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Code Issues 14 Releases Wiki Activity

Anti-virality

merge-requests/30/head
Bob Mottram 2022-11-12 18:23:03 +00:00
parent 189857c76f
commit 9be1bd1577
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@ -66,6 +66,16 @@ number of large servers. Also, in spite of the prevailing great
obsession with scale, not everything needs to. You can federate with a
small number of servers for a particular purpose - such as running a
club or hackspace - and that’s ok.</p>
<p><a
href="https://uxdesign.cc/mastodon-is-antiviral-design-42f090ab8d51?gi=9baf6195c60b">Anti-virality</a>
is a common design approach in the fediverse, and Epicyon also follows
this convention by having chronological timelines and avoiding lists of
trending things or ranking profiles by numbers of followers. Recent
hashtags are presented <em>in alphabetical order</em> to avoid any
frequency bias. Typically if a post gets more than ten likes then its
count will only show as <em>“10+”</em>, to try to avoid getting fixated
upon making numbers go up at the expense of more considered forms of
interaction.</p>
<p>It is hardly possible to visit many sites on the web without your
browser loading and running a large amount of javascript. Epicyon takes
a minimalist approach where its web interface only uses <a

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@ -33,6 +33,8 @@ Servers such as [Mastodon](https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon) are well known,
Epicyon is part of the [small web](https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web) category of internet software, in that it is intended to scale via federation rather than to scale vertically via resource intensive and expensive hardware. Think many small communicating nodes rather than a small number of large servers. Also, in spite of the prevailing great obsession with scale, not everything needs to. You can federate with a small number of servers for a particular purpose - such as running a club or hackspace - and that's ok.
[Anti-virality](https://uxdesign.cc/mastodon-is-antiviral-design-42f090ab8d51?gi=9baf6195c60b) is a common design approach in the fediverse, and Epicyon also follows this convention by having chronological timelines and avoiding lists of trending things or ranking profiles by numbers of followers. Recent hashtags are presented *in alphabetical order* to avoid any frequency bias. Typically if a post gets more than ten likes then its count will only show as *"10+"*, to try to avoid getting fixated upon making numbers go up at the expense of more considered forms of interaction.
It is hardly possible to visit many sites on the web without your browser loading and running a large amount of javascript. Epicyon takes a minimalist approach where its web interface only uses [HTML](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage) and [CSS](https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html). You can disable javascript, or use a browser which doesn't have javascript capability, and the user experience is unchanged. Lack of javascript also rules out a large area of potential attack surface.
Another common concern is being able to keep instances running. Instance abandonment creates a lot of disruption, and it's often related to the amount of effort that it takes to keep things going. To avoid the maintenance burden becoming prohibitive, Epicyon is implemented in a simple manner with very few dependencies and no database. All data is just files in a directory, and upgrades are also straightforward. This degree of simplicity runs counter to the current trend within the software industry towards complex frameworks and large scale databases with elaborate and rapidly evolving dependencies.