if you care more about websites with a "modern feel". I'm sure companies like amazon and google are more than happy to charge you 10x more money for it.
Firefox is going to need a large UI overhaul before I even consider laying my eyes on it. It looks terrible compared to Chrome. Maybe if Mozilla would employ me, I could fix that.
It's very hard to stop Chrome's brand at this point.
Chrome's UI remains an anathema to me--its strict requirements regarding how one is supposed to organize tabs and so forth are bogwash, and I'll be sticking with Firefox, which allows me to do whatever the fuck I want re UI component placement and usage, with the help of some extensions, until death do us part.
Chrome is the Apple of browsers and it should burn in a fire wrt how it mandates and imposes specific UI patterns on users. Mozilla, for all their "we're trying to make extensions more chromelike" seems to be holding onto that.
On the bright side, anyone who dislikes Chrome's UI can wait 6 months for them to completely overhaul it again, like clockwork :-)
Agreed that it is much more polished, if only because they aggressively remove everything they can from the UI, including features. Definitely provides a visually relaxing look, even if they crammed it full of unnecessary margins and whitespace. Works pretty well on tablets, too.
Good that you don't use firefox then, because the chrome UI is awful (at least to me) and the trend from firefox and other browsers to copy it and all look the same is highly irritating.
At least firefox allows for some customization, though not as much as the old opera used to offer.
Thanks! Same here, I would always hesitate before writing a function just because of that pain. I went totally wild this week with pg after building this :D
Your comment was a very interesting read. A shame that it didn't get any further discussion. I'll give The Book of the New Sun a go. Thanks for your insights.
Thanks. You won't regret it. It is a most extraordinary masterwork.
That book changed my thinking in ways I find difficult to describe. It was as if the world suddenly developed richer textures. I don't know if he would agree, but I felt it was a very 'Thielian' book. A lot of his ideas and statements came into focus for me when I read it. Together with the recordings I mention it became quite an experience.
It's also linear extrapolation beyond everyone's individual abilities to react to the immmediate past. That at least is one thing our system enforces: the political cycle forces people to think about the presidency at least once every four years and the senate every two. A long term dip below progress is still possible insofar as the majority of the worlds population live nothing like the lucky minority.
You're saying that our intrinsic chronocentric thinking prevents us from seeing the danger of the have-nots abruptly encountering a Western lifestyle? That futureshock in large numbers could wind up causing disruption on a scale that would pull us all down?
The biggest problem with creating a free software social service is that you can't just apply the old method that GNU has used historically: Just mirror the interface and you're done.
That method works fine for many different tools. But with social apps you need to be able to federate, which means you need to have a proprietary vendor who wants to help, which isn't going to happen.
I'm hoping Matrix will provide the bridging required to be able to send notifications from Diaspora to Twitter (for example). I will always be a hack though. :/
I think there's also a whole lot of other issues. The technical part is one thing, but people's feelings are a lot harder to deal with.
We, hackers, think that everything is so sexy with P2P, federation and decentralization in general, but I don't think 'normal' people share that sentiment.
People love brands, they're surrounded by them, and they feel loyalty towards them. If there's no company behind something, it just won't feel right. You won't feel that push towards a thing. The reason why people use Snapchat isn't just because it's a good tool, it's also because it's cool.
I just don't see how something like GNU Social will ever become cool, if there isn't some timely and powerful brand to push it.
Good points...tech is no longer enough...we have to have a brand as well as an attraction point; that is, some "place" where people think "the party" is happening (alternatively not a party but for example, where stuff or news happens). I think I've come to the point where - right now - we don;t need everyone to adopt decentralized platforms like gnu social...But, i do feel if there is at least a non-trivial percentage of users who can choose to not be limited to interaction by way of silos, then i think that's a pretty good start. And who knows, maybe in the future, when there is enough to attract the casual users (as well as the tech is easier to setup and use), more folks will slip over to something decentralized, though still be able to interact with the/their communities.
Yes, I totally agree with this. We need to improve the tech, to the point of it being accessible and as good as the mainstream offerings.
The thing is also that we don't have any clear incentives to use P2P-services right now, because the silos aren't posing any clear threats to us as individuals. If we see something like a major data breach, or something like a "Snowden for social networks" that change the way we relate to these behemoths, we might just see users getting ready to give them up.
Proprietary services don't even federate with each other so why hold free software products to a higher standard? The problem isn't that they can't (often the free tools can federate with each other, which is more than the proprietary tools can do.) It's that, as you mentioned, they copy something existing and notable, so practically by definition they are already too late to be the popular thing everybody uses.
