Oldschool fediverse phrases, from about 10y ago:
- TZAG: Time Zone Appropriate Greeting (preferred over "good morning")
- TZAF: Time Zone Appropriate Farewell
- #contextpatrol : when someone posted a response which wasn't linked to the original conversation, someone might link the conversation with #contextpatrol (the old StatusNet (ie, GNU Social) interface made not doing this accidentally easily)
- #vaguejokes : an obscure joke that was not really worth or more fun unexplained
Something I also miss: threaded conversations were the norm. Yes, in microblogging! Some of the most intense and interesting conversations about free software philosophy and licensing happened in threads that shot way off to the edge of the page
@cwebber
i subscribe to the zen of python:
Flat Is Better Then Nested
@nightpool flat is better than nested for shallow things, but you won't survive traversing deep things as well in flatland
consider how this affects the quality of The Discourse!
@cwebber @nightpool so... basically reddit, then?
@nightpool @trwnh It may not make people nicer, but I'll say this: there are some reddit / lobsters / hacker news threads that I've read that there's *no way* you could have conversations about in a flat interface. Because people break off into subtopics... and if you look at something like flat news comments on some very popular blogs and news sites, there's sometimes no way to follow the conversation at all... and even if you can, it's usually because topics are grouped at least 1 level deep
@nightpool @trwnh When you end up with the 1 level deep conversations and you have 200 comments, there's no way to make sense of it. Were you replying to someone 130 posts ago? Well how the hell can you tell?
Instead it devolves into "shouting soup". Shout your way to the top.... and I hate that.
anyway, another way to look at it (cf. irc, wikipedia, bulletin boards) is that you're subsuming yourself in and to a broader conversational flow. it's a more collectivist way of looking at it, sure, but communication is something that only exists between people.
It would be just as rude for 2 people to keep arguing about the finer minutia of grammar in an irc where 50 people are trying to discuss music as it would be in "threaded" mailing lists—one just papers over the problem better
@cwebber @nightpool This is really more to do with dropping mentions of everyone except the direct parent.
@nightpool @cwebber @trwnh it's only rude because MLs are usually topic specific places, and they usually request that you stay on topic. On random threads on reddit, much less microblog/tumbleblog threads, I wouldn't consider it rude
@nightpool @cwebber @trwnh and sometimes just "papering over" is all you need
@nightpool @trwnh It's true that if people start arguing on a subthread that it's annoying, but also easy to be contained.
But the reason for subthreading isn't just to contain arguments. Have you ever been to a gathering with a lot of people? You might meet three people who turn out to be interested in the same thing, and you go off and talk about it together in a friendly way. It doesn't matter to most people so you don't require the whole room to join you, but those who are interested can