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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 9:44 PM

    So, much like I rail about decisions to copy the designs of the social media platforms we’re trying to avoid here in our voidspace, why are we continuing to copy the software development platforms of the corporations we loathe the output from? Why build our communal efforts around their craptastic profit maximalist worldview?

    Slow the fuck down. Make small useful things in small groups. Things that build on other small useful things built by small groups. Release it and then start thinking about what’s going to go into the next version, if there needs to be a next version. Keep an eye on what folks are saying in case you need to issue a hotfix. Stop dribbling out every little tweak and idea you have and look to having a shared, cohesive, comprehensible vision for what correct looks like for your software instead. Then take the time to make it correct. You’ll be happier, your users will be happier, I’d be willing to bet on it.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 9:50 PM

    I am not immune to propaganda. I have not walked this talk, I have consorted with mine enemy. But that’s what a lot of our collective folk wisdom we call “best practices” is, it’s propaganda. It presumes an agenda that is not yours nor mine. As such, it’s utility for our purposes should be considered suspect, and we should examine our assumptions and biases across the full breadth of our computering experiences if we want to build better environments for ourselves. At least I think so.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:10 PM

    I’ll give you a real-world example of the sort of assumptions I’m talking about.

    Andrew and I have a pre-alpha prototype for a wander-and-collect mobile game as a web app. The kind of game Niantic made, the difference being that our goal is not data collection and collation but “give people an excuse to get out and walk around a particular area and have some fun doing it”. We made doing data collection at all a non-goal. Any data we have to collect we have to be responsible for. We want to have to take as little responsibility as we can get away with. So, collect minimal data, minimal data to secure.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:13 PM

    We need a way to differentiate between two different players in order to be able to keep track of the state of the game for any given player - for instance, if you encounter a cryptid we probably want to be able to show you that on some sort of statistics panel in the game, people love that shit. So we need to know who you are to log into the game, so we’re going to need to store some sort of username in a database or use someone else’s authentication. I’m not convinced there’s anyone else’s authentication I want to promote enough to use it a la “sign in with <whatever>” so username in our database it is.

    Could be any old username you put in - we’re not allowing for player-to-player in-game contact, at all, zero, so we don’t even have to worry about what your username will look like to other people - they’ll never see it. But probably don’t want people just guessing your username and letting them play against your game state. Passwords are the common thing and we can do passwords, but forgotten passwords happen and we’ll need a way to do that out-of-band, which means email, so might as well make email address the username; now we have to safely store email addresses and passwords, but we can do so and take responsibility for that. And we can hold ourselves accountable for not using those email addresses for anything other than password resets.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:16 PM

    We sat and discussed the pros and cons of this very common, not out of the ordinary authentication system we were proposing to ourselves for multiple hours over a period of multiple days. Just the two of us, making sure we were examining all the implications of taking on the holding of someone’s email address. And it was valuable! It absolutely refined our approach to the game itself to examine exactly what we wanted to be doing and how we wanted to be doing it.

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  • DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-labdjsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:18 PM

    It’s easy to say “okay, what parts do we need, who knows the names of things that provide those parts, how much glue this gonna take, let’s hit it and quit it” but it’s often more productive to take the time to figure it out the long way, if your definition of productive isn’t profit driven.

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  • Andrew (making toys)ajroach42@retro.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:28 PM

    @djsundog I have gone back on the username requirement, even. Sometimes I think we could get away without it by generating a device ID and allowing people to export/import that in place of login.

    The problem with this approach is that you can lose access to your account in an unrecoverable way, but that might be okay!

    I am no longer convinced we need a username.

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