Tim ChambersHard to overstate how important this news is. #Threads
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon
cc: @fediversenews
Sami Juvonen@tchambers @fediversenews I already experienced the September That Never Ended. Bring it on.
Too bad our client software filtering and blocking capabilities are far far below what could be done in Usenet clients back in the day.
What are the most important missing elements you see, Sami?
@tchambers @fediversenews I’ve been meaning to do a dive into news readers of old, because the conceptual overlap between usenet and fediverse is interesting (to me).
Admittedly it’s been some time, but I remember newsreader killfiles (reminder to not let engineers name things) being able to express things like “I don’t want to see Mallory’s responses to Zach when the subject line mentions horses, unless it’s about horsepower measurements”. Or kill [sic] any mention of Elon Musk unless it’s accompanied by the words spacex or indictment, and if the latter, boost it to the top of my feed.
Now we’re just blocking words wholesale like some bronze age peasants.
Kevin Davidson@sjuvonen @tchambers @fediversenews My favourite, by far, was Gnus, which supported very flexible post scoring, adding or decreasing weight based on different properties of the post. Highly scored articles stood out, low scored ones vanished. Much better than killfiles or ungainly muting of keywords.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Scoring.html
@MetalSamurai @tchambers @fediversenews Yeah Gnus is really in a class of its own. Also using it meant dedicating your life to it to the extent of using it for email and anything else you could look from a certain angle as an NNTP feed.
@sjuvonen @tchambers @fediversenews Yes. I used it for email as well. Had it all integrated with my contacts in BBDB and syncing to my Palm Pilot. Out there somewhere in an elisp archive is my code to automate PGP signing and encryption for known contacts when emailing via Gnus.