Are You Gonna Eat That: The Pre-Sequel

The last week or so, ive been working on a social media project called The Website League. It’s a closed federated social media site intended to minimize dark patterns, proactively fight harrassment, and operate democratically. In short, it’s a project for a new social media, with a decidedly leftist bent.

It’s going well. We have roughly 50 users, and we’re slowly opening up to more as we find moderators and stress-test things. You can join, if you want. I’d take ya.

It’s built on existing fediverse software. in my case, akkoma, which I chose because it had the featureset we need to operate (allowlisting, removal of numbers, and a few other things) and because it offers a built-in web frontend, which I believe is necessary.

But it’s ultimately a twitter-like platform, and it comes along with all of that baggage. for one, replies appear in your timeline without context, making the experience feel pretty busy and confusing at times. but i think the thing that bothers me the most about it is something that i’ve never really felt was solved by any social media site: the portioning problem

i can’t eat chips from a bag. or, i can eat chips from a bag way too well. if i have a bag of chips in front of me, and i’m eating from it, it’s almost guaranteed that i will eat the whole bag. chips aren’t filling, and i like chips.

but, if i get a bowl and put my chips in there, put away the bag, and eat my chips that way, i will only eat that bowl. something shifts in my brain that allows me to treat the bowl as my portion, and when that portion is eaten i’m done.

when i’m on a social media site, most of them have a little notification that pops up that tells you that there are new posts in the timeline. when i reach the end of my timeline, suddenly seeing posts that i’ve already seen, i refresh the page to see new posts.

on cohost, this wasn’t a problem, because i only ever followed 150-or-so pages, and after one refresh i was done. but on tumblr – partially because i was a teenager with poor impulse control and partially because tumblr offers more discovery features than cohost did – i was following ~2000 blogs, of various activity. my timeline would never run out of posts. i had an endless bag of chips, and i ended up addicted to it.

this is why algorithmic feeds scare me. there is no end. there is no way to create an end. the only person with the ability to moderate your behavior is you and we are doing our best to give you a hard time of it.

but simple chronological feeds don’t exactly solve the problem. i do have the ability to create an environment that helps me moderate myself, but if there’s always a little light popping up telling me that something new is happening, i still get an urge to keep going, keep reading, keep finding new interesting things to entertain my silly brain.

i really don’t like that

akkoma has a little “show new” button that appears at the top of your feed when you have new posts to read. i find myself waiting for it, and frantically clicking it when it appears. it’s like a cat staring at a laser pointer. i don’t know if it’s good for me.

but i also don’t know if it’s a problem that can be solved with an individual instance’s UX. on some level, it’s a problem simply with “how many posts there are”. because of the dominance of mastodon, fediverse software broadly encourages microblogging. people post a lot of small posts, with no tags, and usually no edits. this means that no matter how you design your frontend, if other instances built things differently, things won’t work right.

if you federate with a bunch of stock akkoma instances, while your instance has a UX designed to encourage slower, more deliberate posting, there is going to be a behavioral split between your instance and the rest. if your users don’t see replies, for example, half of the conversations that are happening on their timelines will be invisible to them. if your instance has a UI that presents quote replies as a reblog chain, then other instances will have to click through every quote to get the full context. i’m not satisfied with that.

self-hosted frontends look like twitter because akkoma looks like mastodon, which looks like twitter. akkoma looks like mastodon because mastodon is by far the most widely-adopted server software on the fediverse, and if you change anything significant, you are going to cut a huge number of users out of the people that your users can follow and interact with easily, which will prevent anyone from wanting to use it.

the website league looks like GTS and Akkoma because those are the servers that implement allowlisting well. GTS and akkoma both look like twitter. so the website league looks like twitter.

and i wonder how we deal with that. people have started to work on planning a new website league frontend that will fix some or all of these problems. but it needs to be robust. people need to adopt it, league-wide, if it is going to significantly affect the culture. it needs to be accessible, and hackable, and themeable. people need to make it work for photography, for blogging, for memeing, for css crimes. that’s not an easy task, but i dunno, i’m not a developer.

i have hope, though. i think we can do it. there are always complications, but i’m confident there is a way for us to handle them.








i wrote that last part before i finished the rest of the post, because i have to remind myself sometimes.

“IP is a euphemism for any law that lets an exective reach outside the wall of their business and exert control over customers, critics, and competitors; and an app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a felony to put an adblocker in it.”

“So it follows that if we want end the enshittiscene, if we want to dismantle the enshitternet, if we want to build a new good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that those constraints are durably installed on our new internet, wound around its roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over those forces so that they can’t be dismantled again.”

“For years your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders-in-waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs momentarily drawing a salary, not workers. Your power came from intrinsic virtue not like those lazy slobs in their unions. Now that was a trick and you got scammed. The power you had came from scarcity so when scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing in six-figure layoffs your power went away. The only durable source of power for Tech workers is as workers. In unions.”

“As Tech bosses beef up this Reserve Army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, those tech workers – you folks – will arrive at the same future as [warehouse workers]. Look, I know you spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to entify your company’s products and I thank you for your service, but if you want to go on fighting for the user you need power that’s better than scarcity. You need a union.”

Oh boy is this some good syndicalism. Oh boy is this good solidarity. This is the point that I think is missing in the labor movement today – solidarity, not just between similar labor organizations, but between unions and a better world. Unions should be fighting the climate crisis, and covid, and spyware, and all of the things that make the world as hard to live in as it is. That is our ultimate goal – a better society for all, not just better working conditions for the in-group.

I have a button now!

I like buttons a lot; they give me a bit of the sense of connectedness that the web was built on. (it is, remember, hyperlinks that make this html) That said, they do still require a little bit of effort where social media is frictionless. But I don’t mind putting in that effort. My hobbies might as well take thought to engage in.

I’m thinking about making an OSC controller for the SD12 consoles, since the app doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with the consoles lately, and I found this little exchange in a reddit thread:

u/Hertz_so_good on r/techtheatre Hi all, I’ve been looking to experiment with the new OSC implementation in my Digico SD9’s and SD10T, and I’m having troubles finding any sort of documentation. I know it’s mostly intended to control external devices from the console, but it looks like it should be able to work coming into the console as well. I know this is how the iPad app controls parameters. Ideally I’d like to be able to control specific parameters (typically just faders) from Qlab, without having to recall an entire console scene. Does anyone have any info about the OSC strings to accomplish this?

u/soph0nax DiGiCo has locked down a lot of their OSC implementation. I’ve seen a few shows convince them to unlock parts of it, but those shows required really good reasons for needing OSC access of things and had rental shop support and multiple levels of tech support covering their backs while they did it. Their network interfacing is already so buggy that I would proceed with optimistic caution. I’d say your best bet is to use Wireshark to sniff what you can from the iPad/Console link and feed the commands back into the console and see if that’ll work. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m not sure if you’d need the initial console/iPad handshake to unlock OSC control though.

I just… if wireshark is your first point of documentation, surely you’re doing something wrong? I can’t say I’m particularly surprised, though. Locking down every bit of documentation about a piece of hardware that is integral to the operation of dozens of productions is kind of par for the course for pro audio. Why don’t you just use the app? It’s only missing features, filled with bugs, and super unreliable.

Don’t bother checking the reddit thread, by the way. There’s no information to find.

Here’s a little article that I like from Margaret Killjoy.