Charles Pence @pence@scholar.social

I have no idea what's going on on fedi today, and tbh, that's been the defining experience on masto for me

Microblogging was a mistake.

An attractive, candy-colored, addictive mistake.

I will never actually implement it but sometimes I look at what the popularity of Twitter has done to the shapes of our conversations and I want to mandate a *minimum* post length here.

Mastodon's default limit of 500 is a start but not really enough. Every instance that raises the limit into the thousands of characters or beyond is doing a great thing by providing a way to wean people off of short, staccato exchanges and give them the opportunity for thought and nuance in a text box they have been trained to dump thoughts into. It looks short at first but it just keeps on growing and growing as your thought takes shape, and you can actually go back and *edit* the fucking thing.

But really I still miss when goddamn Livejournal was where all my online social shit happened. People could still be dicks on it, don't get me wrong! it wasn't set up to encourage and enforce hot takes, though; it wasn't built to make a ton of money by farming your outrage and stress and turning it into ad views!

(Which is really a problem with ALL modern social sites, everyone wants to become the next Zuckerfuck and there is no way to do that without strip-mining your users' attention. But I've sung that song more than once and don't care to sing it again today; I've got shit to do.)

(This post brought to you by watching a disagreement actually get *resolved* thanks to the power of replies that are long enough to have some fucking nuance, instead of blowing up into a multi-day shitstorm of too-short replies going back and forth.)

Turn the sound on!

OH: "GNU Emacs, which is a sort of hybrid between Windows Notepad, a monolithic-kernel operating system, and the International Space Station."

New video by folks at #UBC, "Beyond the Binary at UBC": an educational resource to learn about gender diversity & inclusive practices. Includes info on gender identity, expression, pronouns, and much more. https://equity.ubc.ca/news-and-stories/beyond-the-binary-at-ubc/

Hey! Share some fun metaphors you know from languages you speak.

I'll start:
"get a wiggle on" meaning to hurry;
"stare daggers" meaning to look at someone angrily;
"last ditch effort" a desperate final attempt (originates from WW1 trench warfare).