#Probably because it's not compatible with new xkit

[hidoimurasaki]

Continuing after a few very stressful days...

Shima is so... Blunt sometimes. It's necessary but still... I’m

“If you want to say it’s unfair... What's happening in this country itself is unfair. While they’re saying that they don’t accept immigrant... They make hundred thousands interns and overseas students work. In this small island country, placed 4th biggest in the world. Do you know what for? So they can line up in front of a shop to buy bento at 5 in the morning. So they can get the newspapers every morning. So they can get a convenient life cheaply. So why am I alone who must feel guilty now? If you have any complaint, please tell that to the country!”

I mean... I can see why he did what he did. But having a good reason doesn’t make it right. As Shima said, 19 people got caught, possibly arrested, and Mai was fired from her job. Sacrificing those people victims of that unfair society to save his own skin and to make a statement...? Not the best course of action. In my opinion.

“SHUT UP!”

It was quite impressive in video but the screenshot just make it look funny xD But man, I really love Gen-chan acting when Shima is mad/desperate <3

I think Mizumori got scared for life xDDD

Ibuki tried to believe in Shima’s skill. Improvement! \o/ But yeah, their job is done so poking the culprit might backfire =X

Rise and shine, Itomaki!

And those pictures on the left... I think those are pictures of his kid(s)! Cute little detail!

I can’t believe I never noticed! I mean, I didn’t know what to look for but still! This is a screenshot from episode 1 btw, but we can clearly see that Itomaki has 4 children!

But yeah, I’ll never understand the reason behind the green light. Just... Why?

[otterandterrier]

So I just contacted Tumblr through the feedback option about the possibility of adding tracked tags as a native feature, since right now that XKit extension is not working. Their response about that was that the XKit team was working to make extensions compatible with the new dashboard, which I already knew, BUT they also gave me a list of the features that have already been made part of Tumblr ie that we shouldn’t need XKit for anymore. Others have probably shared it already but I thought it might still be useful to signal boost it because we’ve been asking Tumblr to listen to its users for a long time and this is a huge step in that direction. From their email:

Old Blue: Color Palettes are now on desktop. You can access them from the account menu (the little human icon at the top right of the dashboard). You can also cycle through them with ALT+P.

TagViewer: To view tags on a post, open the notes of a post and click the hashtag button in the notes dialogue.

Blacklist: Tumblr’s Tag Filtering system is just as robust. It checks both the original post and the reblog you’re viewing for any tags you’ve filtered. You can also filter keywords in addition to tags (Filtered Post Content).

Timestamps: Hover over the top right corner of a post in the dashboard. You’ll see the corner fold down, and the timestamp will appear. You can also click the three dots in the top right corner of the post.

View On Dash: Enter the blog name you’d like to view in the search bar. Clicking it in the dropdown will pop it open in the sidebar.

Soft Refresh: This is the default behavior of the new dashboard.

ReplyViewer: Replies and reblog comments now show up by default in the notes view.

Read More Now: This is the default behavior in the new dashboard.

Audio+’s “Pop Out” option: This is available for all audio posts in the new dashboard.

[cupidquinn-moved]

Switched over to Chrome because like serrrrriously, it was bad. So point of advice: Microsoft Edge is a no go for the time being on tumblr. I know, I know, Iggy why the fuck are you using any Microsoft browser? Welllll....the way I manage three different RP blogs is to sign each into a different browser. John is on Mozilla, the multi-muse is on Chromium (an open source Chrome clone), and now Harley is on real chrome. Lol. This does nip any ideas of a forth blog in the bud, since I like using browsers with New Xkit compatibility. Yes I know it’s basically broken now after one tumblr update too many, but editable reblogs and a few other important extensions still work, so. 

Speaking of xkit, idek how common knowledge it is (although I suspect it’s just a matter of it falling increasingly out of vogue given than tumblr basically broke it with the last major UI overhaul), but the New Xkit devs stopped updating it back in May. Basically they’ve just stopped and appear to have pulled the plug on xcloud, which sucks because you can’t sync your settings for if you’re transferring things to a new browser or using a new device. You can however export your settings and they will save as idek, some kinda file thingy. Whatever. I’m a layman with this shit. Point is, without logging in, you can import you settings via that file thingy. Honesty, this is only important if you’re like me and have custom tags saved for certain actions managed by xkit or your tags imputed into their quick tags extension. Idek how much longer Xkit is going to be relevant. There’s a new one that someone made that works as a browser rather than site extension, but it’s not quite as intuitive as New Xkit has been so idek, although to be fair, I think it’s made to work with the new text editor, which I refuse to use until they make me use it and frankly, it’s been over and year, yeah? I don’t think it’s going to happen.

anyway, tl:dr: tumblr is broken on Microsoft Edge, probably only temporarily, but who even knows. It’s tumblr, expect the unexpected.

[shinelikethunder]

disconnected thoughts on fandom and the indieweb

Recently I discovered the IndieWeb project, and I... think I am a lot more intrigued by it than by other Better Social Media Platform pipe dreams and decentralization projects I’ve seen? Because it’s not a monolithic platform that has to be all things to all people, or even one that has to gain a critical mass of userbase before it’s useful for anything. It’s just a bunch of people, making sites that work for them, and banging out protocols so their sites can talk to each other and hook up to the social-media hangouts du jour.

The basic idea:

- Have a personal website, preferably a personal domain name, that is the hub for your online identity and stuff. Posts, tweets, pictures, links, reading list, events, whatever you’d normally be posting to social media. You host it, you control it, you own it. You tweak it to fit your needs, no Xkit required.

- Once the original archival copy is up on your personal site, cross-post it to whatever social media sites it belongs on. You don’t have to quit your Tumblr habit, or convince your friends to quit theirs, or give up the audience you can reach on a large site.

- Use a pingbacks-on-steroids tool to collect all the responses (likes, reblogs, comments, etc) from the various sites you’ve cross-posted to. Ideally, display them at the bottom of the post back on your website.

As an idea, I like it a lot. In practice, a lot depends on what tools are already available, how useable they are, how capable you are of coding/templating/configuring to fill in the gaps, and how difficult large sites make it to push/pull from them automatically. That’s pretty much what I’m interested in exploring in the near future, for my own use if nothing else. I already have most of my Tumblr content backed up to a Wordpress install on my own shared hosting account, so I’m kinda curious see how much IndieWeb compatibility I can manage using plugins and template tweaks.

Indieweb and fandom:

As a potential tool for fandom to wean ourselves off the various hellsites we’ve inhabited over the years... okay, it’s an interesting thought. One with lots of unanswered questions, but interesting.

Lots of unanswered questions, so the rest of this is going under a cut.

- Upside: I know a lot of older fans are still nostalgic about the early blogosphere and even--heaven forfend--the Geocities days. Many things about them were shit, but the archipelago of personal fan shrines, indie blogs, having a personal site with a personal archive of your work, etc. was awesome. And the “own your own creations” ethos fits in nicely with AO3′s “we have to own the servers” philosophy.

- Enabling factor: Fandom builds and customizes stuff like crazy. Yes, including the younger generations who weren’t around for the “build it yourself” days and seem to think AO3 burst fully formed out of the forehead of a long-lost deity. What, you haven’t noticed that even on a hobbled hellsite like Tumblr, teenagers are using the relative freedom of the theme system to spontaneously rediscover all the sins of Geocities web design? (I rib with affection, as someone who definitely had a page with flaming torch gifs and a sparklecursor back in 2001.) Full, out-of-the-box, point-and-click setup is necessary to get fandom to adopt something in any decent numbers. But once we’re there, a disproportionate number of us start tinkering with anything that’s customizable, and when someone with actual coding skills comes out with a useful tool to supplement missing capabilities, it spreads like wildfire.

- Gaps and directions to expand: Indieweb principles include “scratch your own itches,” so here are my itches, which I’m going to shamelessly project onto fandom at large.

Import--needs rock solid LiveJournal-clone and Tumblr support if your site is to serve as an archive. I don’t know if there even is a working Wordpress plugin to import from LJ or Dreamwidth. The best-supported Tumblr->Wordpress importer is actually better than most standalone Tumblr backup tools, but it still mangles video posts/embeds. It’d also be cool to have import tools for AO3, Deviantart, and other major fanwork repositories.

Once your Tumblr posts are in, there's no way to automate the very first thing I’d want to do upon liberating my data from the vise-like jaws of What Tumblr Wants You To Do With Its Site: separate out posts I created, posts I added comments to, and posts I just shared via reblog. A nice addition would be the ability to copy Tumblr tags to a metadata field that’s separate from Wordpress tags--WP tags tend to be organizational, whereas on Tumblr, tags are often a sidechannel for comments that don’t propagate on reblog, thus filled with all sorts of crap.

On that note, Itch #3 is mass-organization tools. Select all posts that fit certain criteria and do a mass edit on their tags, categories, post types, or other taxonomy data. Lots of fandom folks have years or decades worth of content from various sites, making organizational tasks highly impractical to do manually. I’ve dicked around with a few Wordpress mass-edit plugins, but none of them seemed to work that well.

Not sure how well the existing backfeed tools support Tumblr notes, but for fandom to bite, the Tumblr support oughta be pretty damn slick. And the cross-posting should ideally support all the features of a native Tumblr post, because by god, we will use them, and we will notice if an expected one is missing. I can spot IFTTT cross-posts from AO3 without even reading text, and tbh my eyes usually skip right over them, unfair as that may be.

If this project extends to feed readers/aggregators, the embrace of multi-site cross-posting implies a need for deduplication. Preferably getting rid of Tumblr’s charming “barf the full post back out onto your dashboard every time someone you’re following shares/responds to it” behavior in the process. For fandom use, it’ll need a blacklist feature. And I’d love some more heavy-duty filtering, selective subscriptions (like to just one tag of a blog), creating multiple feeds based on topic or on how much firehose you want...

This may be a personal itch, but at least for personal archiving needs, I’m sick, sick, sick of the recency bias that’s eaten the internet since the first stirrings of Web 2.0. Wikis are practically the only sites that have escaped chronological organization. It would be cool to have easily-manipulated collections with non-kludgey support for series ordering, order-by-popularity, order-by-popularity with a manual bump for posts you want to highlight, hell even alphabetical ordering. None of these things are remotely unsolved problems, but they’re poorly supported on the social-media silos most people’s content lives on these days. Fandom’s suffered from this since at least the days of LiveJournal, which had the ominous beginnings of what’s since become the Tumblr Memory Hole. Relentless chronological ordering + the signal-to-noise ratio of any space with regular social interaction = greatest hits falling down the memory hole unless a community practices extensive manual cataloguing. Hell, LJ fandom did practice extensive manual cataloguing, but even within that silo, there was so much decentralization that content discovery was shit if you didn’t know the right accounts to search through. Like, fuck, at least forums bump threads to the top if they’re still active--LJ and blogs have the same "best conversation evar falls inexorably off the map as new posts are added, no matter how active it is” problem that InsideTheWeb forums did in 1999. (Anyone else remember InsideTheWeb? AKA 13-year-old me’s first experience with platform shutdown, frantic archiving attempts, and massive data loss. Fun times.) Tumblr and Twitter, meanwhile, spam you with duplicates of the original post every time someone you’re following replies to/shares it, a key component of the endless firehose of noise drowning out any attempt to hang on to the signal.

All those itches are things I could probably code myself if I got a stubborn enough bee in my bonnet, which might well happen. On the other hand, I have some deeper doubts, ones that aren’t going to get addressed by Wordpress plugins or shiny backfeed support:

The whole concept of IndieWeb fails to address (and might even worsen) what I suspect is the core dysfunction of social media. Which is the degradation of community spaces, and their replacement with a hopeless snarl where all content lives in individual accounts. There are a lot of weird effects that arise when the “social” sphere is built entirely upon the one-on-one connections created when someone subscribes to another account or gives someone else permission to view their restricted posts. Echo chambers, shame mobs, out-of-context remarks going viral, popular accounts setting off harassment storms whenever they disagree with someone, the difficulty of debunking hoaxes once they’re out in the wild... all of those are either created or made much, much worse by the lack of any reasonable, stable, shared expectation of who a post’s audience is.

Basically, if “own your content and host it on your site” also applies to your comments, interactions, etc, it starts running counter to one of the strengths of the Old Web. Which was community contexts where you explicitly weren’t posting to your own space or addressing everyone who might be looking at the main clearinghouse of all your different stuff. You were posting to the commons shared by a particular group with a particular culture and interests, not all of whom were people you’d necessarily want to follow outside that limited context, some of whom you might disagree with or dislike, but in any case you knew what audience you were broadcasting to. You knew what the conversation was, how similar conversations had gone in the past, and the reputations of all the main participants--not just the ones you yourself would subscribe to and the ones attention-grabbing enough to get shared by the people on your subscription list. And you weren’t spamming all your other acquaintances with chatter on a topic they weren’t interested in.

Shared spaces can also establish whatever social norms they need and moderate accordingly. (Plus, plurality of spaces = plurality of norms for different needs, which would solve a LOT of what’s currently ailing fandom.) Peaceable enforcement of a code of conduct, beyond the “minimum viable standard” sitewide abuse policy, is fundamentally impossible on social media, where individual muting is the closest thing you can get to moderation. That + unstable audience = any social norms that exist are so unenforceable it turns people into frothing shame-mob zealots, ratcheting up the coercive pressure on everyone the more it fails to work on the handful of unrepentant assholes who would’ve been permabanned from any self-respecting forum within a week. Moving onto personal sites with beefed up syndication/backfeed capabilities ain’t gonna fix that. Meanwhile the truly heinous dickweeds who’d ordinarily run afoul of the sitewide abuse policy will have the same capabilities, minus any risk of getting banned.

If there haven’t already been epic drama meltdowns caused by the “reply in your own space by making your own post, which includes a copy of the original post for context” model... it’s only a matter of time. You don’t even need malicious actors, just a human conflict where one party has overprotective subscribers. Or information turns out to be faulty and in need of correction. Or an argumentative type stumbles on the permalink of an acrimonious reply post that was actually resolved amicably several replies downthread. Or someone edits an apology into their controversial post and someone who’s been attacking it refuses to update their copy because tilting at strawmen is more fun. Or someone tries to make an embarrassing post go away by deletion and their co-conversationists don’t cooperate. Tumblr’s “reply by reposting in your own space and adding commentary” system already spawns endless floods of drama and misunderstanding, and that’s a system with some limits on the participants’ control, and relatively disposable accounts/identities if the shit hits the fan.

Basically, I’m all for personal websites as archives of your creations, but seriously dubious of them as archives of your interactions. Especially if the interactions aren’t well-segregated from the regular content feed that goes out to everyone who follows you. Yes, abuses of moderator power when interaction is all taking place on a site the mod controls are a thing. But if those sites are an archipelago of indie spaces rather than a monolithic platform, shitty mods don’t thwart the development of a healthy social ecosystem, they just drive everyone away to a competing space whose mod sucks less.

(Private/access-restricted archives of your interactions might be a compromise? You still have your stuff in case the other site goes down, but it’s not out there replicating the ill effects of the Tumblr reblog-to-respond model.)

Leaving aside all that, the IndieAuth component--using personal sites as stable identities you can log in with--is just as workable for community platforms as it is for cross-blog commenting. Proliferation of unlinkable accounts was one of the downfalls of forums, after all. That said, one potential point of friction is that fandom is far more pseudonym-centric than the devs and tech hobbyists who’ve coalesced around IndieWeb so far. But stable pseuds with years of reputation behind them have social effects that resemble real names more than anything else, so as potential culture clashes go, I’d hope that’s fairly surmountable.

As noted in the musings on LiveJournal archiving above: CONTENT DISCOVERY IS A BITCH IN DECENTRALIZED COMMUNITIES and that’s a major stumbling block for fandom. OTOH, platform-agnostic protocols with customization potential = room for experimentation with independently-run discovery/search/tagging layers. (Life goals: stay uncool enough that my “Like Uber, but for ___” elevator pitch ends up being “It’s like Technorati, but for fanfiction of Kirk drilling Spock.”)

Okay, that’s it, jesus christ it’s time for me to go to bed.