Theo has some really interesting videos, but the more I dig into the archive the more I find little gems like this. It's the definition of a quick tip, and it helps explain Maps and Sets in JavaScript (and their advantages) way better than anything I've seen before. The video ends with a hopeful statement that the viewer can maybe think of a few times they've used Objects or Arrays where a Map or Set would have been better and oh boy, yes I can 😂

Key takeaways:

• Use a Map for any kind of "object-like" data that you need to edit, particularly if those edits include adding or removing items. The example given is a collection of Users that are themselves data objects, but a Map gives you a much quicker way to reference specific keys and modify them, or get/set users from that list.
• Use a Set for data arrays that need to be unique (Sets automatically remove duplicates) or whether you need to quickly add or delete values, as there are native functions for both of those operations that are more performant than looping through an array to find/replace/add data.
  

I've followed Jenn for some time, but somehow missed this absolutely perfect talk they gave in 2016 at XOXO Conf. The humour is fantastic; the overview of the satire Jenn has put out is super interesting; and (as with all good comedy) the messages interwoven within the presentation are much-needed (sadly). 🦎

I am a big fan of categorisation debates, so the concept of trying to define what a "blog" is (or isn't) piqued my interest. I'm glad it did, because Tracy has written a wonderfully well-thought-through post with some interesting insights. For the most part, I think it aligns with my own gut feeling on what makes a blog a blog, but I particularly liked the style of a blog post. The fact that blogs take the form of a building argument, not necessarily voicing their intent or conclusion immediately, but instead guiding the reader through the narrative to naturally arrive at that conclusion. I agree wholeheartedly with this take, but I'm not sure that this is the essence of "blog-ness". I think that's just how people actually talk when given a platform.

It strikes me as the same style as newspaper opinion pieces, and very similar to the style that many cultures evolved for public speaking (the kind of public speaking where someone stands on a literal soapbox and espouses some ideal or idea). And I think that makes sense. Blogs tend to be personal spaces (or places attempting to make themselves appear personal, as with brand/business blogs) that give a person or persons a platform, but one which they want others to consider. A conversational tone is appealing at both ends of that transaction: it makes writing the post feel less like work, and it makes reading the post more natural and friendly. I dunno, I feel like there's something there, perhaps worth mulling over further 😊

On the reality that books and blogs are not merely the medium they inhabit:

Printing off a long blog and binding it together does not necessarily a book make; for one, books are weighted towards linear reading — start to finish — while blog posts do not have to be read in the order they were originally published.

On the irritation of graphic novels being crassly categorised in public library systems (and, indeed, bookstores):

I’m a fan of graphic novels, and consider them a different medium than prose books; it pisses me off that graphic novels and graphic non-fiction are shelved with the comic strips at my library under 741.5.

On the impact that the technology of the web has on how blogs work:

hypertextual capabilities encourage authors to supplement their text with links to their own work, forming networks of connected thought, and to references on other websites and online resources

On the nature of a blog and the impact it had/has on online culture:

As a self-published work, a blog reflects the author(s)’s or editor(s)’s premise unfiltered. This direct, decentralized form of publication democratizes writing and the sharing of ideas. As more people of all backgrounds participate in the blogosphere, the culture of blogging accepts less formal, more conversational writing styles.

On the difference with social media, and particularly why comments on social timelines tend to devolve whilst blogs at least have a chance of interesting discussion:

The immediacy of the feed encourages replies in the moment, while a blog post can be saved and mulled over for later engagement.

On Tracy's conclusion about what blogging is; I particularly like the emphasis on the "body of work":

And if you zoom out from the individual blog post level, in a sense this also describes what blogs are: a contemplation on a particular theme in depth (even if that theme is “the author’s life” or “stuff I like”). A blog is a body of work.

Chris reviews their thoughts on the infamous Great Divide article, with some useful additional nuance. Also, isn't it fun to see a blog post response to a blog post 😊

On the ultimate point of the OG Great Divide article:

Since there is too much for any web developer to know, what is the most graceful and professionally acceptable way of not knowing things?

Whatever the answer is, it’s definitely not “ignore, shit on, and downplay the things you don’t know and gatekeep the things you do.”

There's been a growing backlash in certain circles to surveys like the State of JavaScript. I don't fully agree with the underlying rhetoric, and I do think that these surveys are both well-meaning and genuinely useful, if taken in context. Could they be more representative of the web? Sure, absolutely; but there will always be a reach issue, and some data is better than none.

Zach's (stealthy) entry on the topic feels like a much more valid critique. Rather than focusing on whether surveys like SoJS do enough to broaden their demographics, perhaps a better question is how useful they are for determining talking points about web culture more broadly. I often see stats from places like SoJS used to validate business decisions (the typical "we're using React because it's the most popular, see 👇") but Zach's points are more nuanced: by focusing on "JavaScript developers", these results ignore the vast majority of actual web work. In an industry still grappling with the Great Divide, is the divide a necessary evil, or something that is almost self-prophesied (an ouroboros style for loop, perhaps 😂)? I'm not sure, but Zach's words have definitely given me pause to think 🤔

On the falsehoods of considering the web (as a whole) through the lens of the State of JS survey:

This JavaScript community (if judged by the demographics of this survey) seems to be comprised mostly of folks that are largely building with React, webpack, and Jest. With React on 3.2% of web sites and jQuery at 77.7% (as of January 2023), that’s a pretty small slice of a much larger community.

On the Great Divide:

The question I keep asking though: is the divide borne from a healthy specialization of skills or a symptom of unnecessary tooling complexity?

A wonderful look into the practicalities and complexities of having an online presence. Should you have multiple domains for different purposes? How do you context switch online? And should you have to, or want to, in the first place? I like where Ana falls on these questions, and have come to similar conclusions myself. You can be wholly represented by a single domain, a single profile, a single purpose. But that sounds a little dull to me, so I choose otherwise 😉

On the central concern around having multiple domains, particularly for "web professionals":

There were times where I thought I regretted [having multiple domains/websites]. It crossed my mind that having only one domain to represent me would be the best marketing (this whole sentence is a can of worms).

If I have a professional domain to apply for jobs, does this mean that this is my unprofessional domain?

On whether you are "authentic" if you are divided (answer: yes):

But this, and I suppose this blog and my current social media activity, is indeed a true version of myself. Without any quote marks. But it is one of the many versions I have and they all have many things in common between them.

Both the photography and idea behind Written in Stone are great, but what really stood out to me here was the simple-yet-elegant design of the page. It works beautifully together, and I wanted to capture them simplicity:

I'm a big fan of the IndieWeb community, yet I've long struggled with using many of their protocols or guidelines. POSSE is one of those. I do POSSE content to a couple of platforms (though, so far, I haven't made the original "source" posts on this site public) but I do so manually, and I likely post more on those platforms natively than I engage with this system. That isn't due to any specific friction or issue, but more because I'm happier having my content distributed across multiple places. That said, since moving to Mastodon I have been toying with a "stream" domain – we'll see if I ever actually make it, though!

On the rare logic of why automation is not the answer:

I've decided I'm going to discontinue using automation in favor of manually writing posts for each of the platforms I want to post to. [...] I'd like to syndicate to more platforms and each of those have their own look, feel, and community driven norms.

On the loss of native functionality (this is something I've been thinking about a lot, and one of the key reasons I don't think I'd ever want to clone a note to multiple note platforms, e.g. Mastodon and Twitter):

Micro.blog does not support hashtags whereas on Mastodon and Twitter they are first class citizens. By POSSE-ing via this method I lose out on all of that.

Here's a fun idea: a website that tells the time, by showing you a paragraph or sentence from a piece of literature that contains it 😁 Simple, effective, and extremely fun!

Yes, it is 😉 Of course, Molly does a much better job of outlining why the Web3 experiment appears to be failing so spectacularly, and politely calls out the rest of the industry for allowing the existence of all the grifters, scammers, and criminals that have thrived within the bubble that Web3 has created.

The whole talk is an excellent summation of the work they have been doing over on Web3IsGoingGreat.

On the similarities between Web3 and the current web:

So many problems in today's web are driven by capitalistic forces, driving ruthlessly towards the enrichment of monopolistic tech companies, rather than the betterment of society. You'll have to excuse me for doubting that our utopian web dreams will be achieved through the introduction of a hyper-capitalist technology that aims to financialise everything on the web even further, and exposes user data on public ledges where it can be scraped by even more tech companies than are profiting off our data today.

Like many other folk, I've been dipping my toes back into the Fediverse and checking out Mastodon. It isn't my first rodeo in this particular ring, but somehow it does feel a little different this time. Still, having been here before, part of that difference is undoubtedly the increased level of noise and general bluster – attributes I think it is safe to look to Twitter (and that community's culture) to have added.

As a result, I found reading Hugh's post on the influx of new users really interesting. I've seen a lot of pleas to respect existing cultural norms (many of which I quite like), but it's always nice to come across a particularly well-written and thoughtful analysis of the current collision of ideas. In particular, their thoughts on the nature of content consent and sharing are really interesting. I've long thought that Mastodon's stricter rules on things like searchability were a thorn in their side, but this lens provides much greater clarity.

As I've said to many people over the last couple of weeks, Mastodon (and ilk) are not trying to replicate or clone Twitter. They want to be something new. I do think that they copied the core experience a little too much, but I still hope they are able to hold onto that uniqueness and double-down on what are a much better set of foundational principles than much of the social web.

I've also never fully considered the impact of the underlying philosophy of ActivityPub, but I can fully get behind the anarchism versus capitalism concepts that Hugh points out.

(And yes, I'm aware that there is a certain friction in reposting excerpts from an article that explicitly talks about the hostility of finding your voice shared without your consent. I have a lot of personal thoughts on where those lines stand, and the historical benefits inherent in being able to remix and share elements of culture broadly, but I did check, and Hugh's website claims a CC-BY-4 license, so I hope this note is acceptably above board 😊)

On the culture differences between Twitter and Mastodon:

The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn't think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that. The librarians wondering loudly about how this "new" social media environment could be systematically archived didn't ask anyone whether they want their fediverse posts to be captured and stored by government institutions. The academics excitedly considering how to replicate their Twitter research projects on a new corpus of "Mastodon" posts didn't seem to wonder whether we wanted to be studied by them. The people creating, publishing, and requesting public lists of Mastodon usernames for certain categories of person (journalists, academics in a particular field, climate activists...) didn't appear to have checked whether any of those people felt safe to be on a public list. They didn't appear to have considered that there are names for the sort of person who makes lists of people so others can monitor their communications. They're not nice names.

It's not entirely the Twitter people's fault. They've been taught to behave in certain ways. To chase likes and retweets/boosts. To promote themselves. To perform. All of that sort of thing is anathema to most of the people who were on Mastodon a week ago

On the impact of a cultural shift and the emotional strain that "virality" can cause for those who were not expecting (or wanting) it:

To users of corporate apps like Twitter or Instagram this may sound like boasting. Isn't "going viral" and getting big follower counts what it's all about? But to me it was something else. I struggled to understand what I was feeling, or the word to describe it. I finally realised on Monday that the word I was looking for was "traumatic".

On why features are different between the two platforms:

If the people who built the fediverse generally sought to protect users, corporate platforms like Twitter seek to control their users.

Y'know that thing where Spotify is on shuffle but refuses to play certain songs in your playlist? And you can shuffle the same playlist several times over the course of a week and it'll seem to have "favourites"? Yeah, it isn't just you; this is a real thing and it's stupid. Gabbi has put together a great video essay on why (to the best of their knowledge) this happens and provides some (frankly) common sense suggestions that I deeply hope Spotify hear, take on board, and enact.

tl;dw: Truly random shuffling is annoying, because it creates artist clusters and disjointed play styles, so Spotify binned it. But it seems that they've overengineered it in the other direction (I mean, do you remember when shuffle on Spotify would occasionally catch you off guard with a track combo that just worked but made no sense? That doesn't seem to happen anymore!), and now factor in idiotic metrics like artist popularity and how often you've listened to a track, creating a recursive loop where the algorithm consistently reinforces its own bad guesses. This shouldn't be surprising; they made the same mistake with the weekly "for you" playlists, where these slowly become more and more focused around the kind of music that (you guessed it) they had been recommending for the past couple of months. Still annoying though, and Gabbi's suggestion of keeping most of that stuff but seeding the playlist with a truly random starting point just seems so obvious to me as a fix that it's baffling how a company with the data, money, and talent that Spotify has doesn't just, y'know, do that.