What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance.
Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!
My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.
This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale.
This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere.
But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they could have invented the co-op mass farm but the risks were too great - there was not a trade system globally that could guarantee delivery of food stuff X and so it was sensible to not focus your own production on food stuff Y but to grow a little of everything.
I think what we are seeing here is Mastodon etc as the response to the risks of centralised but efficient servers - privacy, ads, government monitoring etc.
That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.
Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search.
When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results.
For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago.
If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing.
BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance.
The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it.
Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition.
It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you.
My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.
I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money.
It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?
So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places.
Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be possible for almost all services, at least in an ideal world), but you won't be able to do much in life without trusting at least someone along the way.
Because big data is valuable and little data is generally not, admins of small instances have little incentive to dig into the DB.
Because humans are moderating the small instances, they can do a better job than AI moderators, albeit with more work.
Moving from one Mastodon instance to another taking follows and followers is quite easy. Admins usually announce plans to close with enough time for people to make the move.
Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.
This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not.
That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.
I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.
I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.
I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server.
I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter.
Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.
> I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server
I don't think that's a desirable goal. It's up to individual services to host centralized forums and deal with the ensuing moderation issues.
I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to.
But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had.
As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.
Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?"
A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency.
In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals.
It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.)
- - - -
As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.
I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease of use a critical mass of users won't be possible so it won't ever be anything other than a niche product.
Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.
Yeah, people are using it. Infosec.exchange and fosstodon.org are pretty busy now. I’m on a smaller instance (but still like 10K users) called ioc.exchange and that’s pretty good too (obviously they all link to each other, but I’ve found it is good to be on a server with a fairly interesting ‘local’ feed to have a look through when not much is happening with the people you follow).
I’m in Australia and a lot of people have moved from Twitter to a server called aus.social, so if I was going to tell friends or relatives to get on Mastodon I wouldn’t probably direct them to sign up to that specific Mastodon server, not just say “you should use Mastodon” and then expect them to work it out. That one has a lot more rules than the infosec ones though.
The concept of federation is definitely complicated for most people. Even I dont completely understand the intricacies despite running a mastodon instance myself (link in profile).
However, you can have large general purpose instances which do not have to depend on federation to deliver the value of a network like twitter. Additionally, mastodon itself has grown by leaps and bounds in making the UX easier for the average user familiar to twitter/facebook.
I think its only a question of time before you have large general purpose mastodon instances where users dont have to grapple with federation and the UX becomes familiar for the layman. But at the same time there is space for smaller community focussed instances if someone wants to take their tribe with them.
I think the answer a few weeks ago was ‘no’, but that’s changing. At this point most of the people I followed on Twitter have migrated. Now, I followed mostly tech people, lawyers, and cat and bird photo twitters; someone who uses twitter to follow celebrities may have a different experience. (I do also get the impression that Irish twitter moved maybe quicker that most twitter quasi-communities)
If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening.
Quoting someone sad
Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt
Author here. I did not go into this, but it really is a problem that I, and most of my fellow hobby beekeepers undercharge. That we don't count our hours into the price means that the few Beekeepers who do it professionally, have a hard time charging proper prices.
So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....
I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well.
For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit.
As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker.
Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.
Everyone who knows that a technology where decentralization is one of the requirements will know this, and they will also know that this is a required tradeoff when it comes to decentralization - no free lunch.
A lot of people skewer blockchain-based tech for ineffeciency, but not a lot of those people realize it's supposed to be like that.
I'm glad that people are at least starting to realize that a lot of decentralized tech has the prerequisite of forfeiting efficiency.
Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want.
vs.
Write twitter.
I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha)
Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over. Cascade issues are fixable. the end result is proven achievable (see telcos and the SMS systems that cover the world, global scale federated messaging exists and works!)
Won't this just end up in the situation that the far right stays on Parler and the far left goes to Mastodon? Sounds like Twitter will end up a happier place without the extremists.
> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...)
This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic.
There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Mastodon or its forks. The author mentions these other pieces of software later, but pulling them them as "some part of mastodon" is at best a misnomer.
That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned.
At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it.
Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse?
Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API.
So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct?
Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes.
You are right. But I deliberately kept this simple. I know I'm technically incorrect. My initial version had a whole paragraph on this. Then I moved it to a footnote. Then scrapped it entirely.
It matters exactly nothing for the point of the post. It's entirely irrelevant for the story.
I know that "technically correct is the best kind of correct". And you are technically entirely correct here. But it still doesn't matter.
I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.
[+] [-] uneekname|3 years ago|reply
Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!
[+] [-] Kiro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phpisthebest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|3 years ago|reply
This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere.
But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they could have invented the co-op mass farm but the risks were too great - there was not a trade system globally that could guarantee delivery of food stuff X and so it was sensible to not focus your own production on food stuff Y but to grow a little of everything.
I think what we are seeing here is Mastodon etc as the response to the risks of centralised but efficient servers - privacy, ads, government monitoring etc.
[+] [-] thrown_22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|3 years ago|reply
When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results.
For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago.
If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing.
BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance. The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it.
Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition.
It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you.
My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.
[+] [-] irusensei|3 years ago|reply
It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?
[+] [-] CM30|3 years ago|reply
Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be possible for almost all services, at least in an ideal world), but you won't be able to do much in life without trusting at least someone along the way.
[+] [-] kornhole|3 years ago|reply
Because humans are moderating the small instances, they can do a better job than AI moderators, albeit with more work.
Moving from one Mastodon instance to another taking follows and followers is quite easy. Admins usually announce plans to close with enough time for people to make the move.
[+] [-] ImaCake|3 years ago|reply
Mastodon at least is not trying to shove politics and celebrities down my throat.
[+] [-] HollowEyes|3 years ago|reply
It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station.
The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much.
Who moderates offshore content?
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
I learned this from this talk:
A New HOPE (2022): ActivityPub Four Years Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fedi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciCz83t70
Which notably is a recent talk (July) but was given before the recent influx.
[+] [-] csande17|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|3 years ago|reply
That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.
[+] [-] dustedcodes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnarn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mlindner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.
[+] [-] Kinrany|3 years ago|reply
I don't think that's a desirable goal. It's up to individual services to host centralized forums and deal with the ensuing moderation issues.
[+] [-] molly0|3 years ago|reply
The same people I follow on Twitter I follow on Mastodon and I feel they are being more honest on Mastodon. This might not be true.
[+] [-] dotnet00|3 years ago|reply
But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had.
As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.
[+] [-] guerrilla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|3 years ago|reply
A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency.
In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals.
It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.)
- - - -
As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.
[+] [-] peterweyand|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andreyk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|3 years ago|reply
I’m in Australia and a lot of people have moved from Twitter to a server called aus.social, so if I was going to tell friends or relatives to get on Mastodon I wouldn’t probably direct them to sign up to that specific Mastodon server, not just say “you should use Mastodon” and then expect them to work it out. That one has a lot more rules than the infosec ones though.
[+] [-] bhoops|3 years ago|reply
However, you can have large general purpose instances which do not have to depend on federation to deliver the value of a network like twitter. Additionally, mastodon itself has grown by leaps and bounds in making the UX easier for the average user familiar to twitter/facebook.
I think its only a question of time before you have large general purpose mastodon instances where users dont have to grapple with federation and the UX becomes familiar for the layman. But at the same time there is space for smaller community focussed instances if someone wants to take their tribe with them.
[+] [-] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wruza|3 years ago|reply
Quoting someone sad
Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt
I hope they can handle it well.
[+] [-] imagineerschool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbrgn|3 years ago|reply
Locally made honey (i.e. not from South America) in Switzerland usually costs significantly more than 10€ :)
[+] [-] berkes|3 years ago|reply
So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....
[+] [-] ahMath8|3 years ago|reply
I don’t get to goto work and engineer essentially the same product 2007 engineered.
It’s a rehash of a rehash of an idea that will become another social landfill.
Really looking forward to the technology equivalent of another Star Wars or Batman trilogy!
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well.
For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit.
As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker.
Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.
[+] [-] VonGuard|3 years ago|reply
Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub.
[+] [-] anotherrandom|3 years ago|reply
Everyone who knows that a technology where decentralization is one of the requirements will know this, and they will also know that this is a required tradeoff when it comes to decentralization - no free lunch.
A lot of people skewer blockchain-based tech for ineffeciency, but not a lot of those people realize it's supposed to be like that.
I'm glad that people are at least starting to realize that a lot of decentralized tech has the prerequisite of forfeiting efficiency.
[+] [-] its-summertime|3 years ago|reply
Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want.
vs.
Write twitter.
I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha)
Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over. Cascade issues are fixable. the end result is proven achievable (see telcos and the SMS systems that cover the world, global scale federated messaging exists and works!)
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] supermatt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlindner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overlisted|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoe-krk|3 years ago|reply
This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic.
There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Mastodon or its forks. The author mentions these other pieces of software later, but pulling them them as "some part of mastodon" is at best a misnomer.
And it's been written about countless times already. See https://bofh.social/notice/APTBaDyBOOvNAzaeqO for a relatively fresh list.
[+] [-] xg15|3 years ago|reply
At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it.
Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse?
Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API.
So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct?
Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes.
[1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-...
[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520
[+] [-] berkes|3 years ago|reply
It matters exactly nothing for the point of the post. It's entirely irrelevant for the story.
I know that "technically correct is the best kind of correct". And you are technically entirely correct here. But it still doesn't matter.
[+] [-] pvg|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] doener|3 years ago|reply