Alipay.

Time to break out the block cannon. Ain’t no way that I let anything Zuck touches touch my stuff.

This. This right here. For anybody to embrace anything they have to perceive and advantage to them to do so. If you can’t persuade them of such an advantage they won’t do it.

The name is a really weird one. Sounds more like a spreadsheet than a social media application.

Chrome too.

A whole lot of misdesigns are only a “small amount of brain power” to use. As your language accumulates these, however, the load builds up.

This also has the extra problem that overloading in general brings with it. What is the result of 3 + "string"? What is the result of "string" + 3? You have to have rules for this. These rules have to be learned. They have to be kept in mind. There is room for error. And of course the way different languages react to them will vary strongly.

For example in Rexx, Python, and Ruby these are errors (and with the latter two the error changes depending on which order). In Awk and Perl the result is 3 in both cases.

Format strings are better than + as concatenation, to be fair, but are still not very good compared to separate concatenation operators. It’s hard to make them type-safe. They separate the value from its location in the string.

Using actual concatenation operators has the advantage of format strings, but add the possibility for type safety. For example in Ada:

...
    Put_Line("Distance: " & Distance_Value'Image & "km");
...

See here, & will only concatenate string types. If you want to print something that’s not a string, you have to convert it to a string. This means you can’t accidentally mix types. Further, it’s immediately obvious where a given value will show up in the output. Compare and contrast with the C equivalent:

...
    printf("Distance: %skm\n", distance_value);
...

Not only is location of the value obfuscated—trivial to spot here, but in a complicated string it’s very difficult to spot at times. And it’s easy, too, to have the format code not match the value. As this example illustrates. Again, easy to spot in trivial code like this, but horrifically hard in real-world code, especially if the variable type changes.

String concatenation with + is evil. Well-designed languages (Lua, for example, among many others—I’m not calling PHP well-designed!) doesn’t do this.

Why?

Because +, in every other context is commutative, but suddenly, in the case of concatenation, it is not. This is an unnecessary cognitive burden for no material gain.

Concatenation can be accomplished by juxtaposition (e.g. SNOBOL4, Rexx, much of the C family tree), by .. (Lua), by . (Perl, PHP), by || (PL/I, Rexx again), by & (Ada, some BASIC dialects), etc. without this added cognitive burden of overloading + for no good reason.

No.

ActivityPub is a protocol. It has no agency.

People can save the Internet. Perhaps with ActivityPub, perhaps with something else.

And here we see the seeds of IRC’sthe Fediverse’s irrelevancy being planted and lovingly tended.

What you just said could have easily been put into the mouths of any number of IRC advocates 20 years ago. Where is IRC now? Remind me.

Because it’s sometimes a ludicrous demand?

Common pattern I see in Mastodon’s … more strident, shall we call them? … advocates:

Poster: I just took a picture of a <insert bird>. Note the red and yellow flash of plumage, in contrast to the more usual green and red. I caught this little darling hopping along the charcoal grey slate walkway I’ve got running through my garden, right next to the <insert flower> you can see at the right side of the frame.

<put picture here>

Strident Twit: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT!?

Or, worse:

Strident Twit Bot: WHY YOU NO PUT ALT TEXT FOR OUR BLIND USERS!?

So what, precisely (providing details), would you put into alt text that’s not already in the post? Would you just copy and paste the alt text? When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

I think he’s a bit over-hopeful at the fediverse’s prospects, sadly. People will give up so much (like all of their privacy!) for a small amount of convenience.

It’s not Twitter that Mastodon has to seize the moment from. It’s all the other commercial offerings that will inevitably pop up in its place as Twitter crashes and burns.

Is there a version that’s not behind a paywall?

This is nonsense.

I’ve seen more young’uns whining that it’s “too hard” to choose an instance. It’s the young’uns that are used to things being all in one place: one Facebook, one Twitter, one Instagram, etc. The elder Gen-X/younger-Boomer crowd are all very familiar with having to make choices in service providers (because we had choices!). We had to choose telephone service providers, Internet service providers (who weren’t our telephone guys for AGES!), email service providers (often our ISPs, but not always: also our work environments, and third-party suppliers once we’d gone through the change-the-ISP-email dance often enough), etc. etc. etc.

The young’uns are the ones that flock to wherever their friends are flocking this week and have ISP choices they can count on one hand, even after a bizarre gardening accident sheared off a few fingers. Choice has been systematically removed from people in the tech sphere since I was in my teens. Fewer choices in phone configurations, fewer choices in ISPs, fewer choices in email providers, fewer choices in chat systems, fewer choices in …

… until we have the situation where people think of social media sites instead of social media platforms.

US companies not obeying laws in other countries, even when operating there, is by now just a sad cliche.

Public speech has no expectation of privacy. Nobody would find anything wrong with recording a public announcement. If you want to have a private conversation, it’s up to you to hold that conversation privately.

Please let me know where you live and which cafe you frequent. I’ll just stand there while you have a quiet conversation with your SO, my phone recording everything you say. You won’t object, naturally, because it’s a public space and if you didn’t want your romantic conversation broadcast live on Twitch you’d have had it elsewhere, right?

Scraping public text, which is something that’s been widely accepted on the web for two decades …

Saying that “she asked for it; she was dressed like a slut” was widely accepted in the world at large for THOUSANDS of years (and still is in some places!). Until it suddenly wasn’t. In some parts of the world.

Hell, pounding the shit out of someone for being “rude” was (and is) widely accepted for thousands of years. Not all that long ago, in human historical terms, killing someone for talking back to you was not only acceptable, it was required to preserve your “honour” (or whatever other term was used in that space).

Maybe—and just hear me out here—maybe things that are “widely accepted” have turned out to be shitty things, not things to be emulated and amplified.

(Please wait until I’m in your cafe and recording before you respond, though. I want to make sure that thousands of people are listening in.)

If the author is telling the full story…

Key word is the first word there. Everybody who has ever been banned from a site or server in all of the Internet’s history was innocent when they tell the tale.

Spotted the Russian op.

Oh God I hope not!

We will see. When “Quote Toots” come to Mastodon, let’s watch and see if Mastodon turns into a toxic dogpile site. My prediction is that it will (though it will be more left-flavoured than right-flavoured like the Birdsite). Yours is that it won’t.

We’ll let history decide which of us was right. (And if I was right, I’ll drop Mastodon and the Fediverse like I dropped the Hellsite and the Birdsite.)