Blog post: Where are we going? https://bigzaphod.com/blog/where-are-we-going/

I should blog more often probably.

Although maybe after reading this, perhaps I shouldn't blog more.

Hmm.

@Nerde

I first remember him as a Likud spox in the 1st Gulf War. I hear there's a press-secretary opening he might be interested in.

here is a live recording of some stuff that happened earlier

#scratchingPost #nowPlaying #fediMusic #music #turntablism

Kirk says: Sulu, Let's tear this universe a new one!

@futurebird Do you know how knowt compares?

Our blog was quiet for over half a year, but we're back, and you get three blog posts for the price of one: pinned messages, Liquid Glass on iOS, in-app updates for the Android APK, decentralized onboarding across community relays, and a first look at what's coming next, including the end of unencrypted email, and the reasoning behind it.

https://delta.chat/en/2026-11-07-pin-messages-and-multi-relay-onboarding

#deltachat #chatmail #webxdc

Guess that became a movie night. We followed up with FernGully and after that Dorkness Rising 🤓

Okay, another:

Focus on community. Foster online community.

Create easily searchable references on the web. Not just documentation, but also forums and wikis. Make it so when somebody pastes an error message, they can immediately find a page where people are working through sorting that issue. Don't make them join your stupid Discord (you can't search the web for Discord messages!!)

Actively encourage users to ask simple, easy questions, simply as a way of getting them used to asking questions. Ban the phrase RTFM ("Read the friendly manual", except we all know the F secretly doesn't actually stand for "friendly"). Don't dismiss users who "didn't do enough research before asking" -- many of them may not have known what to look up because they're so new to all of this. It's easy to be blinded by your own competence that you forget what it's like to be a newbie. That's not to mention how dreadful online search has become nowadays.

I also suppose it goes without saying that you need to police and moderate your communities, and be explicitly welcoming to marginalized communities by being anti-racist, anti-transphobic, etc. This needs to be the No Bigots Club.

Here, I'll start with something (perhaps I may share more later, too):

Developers need to listen to their users, especially when it comes to UX.

There was a tendency in the old school of open source in which programmers kind of had this attitude that "if you don't wanna learn how to be a terminal wizard, you deserve to be spied on by Facebook" because you don't know what PGP is. Or that if a user thinks Linux apps are hard, the response was often to scoff and tell them to "git gud", instead of actually just making the program easier to use.

I'd like to see developers more and more accepting the idea that in order to make a real impact, we're going to need to develop things that can actually be used by a general audience.

Check it out! Tonight there is an extremely rare "Stolen Moon".

I wanna talk about the political movement of the Open Source community. If you spend enough time on fedi, you surely will have heard *plenty* of criticisms of what's going on in Open Source, and rightfully so.

So I'm curious, what do we think the Open Source community *should be doing* in order to achieve important progressive and anti-authoritarian goals? What should the next generation of programmers be thinking of and working on in this space?

A special rule: You're only allowed to say "don't X" if you have at least as many "do Y" recommendations. Preferably, I'd like to see more do's than don't's.

Boosts welcome

#tech #openSource #FOSS #progressive #programming #askFedi

@ai6yr there's a senior prof at work cranking out several books a year that are all produced with a heavy AI hand. Somehow that's seen as useful in annual reviews.

@tsturm @sleepytako completely slept through it in Kyoto😆

@lowqualityfacts

Riiiiiiiiight .. Good luck with that.

@douglasvb Oooof

Night in Paris 1, Yoon Hyup, Acrylic on canvas, 2020

#art

@robertcadena WOW, that plant looks like it's doing phenomenally well! Which grower.. .mail order?

Coffee plant update. I bought this guy back in 3 months ago from a grower in Santa Barbara. First photo back then. 2nd today. He’s doing well. #plants #bloomscrolling #gardening

@Kishi The docs are very bad. The only positive thing I can say about them is they exist, which is not true of all build systems I have encountered.