes simply discovering the right terms to search for.
This continuous learning process can feel like I'm starting from scratch over and over (and feeling like I know nothing each time ;) ), but lessons learned from previous projects usually make future ones easier to learn/identify problem areas.
It's good to embrace that uncertainty.
There is so much out there to learn, no one can know it all, but if you can learn to identify good mentors, quickly parse documentation and apply current best practices you'll do just fine.
Considering the big three frameworks are React (6 years), Angular (3+ years), AngularJS (9 years, deprecated) and Vue (5+ years) .. the churn really isn't what it once was. Yes, there are new options popping in and out, but even hyperapp and inferno are 2yo since 1.0.
Not all things have stood still, that said the frameworks are definitely still around, and barring a relatively few breaking changes, the past 3-5 years have been relatively stable now. Yeah, you can do react functional components with hooks, but the class syntax still works.
Have you found the solution to keep things from asking for permission on things? I haven't upgraded yet, but experience this for a good 20+ items on reboot, and I haven't been able to find a solution to stop it. (including going into my keychain and trying to allow more permission to some items)
Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
> including going into my keychain and trying to allow more permission to some items
This almost certainly is not going to help, because it’s granting access to other things.
> Sometimes this mean 5-10min of allowing things access and typing my password over and over for each prompt. Things usually work after that, but I don't even have a clue, often times different apps seem to be asking if they can access system programs.
It’s interesting to see how we’ve already degrade to the Windows Vista-esque experience when you just approve everything. None of the security benefits, all of the usability downsides…
I mean, I've taken the time to try to search for each of those subsystem things are asking for, but the information out there about doesn't really add much more info to 'if you don't say yes this will not work' or, 'this will ask you again for permission in 10 min'
Some of the more curious ones I've checked via the logs in the ActivityMonitor to try to figure out what is really being asked.
But none of this yields an answer. ie, things need to use launchd, assistantd, and accountsd ect. I never personally revoked those permissions.
Historical web answers point users to use Keychain First Aid, which hasn't been around for years now, but obviously this has been a long ongoing issue which seems to possibly be exacerbated by other OS upgrade issues.
A fix would absolutely quell the rage this gives me when I have to deal with it early in the morning before a deployment.
curiously, on my Windows system, I clicked 'no' to a permission prompt on something one time and now I can't seem to actually give the thing blanket permission after determining I would want it to have it.
So that just asks pretty much every 5 min or so, again it's more a subsystem than an entire program, so bla)
so. yea. yay for technology. ;) I think I'll just go read a book now. on paper. in the other room. ;)
You can try to look at your site on your phone out in bright sunlight, but the thing about contrast is... you don't have to trust your eyes.
You can mathematically know if something has enough contrast.
The guidelines for AA contrast is 4.5:1 for most text and 3:1 for large text. But... it may be hard to understand what those ratios mean. Basically Lightest Color relative brightness:Darkest color relative brightness.
https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont...
The US Web Design system shows one way to solve it (ie, use their css token system that labels colors to make contrast differences super clear) but they also link to several very good resources on contrast.
Things like the WAVE tool (https://wave.webaim.org/extension/) will also have places where you can see contrast errors. In the WAVE tool, it's the third button at the top of the results [styles][no styles][contrast].
You can then see the contrast errors and try out some different options right there in the tool, until the errors go away, and you know what you can replace in your code.
Pretty sure all I wanted to do was make cool graphics and games at that time.
You could also show off some cool pens from codepen.io which also let you remix and play.
If you think they'd be into interactive fiction games/stories, you can run twine or texture in the browser, too, you could ask them for prompts, 'where do we go next, the cave or the castle' and then make it happen.
A little deeper in, but I once went to a tech talk where the speaker setup a http://johnny-five.io/ bot that and changed the LEDs on her belt in the room when people tweeted colors at it. You might not need a whole belt (or even LEDS, you could have a webpage change colors or words or music), but that kind of live demonstration is always fun (and comes with the caveat of live demos, which somehow don't always work when in front of an audience of skeptic students).
While they started with a small discussion with people informed about the differences and server stress became instead a tornado of a much larger discussion while also dumping more stress on the servers, as well as emotional stress of having to deal with all the incoming attention.
So. They are overwhelmed, and everything seems like it needs to be solved with the highest priority, but they aren't set up with enough help desk/sub-admin people to filter/protect themselves.
Basically all mastodon server admins have a need, at least temporarily, for some business style structure. They need a Janine Melnitz (Ghostbusters Secretary) to prioritize server is burning down messages, organize non-server is burning down contact requests, and direct help/press requests to appropriate people. And perhaps someone else available to work on social onboarding.
All personal blog/toot/tweets posted by said overwhelmed server admins should also be taken with a grain (or more) of salt. They may feel differently when things are calmer, or might be able to be more diplomatic in general.
Overall though, it was good to hear about how the Author is feeling, and how self-aware they are about how it was similar to when their cohort joined and had to adapt and how the previous fediverse admins might have dealt with similar things.
"..there are names for the sort of person who makes lists of people so others can monitor their communications. They’re not nice names.”