Having an easy on the eyes markdown that is also easy to parse would be cool.

But YAML does these things:

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

which are not excusable, for any reason.

I’m not sure now that I think about it, but I find this more explicit and somehow more free than json. Which can’t be true, since you can just

{"anything you want":{...}}

But still, this:

<my_custom_tag>
<this> 
<that>
<roflmao>
...

is all valid.

You can more closely approximate the logical structure of whatever you’re doing without leaving the internal logic of the… syntax?

<car>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre>      <valve>open</valve>  </tyre>
<tyre> air, <valve>closed</valve>  </tyre>
</car>

Maybe I just like the idea of a closing tag being very specific about what it is that is being closed (?). I guess I’m really not sure, but it does feel nicer to my brain to have starting and closing tags and distinguishing between what is structure, what is data, what is inside where.

My peeve with json is that… it doesn’t properly distinguish between strings that happen to be a number and “numbers” resulting in:

myinput = {"1":"Hello",1:"Hello"}
tempjson = json.dumps(myinput)
output = json.loads(tempjson)
print(output)
>>>{'1': 'Hello'}

in python.

I actually don’t like the attributes in xml, I think it would be better if it was mandatory that they were also just more tagged elements inside the others, and that the “validity” of a piece of xml being a certain object would depend entirely on parsing correctly or not.

I particularly hate the idea of attributes in svg, and even more particularly the way they defined paths.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorial/Paths#curve_commands

It works, but I consider that truly ugly. And also I don’t understand because it would have been trivial to do something like this:

<path><element>data</element><element>data</element></path>

YAML

To each their own indeed.

;)

It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.

The fact that you can make anything a tag and it’s going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.

But with a niche use case.

Clearly the tags waste space if you’re actually saving them all the time.

Good format to compress though…

I think the timing isn’t quite right, because the other social media places aren’t figuratively totally on fire.

There isn’t “the great social media collapse of 20XX” happening, because of some security issue or servers being super expensive or ads being actually 99% of the content. The forces that be are managing things well enough that things aren’t collapsing right now.

There is no single actually big celebrity that has picked a fediverse platform as the place to be, follow and discuss news.

And there is no killer feature that you can only get here.

The bonfire is stacked nicely, but there is no spark. For now. That could change at any moment, but it could also take a while.

I don’t think the timing is quite right.

I don’t really have anything meaningful to contribute to the feeds and most of the discussions are a bit pointless. They’re not really changing anything. So, in part those other platforms are fueled by outrage culture. Which I know is bad, so not having it is good, but then we also don’t have the growth from it.

The technology is there and that should help. Apparently people aren’t going to mass migrate from reddit quite yet, even though the push last year probably helped a lot.

It is a network problem. I think the slow growth will / should happen eventually, because the fediverse is an objectively good place to start a community. It’s just not going to be fast and other platforms adding push factors would help obviously. We’ll see where reddit goes with their paid subs.

I don’t think the low effort posts are a problem, there is hardly motivation to interact with an empty page and there is slightly more if there are “boring topics”. At least it’s a place.

You’re a hero for making this happen in… 24 hours? 48?

The issue won’t go away, we’ll see how well everyone else deals with it, but this is a super strong argument for your system / server.

(Advertise it. Advertise it HARD. “piefed, we have private votes”.)

I would like a (c) where my instances collects all the votes on the post, and then transmits an anonymized aggregate.

How is it vague?

It’s vague in all the legal ways:

• First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.

• It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.

• It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.

And a few more.

That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.

1. if a random comment on the internet is enough to destroy

your dream

then it was a weak and shitty dream. Get a new one.

2. do it anyway. Who cares. You know what’s the worst that could happen? You try, and it doesn’t work out and then you can look back at it and consider it “gave it a good shot, didn’t work out”. And then you can point to all the people who still sit on their couch and didn’t even try.

3. do it.

No.

You know how boxers don’t beat up their trainers?

This is like that.