I guess, as a bit of additional response, I should also mention that I’ve thought about doing this as a JSON format rather than as CSS.

Here’s a look at the JSON format we’ve been using for Multiverse box styles.

{
    "header": {
        "color": "#6B1173FF",
        "back": "#B6B5A8A5"
    },
    "main": {
        "fill": {
            "type": "Solid",
            "color": "#FAE9FF00",
            "back": "#FFFFFFF2",
            "direction": "vertical"
        },
        "border": {
            "color": "#000000",
            "style": "none",
            "radius": 0
        },
        "shadow": {
            "type": "None",
            "color": "#B6B5A8A5",
            "style": "plain"
        },
        "highlight": {
            "type": "None",
            "style": "plain"
        },
        "text": {
            "font": {
                "family": "Roboto"
            },
            "fill": {
                "type": "Solid",
                "color": "#6B1173FF"
            }
        }
    },
    "title": {
        "fill": {
            "type": "Solid",
            "color": "#FAFAFA00"
        },
        "border": {
            "color": "#2DC0A6FF",
            "style": "dotted_1px",
            "radius": 0
        },
        "shadow": {
            "type": "None",
            "style": "plain"
        },
        "highlight": {
            "type": "None",
            "style": "plain"
        },
        "text": {
            "font": {
                "family": "Red Rose"
            },
            "fill": {
                "type": "Solid",
                "color": "#17C27FFF"
            }
        }
    }
}

For fonts, we could keep an expanded list of font names that are supported - or at least a kind of registry - just like browsers already understand Verdana, Arial, Courier, etc.

So perhaps this paired with a font registry format would do the trick. I don’t have a strong preference tho - and am just throwing this out there.

This then means that there has to be some thought put into the UI about letting an author privilege certain edges other people have applied, while still allowing discovery of that persons wrong opinions about accents.

I personally would just moderate contributions that show up - sure that means that I end up with a queue and conversation isn’t real-time that way. But that’s a fine tradeoff I think. And if you want real-time, you can make unmoderated additions monochromatic or something to set them apart.

In a federated world, I wouldn’t want to publish stuff if I don’t know what it is - and sifting through all that stuff and hand-selecting the good stuff is key effort that I think we have to get used to.

You can decide how to shape it all.

I mean the other way of doing this is like the public self-modelers did. They just gave each other direct access to each other’s wikis and trusted each other to take care of it. That worked really well.

Oh! You should also check out everything2. They’ve been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. I bet there’s some good nodes about this.^[2]

paragraph based, not an outliner

Yes yeah.

I also think whostyles - the concept for this came from Sphygmus’ wiki - show some promise. At least let people style some part of their post colors, fonts, outlines. This could be done successfully on Reddit - though perhaps they would limit the color palettes and font choices if they didn’t want readability to suffer.

Not really sure the answer to all of this. But thanks for the thoughtful comment!

The more vital role of ‘importances’ is to move things out of view that are less… important to me. I wonder: how many follows do you have? Because I am keeping hundreds around. To have each tag on a single page would be death-defying!

Sphygmus:
About having the real-time/daily/weekly/etc all in one feed - all of my (12) feeds are set to real-time, not because I care about having them checked very often (some I might set to daily or weekly, theoretically) but because I want them all visible in that view. Given that I can set everything to real-time and not have it impact performance with only twelve feeds, though, I’ve just ignored the whole dealio.

So perhaps this is an issue with how someone uses Fraidycat when they have fewer follows? Perhaps I should make the ‘importances’ links disappear if you only have ‘Real-time’ follows under a given tab?

Perhaps detaching the concepts of “importance” and “how often the program checks the feed” would help? As it is now, importance as a way of sub-sectioning tags seems to be mixed in with the idea of “how often do I care about the feed for this being checked” and those seem like two different things to me.

I want to avoid making things more complex - and I am curious if the problem here is a terminology problem. I’m considering changing the names of the importances to something less time-concrete.

Like this:

This way the focus isn’t so much on time - but on actual ‘importance’. Do I need this thing close at hand, on my front page? Or do I just need it tucked away, saved for another time?

On the front page:

My point is that I want some things hidden. And behind a single-click has been useful for me. I struggle to think of a better way.

Perhaps the issue is that I am eager to read a lot of people. So I take on stuff of all kinds of quality. Maybe you both already have a high bar for what you will follow? Part of the point of Fraidycat was to allow me to lower my bar. I can now follow more things because they don’t create noise for me. I need them out of view until I’m sure that they are really important to me.

I will probably do a livestream soon so that I can chat and work some of these things out in conversation. Think about it - I would love to try to understand where you’re coming from more clearly.

Thank you to both of you for your suggestions and for even trying this tool out! I’m also going to tag Eli’s post, as one who has also been offering suggestions as well.

Chris:
We’re being trained to dip our toes into a rapidly flowing river and not focus on deeper ideas and thoughts or reflect on longer pieces further back in our history.

Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless.

This is absolutely what we’re trying to figure out too, in our own way. Here’s a summary of what this group (the ‘public self-modelers’) is doing:

• Cross-wiki chats get compiled and placed in permanent pages so that they can be referred back to and built upon.
• Each individual works on writing master pages for specific concepts (Find The Others has been a topic that we’ve fleshed out together) or even for specific people (such as h0p3’s page on Sphygmus or my page on h0p3.) These personal pages are just good fun - a reminder that the point of our conversation isn’t just to explore a topic, but to get to know each other and goof around.
• Because conversations and chats span months and months (compared to a Twitter thread, which may last only a few days,) even the ‘ephemeral’ threads are pretty solid, because a lot of thinking and back-and-forth have gone into them.
• Since we’re not using a rigid protocol (like ActivityPub or microformats,) we can shape the conversation however we want. (For example, at one point we decided to start using each other’s colors when quoting - I think this was Sphygmus’ idea - so we worked on ‘whostyles’ - you can see them on my Hypertext%20%20 page. So we don’t really care about protocols. We care about messing with the hypertext. They’ve each done a lot of work tweaking their wikis. So there’s an aesthetic component.) So we’re not just work on permanent writing - but long-term design/art projects, too.

People seem very focused on technological solutions to online communication (ActivityPub, Indieweb, this absurd BlueSky idea), but the hyperconversation approach is trying to prove that the problem is a human problem. If you read and listen to each other and try to respond thoughfully and carefully - and try to find your own style and wee innovations along the way - you start to feel like you don’t need anything more complicated than a TiddlyWiki!

That’s been a very stunning realization for me. (As I’ve been an Indieweb zealot as well, of course.) Thank you for your curiosity and for your excellent blog and for your work on improving the Web! You are one of the main writers that I feel has been keeping the Web healthy. You connect a lot of people, Chris. That’s human work.

There was once an online forum that I was on where people just loathed me. Almost everyone in my life knows about this - because the forum had a lot of real-life friends - and everyone on the forum had little 64x64 pixel avatars. And there was this one popular user that had an avatar of a little kid’s face - I guess it was kind of iconic within this group. And I started using the avatar as my avatar - and it came to knives. It was rough - because I did it for many weeks and people hated it because they would think it was this other person posting when it was just me and my shit. People were messaging me “I will cut you” or gtfo and I really enjoyed it - but the forum eventually died and now we’re here talking to each other instead.

Things have changed for me since some of my surrounding family members have died - a number of people my age and four children. And this has also led to me meeting other people who have had to go through accidents with multiple deaths. That side of my life eclipses whatever is happening online - I just come here to play and escape. So maybe that helps explain my perspective - the problems of Reddit, imageboards and so on just seem like virtual play by comparison. But it’s much more than that - I just appreciate being alive for today and getting to write you a letter. Every day I feel grateful to breathe and be on this world with whoever happens to be here. So yeah - especially you too!^[1]

a realization like this; that the current internet was sick, nothing like it was in my youth

This is a fun description, it’s very true. I don’t think there’s any curing the sickness - life outside the Internet is sick in its own way. I think I like the idea of directories because it doesn’t go head-to-head with Google. I don’t like waging head-on war against the enemy. It’s too straightforward and just seems naive. It alerts the enemy.

I like directories because they’re surreptitious. You’d never notice them. I really think subterfuge and peaceful, lulling work can defeat anything. I’m not saying that directories will win - they’re a total longshot, of course - and head-on attacks have the advantage of alerting your allies, too.

The “post-searchengine era” has suddenly implanted itself in my brain, like a mind virus (you just lost the Game). If we are to collect hyperlinks, to build a directory of directories or a web of links like Indra’s Net, we could transcend the search engine altogether. The idea of stealing google’s power from right under their noses makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I was anti-search when I started getting into directories. But this fragment of a conversation with this guy Brad changed my mind a bit. Maybe it’s just that we need balance or something between directories and search. (Like how TiddlyWiki itself is a balance between directories and search.) So I guess you’re right - thinking “post-searchengine era” sets a course that way.

Brad is also starting an old-school forum to talk about directories if you’re interested. Maybe my question for you wikifolk is - it could be enough to just say “my whole wiki is a directory” - but what could a more finely curated directory look like in TiddlyWiki?

And what’s more, do you have recommendations for “churn” type websites (places with lots of new content I can check daily) that aren’t so cancerous? I experiment with RSS and stuff, but the new content just isn’t forthcoming. I’m forced to look at what Pocket recommends in my phone’s Firefox or to trawl HN for interesting things to read.

Yeah, I should write some thoughts about this - because I have some specific recommendations for link-hunting in 2019 that I think everyone should know. But it also mainly comes down to just surfing. I have a big page of links that list rabbitholes that I haven’t fully explored yet - I usually just pick back up there. (Like - if you just started at philosopher.life and branched outward from there, who knows where you’d end up. Like really - you’re going to find a lot more of the web from that approach than searching on Google for, say, “cool links” or something. Or typing three random words into Google.^[2])

I’m still learning how to get around the 2019 web tho. Might be a matter of finding good shit and then working backwards.

Hey, with the group chat - I have a page of ‘springboard’ type prompts that I can throw out at first, but I have a feeling that there’s enough unresolved discussion between us all that I think it’ll reel out of control no probs.

Always honored to hyperchat, chamy. (oh hey - I’m not saavy to the origins of ‘chameleon’ as a nick for you - but it haaaas to do something with the face, right? Triangle head, circle eyes, straight line mouth? Slurpy lil face.)

it’s hard to go back and read my writing. like gurl, why you gotta be so, so, so! oof! I didn’t know what I was doing! I don’t know what I’m doing now, either, but I have a better sense of the direction I’m heading. I will bring your gracious benefit of the doubt to myself: a year ago this was new, and different, and vulnerable, and as a tiny seedling my perspective was different than my current perspective as a slightly taller sapling.

Well and I feel like you’re hiding less of your tiddlers now? Or is that you’re crafting more public ones? Just like I have /all, you have your layers, too, I guess.

I’m grateful that our early interactions led to me adding a more private layer - but I’m also glad for those messages between us simply because I got to know you better. Takes a lot of foot-mouth-putting and shredded past-talking notes to get there - with anyone. Your voice has become a lot more familiar to me over time - it is a voice that sounds colorfully creative but with a sensitive longing.

I was definitely worried about you disappearing at one point. But now I just see that you were in a phase of building your wiki. Seeing that I fall into those phases, too, I think we’re alike in that way. So I just feel a kinship now.

I don’t think there’s anyone who I’m more interested to hear their ideas or impressions about Fraidycat than you. I think your organizational and visual improvements to Tiddlywiki are second to none. But I also think it will take time to understand organizing at the Fraidycat meta-level. I would pay a lot of dollars to see what a Sphygmus remix would look like tho.

Perhaps these words would be different if I had drafted them in private — I don’t think I can say for sure, this time. I’ve wobbled back and forth as the deadline of my publish script approaches — will I take the private tag off and let it roll through, tonight? Or will I keep it tucked away just a little longer?

While I realize that what ends up at sphygm.us is somehow trimmed, I didn’t know how - and was about to ask you, when I realized that pearl/publish and pearl/crontab are right there! It’s lovely that I can use your wiki to research you in this way. (Your publish script removes tiddlers tagged private and goes off at 8:20 GMT — the sphygm.us last-modified header right now says 8:25. So you write against a deadline each day - although I doubt you race to meet it - as you say: keep it tucked away, anticipation rather than haste.)

It’s so cool that you have a self-designed publishing system setup for yourself. I wonder what it’d be like if a podcast or a video blog ran in this way. The thought is kind of cool - of a wiki of audio files, some in ‘draft’ form or comprised of disparate fragments.

Give me the OG Godslayer & Return of the Fallen, plus Realms Unraveled (with the multi-factions) and I’d be perfectly happy!

Don’t know why the OG doesn’t grab me. I’ll try again. I think I thought Mechana was too strong there. I feel like you have to go Mechana or you’re lost. And I like to go Void.

I’m with you on multi-factions. I love the flip cards, too. And the weird stuff: like the one demon that lets you bring other demons into your deck and use them as power.

As for the rest — I’m afraid I don’t know how to mock you — neither can I replicate the kind jesting you and Ivan gift to h0p3.

I have a unibrow - so that’s an easy target. I also conceal my feelings too much and come off as aloof or condescending. So it helps when people trim me down - I have a sister who just always tells me to fuck off and sometimes slaps me in the face to get me to come down. (She is the best, she’s able to full-on slap me when the time for it is ripe.) Anyone in the room will tell you it’s absolutely necessary.

I also touch people too much in the pool. I don’t know - my inhibitions come down and I start grabbing people too much. This isn’t as much of a problem between you and I right now - but if we end up in a Roblox virtual spa one of these days - hopefully not, but just be aware.

I also have these terribly graphic and deplorable dreams that could only have been concocted by the worst kind of debased mental state. This isn’t the worst of them: but I once had a dream that I was murdering people, just going house-to-house stabbing people in their homes and throwing the knives in trashcans when I was done with them. The next day when I went to work, someone said to me, “Hey, I had this crazy dream last night where you were going around murdering people!” This chilled me to the bone! What’s that supposed to mean??

I’m often drawn into the trap of wishing my online correspondence would manifest itself offline; I fancifully dream of us sitting together on couches in a comfortably lit room, drinks of choice in hand, full bandwidth engaged.

I have no doubt that I would love to meet you. And the others, too. There was once a guy online who asked me in IRC where I lived and I told him. So he drove out here and we met at a bowling alley and ate at the diner attached to it. It was very unexpected, but a very fond memory. I think he had a habit of roving around to drop in on people.

However, I’ve also had some negative experiences - not anything too invasive, just unwanted attention - and so I resolved to lay lower, just keep online things separate. But it might just be that the uptight side of me needs a slap in the face again.

what’s left? I think this is left, this being-together-in-quietness, the park bench, and here is where the conversation might pause for a while and pick right back up in a month or a year. (well, also, it feels a little silly to chat about things that are just chilling in my wiki. it’s both a blessing and a curse — idk, blargle!)

Oh, my mom always played that song when I was a kid. She kind of had a mocking way about it - like the old friends were just way too cute about it. She would sing it when people were too cute about being BFFs. But I still think it’s great - I have an old friend coming in a week and we’ll take a walk for hours next to the train tracks - it’ll be too cute just like that. I’ll have to sing that when we’re walking just to ruin the mood.

I’ll have to think more about video. Right now I’m feeling like it’s a crutch and I shouldn’t betray hypertext in that way. But then, I’ve written too long again and now wish I could experience a video of your thoughts and meanderings - wish I could see you do the ‘warm space’ website thing and tour us through your stuff…

So I know what it means to want more info - completely natural.

One of the reasons your tool has an advantage over other services which might attempt to build such an overlay is that the user themselves run it on their own machines.

Yes, I think this is such an advantage of decentralization in this case. It’s like a spirit animal that sits by your side and no one knows it’s there. It really is ‘yours’ in the sense that it exists completely within your personal machine and also doesn’t encroach on your autonomy - it literally should only do what you tell it to. It must be austere and loyal in that way.

[…] WeeChat, Trillian, and Pidgin […] MLDonkey and Bitcomet […]

I used a lot of this software, too - yeah, you’re right, I’ve pulled some inspiration from there! Glad to be a part of that lineage.

The problem is that I need the networks to play well in some sense - I at least need to have access to scrape HTML fragments. But these networks will always fight back against that. We have to accept that. Fraidycat will need to be incredibly resilient and aggressive - like Stuxnet or like PRISM.

When you think about it, though, it’s ridiculous that this needs to be done. It’s insane! Civilian counterops.

It’s rad that you took the time to vocalize your angle. I need to internalize this, because there is further direction and understanding in this. I don’t fully understand what I’m doing - I absolutely thirst for these sick angles from other fields of view.

UUUUUHHHPDATE: Just saw Le Reddit Log. Holy shit - you are a madman. Buggin out over here.

Damn man oh man - not sure I’m ready for this!!