thebaer

As someone else mentioned, this is so it works on custom domain publications, but you can verify in the source nothing nefarious is going on.

It's also on the list of issues to fix: https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA/issues/15

Do you know the admin there? I requested a login but still haven't gotten the confirmation email, and no one's on IRC.

It might be possible in code to hide it on your own instance, but it'll still be there in the various Mastodon clients, other instances, etc. Without knowing the codebase (but having used the software) it looks like it'd be a major core change to turn it off completely, or change it to something like a private bookmark function.

> How do I have an identity when I consistently invite other people - often strangers - to affirm my experiences?

This sums it up so perfectly. It precisely explains what I've always failed to when people ask, "why didn't you take pictures of that? or share them on Facebook?" I was just overseas for several weeks and I was able to fully absorb the entire experience because I wasn't worried about what anyone else in the world thought of what I was experiencing at the moment.

I do think there can be a middle-ground with social media if it's designed thoughtfully, with this perspective in mind. I wrote a little about it recently [0], specifically on how Mastodon shouldn't have ported over the favorite/like functionality from Twitter, because functions like that do hijack our brains to use these tools for the subconscious reward, rather than to truly improve our lives in some way.

With prevalent awareness of the issue, thoughtful design, and a change in financial incentives for platform makers I think we can come away from this crazy time of intrusive, subconscious-altering social media with just the good parts.

[0] https://write.as/matt/mastodon-social-favorites

I like it. Tools with a different take on a regular problem like this are always useful, and can make people more creative under new constraints. It sounds like a tool that needs to exist and one I'd love to try out.

If you haven't seen it yet, there are some kinda-similar tools out there like Little Outliner [0] that might serve as inspiration. Otherwise, as someone also running a niche-ish blogging platform (anonymous, writing-only), I'd definitely suggest getting the tool out there and tweaking it based on real feedback before worrying about what business model will fit best. Not saying those ideas won't work, just that it's a crowded space and you might need to do more to differentiate or bring people value. In case you want an idea of what the growth / revenue timeline has been like for our platform, you can see our metrics: [1].

[0] http://littleoutliner.com

[1] https://inside.write.as

You'll get a different (less annoying) experience if you're logged in. However if you haven't logged in on a Medium site (these [0][1] might be some), you'll get the annoying sticky bars.

[0] https://hackernoon.com/the-rise-of-influencers-in-a-digital-... [1] https://imrat.com/medium-custom-domain-cloudflare-db76b8a9b2...

How would you like to see it improved?

Yep, a user stylesheet would easily do the trick. And a nicely-packaged extension makes it accessible to more people, especially non-technical users.

Love it. If you file a GH issue I'll remember, and add that as an option.

In theory I agree, but reality makes that difficult to adhere to. To me, 15 minutes throwing a browser extension together is worth not being assaulted when I end up on a Medium-powered site. Same reasons I use an ad-blocker.

The problem isn't with devices or necessarily "screen time" but with the types of software on these devices. Social media is just 21st century TV -- that's why it's harmful. The platforms that are ad-driven and engineered to be addictive don't help us connect in the same meaningful ways we get offline.

So as you might restrict your kids' time watching TV, parents should be aware of the amount of time kids spend on interactive TV. Phones are particularly demonized because their omnipresence encourages more consumption, but really they're just the physical manifestation of the individual problems starting inside the devices. (Aside: I'd really be curious to know the amount of time people spend passively consuming information on social media vs. creating / contributing.)

And as an industry I think it's important we find other business models. We build these apps for "stickiness" and "engagement" -- seemingly innocuous metrics that ultimately accumulate to form these larger societal issues.

The EFF has a nice site set up exactly that way: https://dearfcc.org

As a fellow mobile developer, I highly prefer Android's non-visual option with human-readable and -editable XML. I always find myself editing layouts textually and then just using the visual editor to preview how things look.

Interface Builder was great for me at first, when learning iOS-specific controls and how everything worked, but as I've gotten better I've found it's always more of a hindrance. Things really start to break down when you need to move fully laid-out controls to a new container, for example, whereas Android's XML layouts let me do that by deleting/changing a few lines of text.

I started by building something simple that would appeal to a tiny group of people I understood: a pastebin service only available over telnet [1]. I posted it on /r/linux, which led to some good conversations and open sourcing what I was doing, building a small HTTP-based service (the start of our API), and having a small group of people to talk to when the product evolved.

The goal was to become a seamless publishing platform, so I built the Android app next (which brought me closer to the broad audience I wanted) and told /r/goodguyapps about it. Every time I went after a new platform -- Chrome OS, iOS, desktop via command-line, web -- I found a community that would want to hear about it and simply had a conversation. I went to listen to people's problems instead of just selling my app, and ended up learning exactly what I should build and what the product could do outside of what I'd originally imagined. Write.as didn't have user accounts for the first year and a half it existed, but somewhere in that process we passed 100 users across various platforms.

[1]: https://github.com/writeas/nerds

Right. The advertising-supported internet was good for a while, in my mind, only so that we could see just how bad it can be for the end user, and we can move on to better business models.

> I'd rather have a few channels or sites of quality than hundreds of pieces of crap

100% agreed

> The FCC provided no evidence to substantiate the proposition that broadband providers respected consumer privacy any less than other members of the internet ecosystem.

Without knowing entirely what they're referencing, I would say that we need to make sure broadband providers respect consumer privacy, regardless of what "other members of the internet ecosystem" are doing.

> Consumers enjoy the advertising-supported internet and innovation...

Uhh... no.

Exactly. And that communication can (and does) happen in an infinite number of changing forms, which is amazing.

I meant "this" as in people creating simple tools and services for everyone. I meant your pure plain text service would've been a nice addition to the web. Everyone who creates things online brings their own ideas to the table, and that's what the web is about. (And of course it's good for other things.)

And certain services (like Write.as) keep track of all the posts you've written, and they can optionally can be tied to a pseudonym. I don't think that an assurance on who wrote what is always necessary. If the writing is good, the author doesn't necessarily matter. And anecdotally I think people who abuse anonymity online are in the minority -- most people use anonymity to share more candidly where they otherwise feel repressed.

And I think "worth" is best decided by the reader, and a human touch continues to be superior to any technical solutions we've come up with. Platforms who try to uniformly enforce some standard of "worth," in my opinion, risk alienating a large amount of people, and usually miss the entire standard they were going for in the first place.

But what other problems do you think exist with text publishing services? Or what do you think needs to change? How do we solve those things?

They definitely are, but it's still an interesting, useful project.

As someone also building and running a "plain text" service, I know there's a lot you can do with such a simple product, if you care to. [0][1] It's great to have more services like this -- it's what the web is all about.

[0]: https://write.as/apps

[1]: https://read.write.as

GitHub will definitely get the job done if you like going the static site route. Otherwise Ghost [0] is a popular alternative to WordPress for self-hosting.

The answer really comes down to how much time you want to spend maintaining and updating your blogging software. If you don't want to worry about the backend, Medium is a popular free hosted solution, even if they've had some shakeups lately. Otherwise some popular paid platforms are Svbtle [1] and Posthaven [2], and I'm building Write.as [3], a light, writing-focused platform.

[0] https://ghost.org/

[1] https://svbtle.com/

[2] https://posthaven.com/

[3] https://write.as/

Yes, anyone can make their own Android app store and charge whatever they want for the apps there. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=android+app+stores

Crouton doesn't necessarily go away on reboot. You just have to consistently boot into Developer Mode to keep it (and the rest of your data). You just get a warning and the option to do so each time it boots. That's how I've been doing it, though I hardly ever shut the thing down.

You're right they don't care, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless. It's up to developers and companies to actually create the pure utilities the free software movement advocates, and sell it not on "freedom and decentralization," but on "our products give you more value than Google's do."

We'll never get the public to care about these things unless we silently provide them behind actually-useful products. We consumers build our lives off readily-available utilities, generally not caring about what they're doing behind the scenes, because we want a blackbox we can trust. We all want to save time and get on with our lives. So we need more companies that exist as utilities, grow their network / market share, and don't sell out at the end of the day. Of course, creating the conditions to make that happen is a whole 'nother thing :)

Yeah, we've been working on this for a while, and figured we'd throw it out there after hearing that news :)

A few things that are different: you can see your list of past posts, we store everything in localStorage in the browser, we have Android, iOS, and command-line apps [1], and you can put together a full pseudonymous blog on the web (coming to other clients soon).

Edit: we also run a Tor hidden service [2], which the Android app works with.

[1]: https://write.as/apps

[2]: http://writeas7pm7rcdqg.onion/

Thanks. I am planning on updating the iOS app myself now, especially since I'm generally doing more iOS development these days. But it was incredibly nice to hand off that bit of work and get back a fully-functional app, especially after building / maintaining those other platforms.

It's live, and it says at the top: "the camera is on" basically. It's like the call already started as far as the caller is concerned -- no ringing necessary.

I might be convinced of that when they improve the battery technology. No company on the planet except for Apple can say "wireless is the future" and charge $159 for buds that last 5 hours.

Write.as CLI

Our open source command-line utility written in Go.

Write.as is a lightweight hosted blogging platform with clients on every popular platform. We started with pastebin-like anonymous posting in v1, and now v2 has real blogs and post syncing -- but is currently web-only. So I'm bringing this new functionality to all our clients, but starting with mobile. And I'd really love more input from technically-minded people on this client, since most of our interfaces are focused on non power users.

Monthly goals:

  - Build a reusable client library in Go to use in the backend, and to open source
  - Develop a friendly command-line interface for publishing standalone and blog posts, 
    registering or logging into an account, and syncing up anonymous posts to accounts

Skills needed: Go, command-line design and ideally Windows experience (I'm personally most used to Linux and OS X)

Code: https://github.com/writeas/writeas-cli

Chat: http://slack.write.as or #writeas on freenode

MIT license

I was thinking the same thing -- the Chrome Store has been a huge boon for my product (https://write.as). But a lot of people are on Chrome OS, and since they're keeping apps there at least, I don't think this is a terrible thing. And it makes sense from a product perspective: the store stays focused on the platform it was originally built for, and doesn't try to extend its reach to a storefront for the entire web.

You can also turn a cell phone off and (with most phones) remove its battery.