Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    10Ā·
    17 days ago

    a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deploymentā€™s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles

    ā€¦but WriteFreelyā€™s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I donā€™t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.

    we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job thatā€™d pull main every time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WFā€™s frontend? itā€™s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty unique

    the pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and itā€™ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web

    the downsides are again, itā€™s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emailsā€¦ but itā€™ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic??? also I donā€™t like the editing experience), and itā€™s not really what Iā€™d consider federated ā€” it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but itā€™s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites wonā€™t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread itā€™s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I havenā€™t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.

    this definitely wonā€™t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?