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Phillip Winn

It’s an old tune, but new verses are added regularly: cable monopolists behave badly, and cost us all money.

pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/use

In this verse, @pluralistic (aka Cory @doctorow) spells out “how cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face.”

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Phillip Winn

This showed up on Hacker News today, and was soundly panned as well as flagged. Which shouldn’t surprise me, I guess.

12 Things to do Instead of Calling the Cops

theanarchistlibrary.org/librar

Most of this seems like good advice, although the HN comments point out that 1500 women are killed by domestic partners every year, so the last point might seem too passive in light of that.

I once stood outside my apartment and asked an upstairs neighbor if she needed help, rather than call the cops, and it took me longer than I wish to admit to work up the nerve to even go outside. I didn’t want her to face her ex alone, but I didn’t want to bring armed police into the situation, either. Seeing me seemed to calm the guy down quickly, and he left immediately. Realizing there was a witness, I thought at the time, although now I wonder if he was thinking the same way I was: I could call the cops, and they might shoot him first and ask questions later.

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Phillip Winn

Apple may be allowing alternate app stores soon, at least in Europe, at the point of a metaphorical gun, but I assume they’ll do in their Apple way, meaning it won’t be easy, and it will likely still require every app to be signed by Apple at some point, like MacOS apps mostly are now.

I’m all in favor of more openness and flexibility on my devices, especially when there are guardrails and protections I have to explicitly choose to turn off. I hope that iOS allows alternative browser engines, app stores, and everything else, but that none of it is turned on by default.

That said, I'm already tired of a few arguments I see online.

It seems clear that some companies are going to push for their apps to only be available outside of the App Store. But no, people say, Android has allowed side-loading since the beginning, and that hasn't happened there! Two things: First, yes it has, Epic's Fortnite is the most notable example. Second, Google hasn't impacted Facebook's advertising to the tune of $12.8 Billion in 2022 alone. Facebook is highly motivated to get around the iOS prompt allowing people to block Facebook's highly-invasive tracking, and if side-loading will do that, it is probably worth it to them to insist on side-loading.

Of course, I don't think even side-loaded apps will be able to avoid the "do not track" prompt, so it is quite likely Epic will be alone in insisting that they should be installed in a back alley, but the argument that it won't happen because it hasn't happened is hogwash.

The other argument that has been bothering me is that "Safari doesn't support web apps," so allowing alternative browser engines will mean an explosion of web apps replacing mobile apps in the App Store anyway. I have a few issues with this one. First, Safari does support web apps, and web apps that work in Safari do exist. Some features and APIs aren't supported, though, which is really what they mean. Second, a number of companies have gone the web app route in the past and found that there was no way to get a web app to match the experience of a native app, so the've switched back. You might say that's because of Safari limitations, but thirdly, if web apps are set to supplant native apps, why aren't they doing so on Android, where browser engines presumably are not the limiting factor?

But Starbucks, you say! Yes, Starbucks has both a native app and a web app, and the web app seems to work fine in Safari. It requires iOS users to choose to "Add to Home Screen" rather than auto-installing, but I prefer that approach, personally.

But Flipboard, you say! Again, this seems to work fine on iOS after manual installation, although I note that it prompts at least once per session to install/open the native app instead.

The point remains: if web apps are where they should be--which I doubt--then why haven't they taken over the Android world yet? If we're still in the early days of web apps, then there's no rush for iOS to trip over the bumps in the road until things are more stable.

Technologists are incurable optimists, myself included. It's easy for us to see things as they could be, rather than as they are. That's how new things are created! But there's a fine line between envisioning a future we can make together, and denying reality. I look forward to a future in which open NFC, browser engines, and alternative app stores are options in iOS, but I don't think it's going to be the panacea some are expecting.

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Phillip Winn

It is surprisingly hard to buy a car right now. At least for me, it’s hard to buy a 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV Premier with sunroof. Been talking to four different dealers for more than a week, and today declined a “new” car that had been at the Texas State Fair, with 557 miles to show for it, in favor of one that isn’t a color I wanted but will be delivered Saturday.

Driving a car in a color I didn’t want should build character, right? More than waiting until March?

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Phillip Winn

I finally put up the holiday tree on Saturday, so it's starting to seem a bit more like the holiday season.

Not too much, just a bit.

The artificial tree is pre-trimmed with lights and even artificial pine cones and berries, and it looks so good just out of the box that all we've added to it is the traditional star on top. We have traditionally bought one new ornament each every year, and we'll do that again this year, but those will likely be the only four ornaments on the tree, other than the topper.

I don't think there's any "right way" to celebrate holidays, although I suppose there are plenty of wrong ways. Don't be hateful, be kind. Be gracious to others, and accept with gratitude when others are gracious to you. Be gracious to yourself. Beyond that, you can light candles or cut down a tree or pull a tabletop artificial mini-tree out of a box, and decorate your living space however you wish, and if it works for you, I think that's all that matters.

Whether you mark Christmas or Hanukkah or Festivus or some other event this time of year, I hope you can take a moment to be grateful for having survived another year on this planet.

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Phillip Winn

Wow! apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/app

iMessage Contact Key Verification brings over a feature from Signal, and will still require *some* measure of trust in Apple, but seems like like a step forward. Given Apple, I’m sure most of the time people will use the prompt to learn when their family and friends upgrade their iPhone.

Security Keys sound great, and I want one now. Wait, they’re only $29 from Yubico? Wow!

End-to-End Encryption for iCloud Backup is huge, and while I want to say “about time,” the second-best time to plant a tree is today, so I’m glad it’s here now.

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Phillip Winn

Sean McCoy (@seanmccoy) has lit my imagination on fire, and the conflagration is threatening to burn out of control! He’s talking about

seanmccoy.substack.com/p/dunge

So now I’m talking about

“A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms.”

I’ve never designed a role-playing game from scratch, and I would have said I wouldn’t know where to start, but now I do! I’m going to actually try this, and I already have some ideas about how try to stand out, and maybe avoid producing the same exact mega-dungeon (in a different order) as hundreds of other people.

I’m going to aim for a 52-story building. Seven rooms per floor, and some of the floors might be subterranean. Or trans-dimensional. Because this building, it ain’t right. It ain’t even wrong. It ain’t any kind of building you’ve seen before, and if you wake up anywhere in it, you’re about to have a bad time.

Of course I want it to work well with Mothership 1e rules. The stress mechanic alone is inspiring.

I don’t know. Should my first-ever RPG design be a 365-room mega-dungeon for the best horror RPG system out there? The way I think about it, even if I don’t quite make it 365 days, I should end up with a decent-sized area to explore, right?

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Phillip Winn

I should probably know better than to wade into such a contentious topic as a mastodon newbie. Yet here I am, responding to a story titled: "Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, Caves to Nazi's Agenda"

qoto.org/@freemo/1093939899627

I am new to QOTO, so I'll let Mr. Freeman handle the historical details, and I hope that people listen and unblock QOTO, which I have found to be a wonderful server run by impassioned moderators, including Mr. Freeman. My concerns are more basic and technical. I'm trying to understand the purpose of defederation. As I understand it, this dispute ultimately comes down to how to respond to bad actors, and there are different mechanisms for different levels of bad activity.

To be clear: any of the below could be completely wrong! Please, do not rely on this as an authoritative explanation of mastodon, in case I get out over the front of my skis and make too many assumptions.

## How Mastodon Works

Mastodon works because completely independent servers are all running compatible software that speaks "ActivityPub," and that is used to exchange activities like posts and comments and follows between servers. If any user of serverA follows any user of serverB, then serverA gets a copy of posts from serverB to display in serverA's "Home" view for that user. This connection between serverA and serverB is "federation," and some servers are federated with many other servers, while some are federated with only a few, perhaps because they have very few users who are interested in mostly other users on their same server.

Poking around instances.social, it seems I can click on any server and find out how many "connections" it has, which I believe to be a measure of how thoroughly that server is federated. Sorting the list by users, I see mastodon.social at the top with 879,988 users and 34,623 connections, while mstdn.party at #11 has 39,365 users but only 9,610 connections. QOTO is in position 20 with 25,130 users and 24,529 connections. In fact, if I sort the list of instances by connections, QOTO is sixth, so it seems to be "well-federated" as I understand it.

So far, all technical, but already I see issues. Even in the top-20 listing, when I limited the list to servers with at least 25,000 users, I recognized one server that I have seen on nearly every server's "About" page as a blocked server. That brings us almost immediately to questions of moderation.

## Moderation

Bad actors are one of the biggest challenges facing any internet service. The functionality of email has been almost completely ruined by spammers, victims of "419 scams" send many millions of dollars to overseas scammers every year, comment sections on websites have gone almost completely extinct as site owners do cost/benefit analysis and realize they're spending much more time moderating comments as they're deriving value from the comments that remain, and the world's richest oligarch just set fire to $100 billion of his money because he refused to accept what Twitter was saying about bots, and still his every tweet has fake crypto giveaways among the first few replies. Worse than any of that is targeted harassment, as some people don't respond to any of the normal mechanisms of social pressure intended to keep them for pursuing their victims to hurt them.

These are human issues, not technical issues, which is why I think any solutions cannot be only technical. These issues have always existed, but the internet pushes everyone and everything together, acting as a force multiplier, making bad intentions easier to put into action, and harder to resist or avoid.

I should note here that I am a cisgender man best described as "white," so I know about targeted harassment in a detached sense, but have never been the target of such activity. This will obviously lend my discussion of this horrific behavior a detached tone some might see as inappropriate to the subject. I 100% support those targeted, and I am 100% aligned against those would harm or threaten to harm others in any way, especially on the basis of who they are, rather than in response to statements or actions. (Please read this as: "If you're a nazi, I'll stand by and let someone punch you and not feel bad about it at all.")

Like most internet-connected software in the 21st century, mastodon includes mechanisms for responding to both bad actions and bad actors.

Starting at the local level, if a user on your server says something that you believe violates the rules of your server, you can bring it to the attention of a moderator and they should respond appropriately. Depending on the server, a bad *action* might result in a notice and the post or comment in question being deleted, while an egregiously-bad action, or a pattern of bad actions that indicate a bad *actor*, might result in that user's account being suspended or terminated. If you find content you consider to be objectionable, but the moderators of your server don't agree it is worthy of moderator action, you still have a few choices: you can mute the user so you don't see their posts or comments, you can block them so that they can't comment on your posts, or you can leave the server entirely and find another one more to your linking. The design of mastodon means that your list of followed and followers will move with you, but your posts and comments will not, so it's not a completely transparent move, but it's not the end of the world, either.

If the user is not local to you, meaning you're on serverA, while they are on serverB, that's where things get more difficult. You have the same mechanisms available to you: you can mute the user or block the user, and even report the user. When you report a user from another server, the message goes to your own server moderators as well as (optionally) the moderators of the other server. And then what? It depend on both your moderators and the moderators of that other server.

Let's say that other server's moderators are horrible trolls, or that the other server in question is a self-server, so that the person spamming or harassing you *is* their own moderator. You have one additional mechanism, which is that you can "Block domain badactor.antisocial" entirely. For example, there are servers out there devoted to trolling, or that don't abide by laws effective in the US and Europe, or that are just gross.

So far all moderation choices are up to you. If you find people of a certain political leaning intolerable, you can block domains known to host them. If one particular person gets under your skin, you can block them. If you're browsing the "Federated" timeline to see all posts from everywhere and see something you can't believe is even allowed to exist on the internet, you can block either the user or the entire domain as you feel is appropriate.

But there's another level of moderation possible, and that involves server admins.

## Local vs Global

I'll use QOTO as an example, since that's where I am. QOTO has strict policies against hate speech and harassment. There are several moderators who spend a lot of time reviewing content on QOTO, and enforcing the rules. The "Local" timeline is full of friendly positive content and a lot of nerdery. Anything that seems even a little bit like hate speech or harassment can be reported and will be dealt with, and they'll kick people off the server who aren't willing to be kind. QOTO has long been a haven for people in the LGBT community, in large part because of somewhat-heavy moderation at a time when some LGBT people were being targeted specifically on mastodon. As a server, QOTO is a great place to be.

But all of that describes the "Local" experience. If you stay on the "Home" (people you've chosen to follow) and "Local" (people on your server) timelines, QOTO is pleasant and agreeable and interesting and fun, and most of all, well-moderate.

If you switch to the "Federated" (global) timeline, things can get very ugly very quickly. That's because QOTO has a policy against de-federating.

Server admins have four options for moderating users, and three options for moderating entire servers. The user actions come into play when, for example, I report something another QOTO user posted, and the QOTO moderators have to decide what to do with that. They might mark the user as sensitive, so that any images that user posts is automatically put behind a content warning. They might freeze the account to prevent any further posts or comments by that user. They might "silence" or "limit" the user so that only people who've chosen to follow them see anything they post. Or they might suspend the user, which effectively deletes their account completely.

The server options are similar, but more consequential. A moderator on serverA can choose to "reject media" from serverB, so that no images of any kind from that server show up locally. They can "silence" or "limit" that server so that nothing from any user on serverB shows up except for people on serverA already following them. Or they can suspend or block that server entirely, an action commonly called defederation.

This last option seems very extreme to me. It is literally the most extreme option available, and can have unforeseen consequences many server moderators don't seem to be considering. It is such an extreme option that QOTO has a policy of only blocking servers that engage in technical attacks or make CSAM available. They've silenced only four servers, mostly in response to dedicated harassment of LGBT people on QOTO condoned by those server moderators. For the most part QOTO focuses on local moderation and makes a domain blocklist available to all users who wish to start with a list of 123 blocked domains.

qoto.org/@freemo/1093036879382

While QOTO takes a very hands-off approach to inter-server moderation, leaving decisions in the hands of individual QOTO users, some servers lean very hard in the other direction, blocking domains not just for things that have happened, but for things that they believe might happen in the future, or because a server chooses not to participate in the daily two-minute hate against another server.

## What Defederation Does

To be clear about why defederation is a big deal, I can give an example, naming names. I am on qoto.org, while a very good friend of mine who is pretty big in the tabletop gaming world was on tabletop.social. It turns out that tabletop.social blocks qoto.org for reasons seemingly related to the ongoing issue described in the first link in this post. As my friend put it when I mentioned this to him, they'll block anyone for anything. Because his server blocked my server, he couldn't add me as a friend. He couldn't search for me by tag or URL. He couldn't see any of my posts unless he logged out of mastodon. I could see him, and I tried to follow him, hoping that would open up new options for him, but he never even saw my follow request, and his account was set to require approval for following. Like I said, he's pretty big in the tabletop gaming world.

He and I are the best of friends, and neither of us are bad actors in any way. In fact, we're both supporters of LGBT people personally, and where applicable, professionally, so it seems really strange that we could not communicate at all because of (apparently) issues related to LGBT people. None of the 3.15K users (870 active) on tabletop.social could interact in any way, shape, or form with any of the 25.2K users (8.53K active) on qoto.org. There was no accusation of bad behavior by me, or by any other QOTO user, just a presumptive domain-wide ban. When I dug into why this ban was in place--which was difficult, since nobody at tabletop.social could even see my comments asking questions--I came across comments from some years back suggesting that QOTO's unwillingness to block a third domain meant that QOTO should be blocked. This got QOTO put onto a blocklist shared by a number of sites.

I struggle to follow this reasoning. If someone on tabletop.social were being awful, I would block that person. If multiple people on tabletop.social were being awful, to the point that I began to suspect the domain existed for the purpose of being awful, I would block that domain. And even though I'm only acting for myself, not every user of my server, I can't imagine blocking tabletop.social because they refuse to block some other domain I really dislike. Let's say there was a domain called badactors.antisocial that existed primarily for the purpose of harassment. I would block them for myself, no problem. I might even, depending on just what sort of harassment that server was engaged in, block them at the domain level if I were a domain moderator. But I don't understand what would make someone then go around to other servers and demand that they also block badactors.antisocial. That tabletop.social users might see posts from badactors.antisocial on their timelines doesn't affect me or my server at all!

An ungracious person might view it as "I hate anybody unwilling to hate the people I hate," but surely there has to be more to it than that, right? I can think of very few possibilities. Four, really.

## Why Defederate?

First, it could be exactly that. Authoritarians can be found all along the political spectrum, and to some extend this feels a bit like left-wing authoritarianism. For example, mastodon.art recently chose to block QOTO and lists as the reason "Federates with instances that violate our ToS/CoC (such as Gab, Kiwifarms.cc, freespeechextremist.com, etc.)" That sounds a lot like "we block these servers, and any servers that won't also block these servers, etc." It sounds like the "two-minute hate" issue. And to be clear, those servers are terrible, and I wouldn't fault anyone for blocking them either individually or even on a server level. I blocked two of those myself individually, and the third doesn't seem to exist anymore.

However, it could be a second reason: maybe servers blocking QOTO don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing. In describing the action, the owner of mastodon.art seemed to believe they weren't affecting anybody who already followed someone, but QOTO is listed as "Suspended," not "Limited," so no, they've completely blocked any interaction with anybody from QOTO for all of their users, possibly because they don't understand the difference. Again, the fact that QOTO doesn't block badactors.antisocial doesn't mean that badactors.antisocial content shows up on tabletop.social or mastodon.art! If those servers block badactors.antisocial, then badactors.antisocial content won't show up, so the reason for the preemptive blocking seems to be based on ignorance. There are two more possibilities, though.

A third option is that there may be one way that content from badactors.antisocial *might* show up on a site that has blocked that domain. I haven't experimented to be sure, and it seems from reading comment threads that others haven't either, but there's a widespread belief that if someone "boosts" a post from badactors.antisocial, then that boosted post could show up even on a server that has blocked the domain, because the "boost" means that the content is now coming from the other server. I am not sure whether this is the case, but let's say it is. Then I would ask, has this happened? Are there people on QOTO boosting horrible posts from badactors.antisocial? If so, report them to the QOTO moderators, who should take action! If they don't take action against the users boosting bad content, then you have a valid reason to take action against QOTO. Nobody in the comment threads seems to be 100% sure whether boosting posts from blocked domains results in them appearing, so it seems clear that even the first step in this chain has not happened, making a block against QOTO seem very premature at best.

Finally, the only other reason I can think of is that people have misunderstood QOTO's heavy emphasis on "academic freedom" and confused it with the "free speech" label hateful people often use to describe their hate-filled nastiness. Even though QOTO clearly states that they don't permit hate speech or harassment, and very clearly moderate QOTO, people elsewhere seem to believe that QOTO is "completely unmoderated," and a haven for (right-wing) "freeze peach" enthusiasts to say hateful things primarily against minority groups. This is categorically false. I'm not sure Mr. Freeman appreciates why people might believe this angle, or he might make it even more clear in QOTO's About page how heavily moderated QOTO is. Then again, he has stated so many times in comments when it has come up, although they are comments I'm not sure most relevant people can actually see, since they come from someone at the now-blocked QOTO!

## Consequences

I'm a mastodon evangelist in my circle of friends, and I convinced my board gaming friend to move to dice.camp, away from tabletop.social. I convinced my artist friend to sign up with sunny.garden rather than mastodon.art. A long-time mastodon-savvy friend reached out to warn me about a push toward defederating from QOTO, suggesting that I might "wind up on a fediverse island soon if this defederation continues," and I guess that's a chance I'm taking. (I sent him the first URL in this post.) It seems strange that the sixth-most-connected server could end up as an "island" with zero evidence of any actually-offensive posts.

The thread that prompted that friend to reach out was illustrative. The initial post said that they were blocking QOTO based on a message from a QOTO admin that no, QOTO wouldn't block a server for inciting genocide. But the response wasn't quoted, it was just "Admin replied that Qoto would not block such servers." It possible that the response was actually that QOTO does not block *any* servers, which is a principled stand, but it is described in a way that suggests Qoto is in favor of genocide, or at least tolerant of advocating for it. It was nice to see that other people spoke up in comments suggesting that this sounded a bit like a witch hunt, and that it should perhaps require "documented evidence of continuous abuse of rules" rather than blocking based on a singe possibly-misunderstood conversation.

But that's federation! Every server owner gets to decide for themself what they want to allow, and if that means cutting off huge swathes of servers until eventually it's just a few servers in an echo chamber patting each other on the back over their policies, that's their choice. We can have a tiny cluster of defederated right-wing authoritarians over here, and a tiny cluster of defederated left-wing authoritarians over there, and never the twain shall meet.

I've seen a couple of mentions of "The Paradox of Tolerance" in discussions about QOTO, but I don't think what we're seeing is over-dependence on tolerance on QOTO's part resulting in nastiness spreading around mastodon. Instead, we're seeing intolerance in the extreme, with a few individuals cutting off all possible reasonable discussion for large groups of users, many of whom have no idea what's happening, all without any actual evidence of bad behavior or reprehensible views on the part of QOTO users. A small group of authoritarian left-wingers have decided that QOTO is right-wing and acted precipitously to cut it off before anyone manages to say anything right-wing. As someone actually using QOTO, this comes as a surprise to me. None of the admins have said anything I've noticed as being specifically right-wing, and have been very vocal in support of the LGBT community, for example, which is not a stance I tend to associate with right-wing trolls. I don't post much about politics, but I'm pretty far from a right-winger myself. I'm also pretty far from authoritarian, though, so I guess I'm not cut out to be a mastodon admin.

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Phillip Winn

I have mixed feelings about the American holiday of Thanksgiving, but as in most situations, I ultimately come down on the side of joy. Repurpose the holiday! Celebrate with family and friends, and if you really want to have a good time, make sure you celebrate with immigrants!

My fondest Turkey Day memories mostly involve Indian and Chinese university students experiencing their first American Thanksgiving.

There’s also the time my family had a spread set up in the backyard for several dozen church friends, but since it was in the Philippines, and late November south of the equator, it was so hot the butter melted.

It is never bad to be thankful for life. Spending time with family and friends doesn’t undo tragic injustice, but avoiding celebrations doesn’t either.

This year I’ll be in Auckland, New Zealand, this Thursday. And that’s fine too! I can still tell the immigrants I live with I’m thankful for them, and I don’t even have to eat any sweet potatoes.

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Phillip Winn

I'm trying to avoid focusing overmuch on the drama over at Twitter, but it's exceedingly difficult. It's too much! What follows are some thoughts I've had during discussions with friends over the last few days.

1. When I say "Twitter is dying," I'm talking about a difficult-to-define inflection point. I mean, myspace.com still exists. digg.com still exists. slashdot.org still exists. It's not a question of whether or not the website will still exist, or still carry ads, but of whether it will occupy the same place in the mindset of the vast majority of people. I think it's clear that it will not.

2. The idea that "something" will replace Twitter seems misguided. People talk as if facebook replaced myspace which replaced friendster, as if those transitions weren't incomplete and messy. Some people never left, other people went elsewhere, and each of those has had more users than the previous, so they didn't "migrate" from anywhere. Assuming Twitter survives in some form, some people will continue to be there, and probably elsewhere also.

3. Social media has already become far more balkanized than it once was, and the idea of everybody belonging to a single social network seems quaint to me. I haven't had a Facebook account in years, and many young people never have. One of my kids has a Snapchat snapscore under 1000, while another has a snapscore of more than 100k. One frequently sends TikTok links to a family iMessage thread that others have to then describe for the sibling who refuses to click on any TikTok links. My family uses iMessage threads primarily, while my spouse's family primarily uses WhatsApp. I use Telegram to talk to my friends in Ukraine, and WeChat to keep track of my friends in China. It is probable that no one thing will replace Twitter, but that many people will spend more time on YouTube or Discord or TikTok or Instagram or something else, or several somethings else, while others start to spend time on a mastodon server or similar. Even my once Facebook-addicted mother spends more time on YouTube than anywhere else these days. It's not always a mass migration all at once.

4. But in this case, it sure seems to look like one. Mastodon servers have collectively grown by quite a lot in the last few weeks, despite putting their worst foot forward, so to speak. The onboarding is the single worst aspect of the mastodon user experience, and it's the first thing people encounter. The fact that any of us make it though is remarkable, and the fact that more than 500k have in the last week is staggering. If you can read this post, but haven't yet joined the bewildering service that is mastodon, you're welcome to join me here. qoto.org/invite/H4qMWSGv

5. Then again, Twitter has almost 400 million users, half of whom use the site on any given day, so mastodon's 7 million isn't putting a lot of pressure on Twitter in absolute terms. The site I pulled that stat from also says that "Twitter has 8.85% of the world's overall social media user base," suggesting the balkanization might already be farther along than I realized. backlinko.com/twitter-users

6. It was easy for me to forget what an engineering marvel Twitter is. The "fail whale" of the days of Ruby are long gone, and Twitter is supporting unparalleled levels of traffic even now. If every single employee walked off the job, leaving only its new owner standing in the lobby looking for people to pose for photos with, I'm not sure how many developers would feel comfortable with their ablity to come in and keep things humming at scale, and have the skills to back up their comfort level. And that's just to keep it running, not create "Twitter 2.0." There are not very many companies in the world operating at Twitter scale. Twitter's engineering blog is a good reminder that it takes than your average smart developer to keep Twitter running smoothly.

7. It will take some time before I trust any deep dive into What Went Wrong™, but it seems like a few things are obvious already:

7a. Advertisers are not as easy to impress as "nerds with money."

7b. Software is not hardware.

7c. There may be no end of people willing to put up with just about anything to work on rockets or electric cars, but that may not be true for large-scale web services with a reputation for toxicity.

I've managed to make it this far without saying anything negative about a single oligarch, so it seems like a good place to stop.

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Phillip Winn

One of my kids claimed last night to not know that there have been two Roosevelts as presidents of the USA, not know why people don't like Nixon, and when pushed, not know what the US Senate was. Actually, they asked, "Who is the senate? He sounds important."

🤦‍♂️

This child tried to blame their school, so they quizzed their younger sibling, who knew the answers to all of the above and claimed to have learned it while attending the same school. So then this child, in desperation, quizzed their other sibling, who knew some answers, but less than they should.

So... last night I explained to my kids how the government works, and what I think actually matters about politics and why (the Judiciary, if you're asking).

Fortunately, my kids did vote! The understood that *this* time was important, but last night I hoped I helped them understand that *every* time is important.

It is worth noting that everyone in that room who was married is in a marriage that is only legal due to a decision by the judiciary, not by law. The US Senate voted last night to change that, so perhaps all of those marriages will be protected by court-proof law soon.

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Phillip Winn

I don't intend to do this more than once, but here are a few daily word games people might enjoy, along with an example of what is shared when you "Share Results" for each.

The one everybody knows, of course, is Wordle, found at nytimes.com/games/wordle

Wordle 513 4/6

⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩🟨⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Another polished game with a bit more complexity is Waffle, found at wafflegame.net

4/5

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⭐🟩⭐🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⭐🟩⭐🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

🔥 streak: 24
🏆
wafflegame.net

That game also offers a weekly "Deluxe" version:

2/5

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⭐🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩⭐🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

wafflegame.net

It is occurring to me as I write this that I should have picked a day and week in which my results for were slightly better.

My most recent discovery, thanks to @Spinybadger, is Thirdle. While that game offers a text-only share like the above, and an image+link share, for the sake of mastodon I'm going to post an image.

thirdle.org

0
Phillip Winn

Since I'm feeling bloggy tonight, and nobody asked, here are some email lists I'm on and enjoy receiving.

1. [Artisanal Sudoku](artisanalsudoku.substack.com) - James Sinclair creates really, really good variant sudoku puzzles, and you get three every Monday for free, or five plus access to a growing archive for $5/month. Well worth the price, in my opinion.
2. [Sudoku Clover](patreon.com/sudokuclover/about) - Clover publishes monthly, and is also worth $5/month in my opinion. Plus, I've enjoyed her puzzles for so long on Discord for free.
3. [Letters from an American](heathercoxrichardson.substack.) - Everyone's favorite historian-turned-substack-queen, Heather Cox Richardson. Her daily emails teach me things.
4. [BIG by Matt Stoller](mattstoller.substack.com) - You should read the book Goliath by Matt Stoller, and then *also* subscribe to his weekly newsletter with a hyper-focus on anti-monopoly issues.
5. [Slow Boring](slowboring.com) - Matt Yglesias can be polarizing at times, but I find his newsletter thoughtful even when I disagree with his conclusions, as does one of my brothers who is theoretically on the other side of every issue from me politically. That seems to say something. MattY hyper-focuses on everything eventually.
6. [Garbage Day](garbageday.email) - Ryan Brodericks writes three times a week (or four, for $5/month) to remind us all that the internet is fun, actually. Brilliant observer of the online scene.
7. [Today in Tabs](todayintabs.com) - The internet in super-compressed form, Rusty Foster packs many, many links into his newsletter four days a week.

I subscribe to many more than this, but this seems like enough, and provides more than one in each of three categories: , , and the .

0
Phillip Winn

I created my first web page in 1994, four years after Tim Berners-Lee kicked the whole thing off. I started my first weblog in 1995, almost three years before the word was coined. Before that I was active on BBSes, so I've had somewhere to ruminate semi-publicly for quite some time.

Yet for the last few years, I've shut down existing outlets and mostly shared my thoughts with a very limited list of friends and family in iMessage or Signal. Maybe a bit of Slack and Discord. I've watched people come up and hit the big time, and other people bigger than I ever was walk away much like I did.

At some point blogging stopped being something fun to do, and started being a chore. Instead of posting my thoughts and finding clarity, I'd see thread after thread of comments on site after site devolve into the most graceless possible interpretations of whatever was written, and it became tiresome. Tiresome to write, knowing people would see whatever they wanted to see rather than what I was saying. Tiresome to read, as the same thing happened to others. Even being an active observer was exhausting, as the culture of the entire internet seemed to focus on a never-ending cycle of outrage.

It doesn't help that during the same period of time, I became more aware of just how deeply the country I live in is built on the bodies of people it chewed up and spit out and continues to disrespect to this day. That shouldn't even be a political issue, in my view, but *everything* became political, and people picked teams.

I changed mine, but couldn't work up the energy to blog about it. I knew I'd face pushback. I knew I wouldn't convince anyone of anything. My close friends and family came along for the ride, or at least observed it, but nobody else needed to know anything.

And that's really the thing. I don't need the whole world to see everything I write. Obscurity can be a boon.

Technically anything I write here is just as available to the world as anything I would have written on a blog, but it *feels* different. It feels less like I should expect to be shamed or harassed here. I also have the ability to block people and servers easily, so I'm starting to relax.

It could be that I have nothing significant to say about anything after all. Several times my friends have suggested that a rant in Signal or iMessage should have been posted somewhere, and I've never been sure whether they meant "so more people can see it" or "so I don't have to read it here." Either way, it seems like they'll soon get their wish.

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