Some praise for the behind-the-scenes tech I'm using to run this site
- Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
- Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
- Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.
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The plan for the beta
Thanks to everyone who's joined to help beta test! I'm very grateful y'all are here! ❤️
My basic plan is to use superstimul.us for the next week, posting here instead of Facebook, getting a sense of the platform so that I can help other people later, and trying to iron out basic issues if they crop up.
After that, I'm going to do a push to invite clusters of people who I'm especially excited about being here. I'll probably reach out to y'all for names of people who are cruxy for your active enjoyment/participation here (feel free to preemptively message me about this!).
Anybody can invite their friends, btw, though I would slightly prefer you held off for now, because I want to be strategic about the launch.
I might do some kind of incentive / costly-signaling scheme where I give $20 or so to the first 30 people who share a substantive post here, and not on other social media? Or something; Not sure about that yet.
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I'm considering going to the southern hemisphere for December and January, to miss the shortest days in California.
New Zealand and Chile both seem like good options: Tons of sun that time of year, good climate, safe cities, relatively cheap. Chile is a lot cheaper, and after having a lot of fun visiting Mexico, I kind of want to try living in a country where I don't know the language.
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I just played Duck Detective and I have a complaint
I am confused that it is SO well-rated. Like, it's 10/10 on Steam? The motivation behind the central crime doesn't really make sense and is barely explained. It's cute in a bunch of ways, but writing reasonable character motivations feels like a "bare minimum" thing for me. (At least in this kind of game, where you're supposed to deduce who did what and why.)
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I did a dance shoot on Friday
Check out this edit I did. The more colorful one is the "after." It's more colorful than what it was like to really be there -- but the less colorful one also isn't what it looked like to really be there. It was so dim!
This kind of choice feels salient during photography post-processing. Should I make it look like how it looked to be there? Or how it FELT to be there? Or should I just do something cool?
The ideal probably depends on the purpose of the shoot. (Is it to remember a wonderful event? Is it to create a piece of art? Is it to give people photos to use for dating apps?)
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Yeah that would be nice! Partly because it sounds nice to give people a better idea of what goes into a pretty photo -- a lot of the labor is invisible. (Sometimes people just tell me "wow you have a really good camera" when they see my photos.)
But also because there's a big difference between what is optimal for aesthetics and what is optimal for accurate-information-sharing, and I'm disappointed about how much art distorts people's beliefs
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I'm really excited for this experiment! Friendica exceeds my expectations in some ways (looks nice, has imo an especially good privacy model, seems easy to update and administer) and falls short in others (ease of finding people, occasional UI weirdness).
Please let me know if you run into any issues and I'll try to fix them or at least help resolve them
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Satvik
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