i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line.
It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
I was in college during the peak of AIM and it was useful to know who was at their computer or not, which I believe was still viable. Around meal times, we could quickly scan for who was around to see if they wanted to head down to the cafeteria. If they weren’t around, there was no point it asking. For time sensitive messages, online status matters.
Nowadays the status is completely meaningless. It's a small dot that doesn't accurately reflect your status, and if you choose to set a message, most of the apps hide it anyway.
Dude beat me to it on Skype, I called him just out of the blue and had a nice conversation with him, lived in Denmark as I recall. Really friendly guy. I can't imagine doing that now though, let alone the person on the other end actually picking up.
I have multiple friend groups on whatsapp - i just check them once in a while to see if anything interesting was posted. All the chat apps I'm on are muted and the mute is muted again to make sure.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
It sucks.
Spontaneous, innocent chit chat is dead, both online and offline because everyone’s hustling now.
The other more obviously negative components tired/overwhelmed are more of a hangover effect people have after over indulgence. But they’re addicted so ultimately always go back for more (most people).
It’s weird for me to witness as I never indulged in social media and could always see it for what it is. I watched my wife use and just classified it as a huge waste of time (and had some not so fun, “get off your phone” conversations along the way). Some people are finally coming around to it but a lot of damage has been done and a lot of social fabric has eroded.
Just my hunch, but post student life, I think many people are not actually using the internet regularly the way you describe. Only a small percentage of people are doing productive tasks, it’s mostly leisurely consumption
Seeking novelty and fulfillment from scrolling vertically are all individually and collectively patterns, including notifications.
Creating is different than consuming when it comes to screens. Separating consuming onto a separate consuming device physically helps.
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.
The most minute of barriers requiring you to deliberately and consciously join and leave...
Not exactly the same as your idea, but definitely in the same vein of "only available under a certain condition"
Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?
Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.
People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.
Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.
A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.
Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.
I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.
I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".
Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
Deaf people need this.
I'm going to take this idea for my partner to use to get my attention if needed. Having it tie into Home Assistant is a win for me as well.
/s
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
To me, not having any sensory disabilities, that’s a lower cognitive load than banners or other text/icon-based notifications.
It's a shame that our phones are becoming more and more voracious surveillance devices without the common courtesy of doing things that are helpful for the user.
While the trackball was understandably nixed in later models (though it was still useful for fine control!), its notification feature is dearly missed.
Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
Here's what I am thinking. You sign in It asks you what you want to do And at what time (hour) in another column and (date) in another column And then it asks you the location
And then we can have a contact-me: which could lead to discord or signal. Or, if you aren't comfortable sharing that info, then you could have a shareable link that you can share with anyone and then they can write their email or whatever and you would get live notifications through mail or whatever platform you decided.
Lemme know if we are on the same page?
EDIT: I have created a mvp but like, the problem is that it's just a form y'know and I just created something where you would input in this information and it would give html and then you can host it and using https://formsubmit.co/ you can use it. Though I guess one of the issues is that you have to validate each form in formsubmit (not good for ephemeral forms) and I guess it also shows email but there's a way to hide it too.
Also, I guess the problems aren't of forms but of discoverability. How do you make people discover your forms but I guess one way could be of having a list of all your forms or just the current ones that you want to show (IDK?) on github pages for example and then you could just share the github pages link to anyone or just have it in a about me section of most messengers?
Also.. Maybe then if you wanted to rather share it to anybody you could create a additional place where anybody can share their forms/such website. But I am not sure if what I've all said is the best user experience.
I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think
Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively
EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it
Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis
Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
Good times.
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
It's interesting how opensource Zulip[1] hasn't been able to garner as much of a following or usage amongst the gamer crowd compared to Discord.
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
There’s a line between baking a cake and building a wedding cake where it stops being about the ingredients and starts being about the desired form. https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake
It’s in that context where building software makes sense. You need to link a bunch of different components together to make a greater whole.
The problem isn't one of technical definitions, it's one of performative definitions.
I am technically an Online Communications Solutions Integration Architect, and also a guy posting on an internet forum.
I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.
Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
This was surprising to me – is this typical of most Discord users (primarily desktop users over mobile)?
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
dangus•3d ago
dandano•3d ago
xyst•6h ago
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…