January 5th, 2021
- convo w Michael Ashcroft & visakanv
- V > talking about what people are doing wrong is what people are doing wrong
- V > Malcolm were you the one who sent me The Fifth Discipline? y
- lots of stuff there that resonates with Friendly Ambitious Nerd
- V > this tweet
- I think you can do better, in terms of stickiness
- I've been trying to do the same thing for me
- we're doing complementary things
- researching cultural institutions
- the further you zoom in on history of progress, the spikier it gets
- the big question: how do you make a scene? / a Golden Age
- capital, academia, open culture
- me: building cultural institutions on the internet
- people playing long games
- Mal > I think V you're trying to get 10s of thousands of people to be more friendly
- V > cities outlast empires
- Mal > if you've a date in Constantiople, she will be waiting in Istanbul
- so many people so despondent
- V > my partner knows she married a visionary
- marrying a guy who is burdened with trying to create a world that doesn't exist
- idea of having a ritual for people leaving jobs
- Mich > what are we inviting people to?
- V > increase in freedom, chaos
- re self-trust
- evolved into Trailblazer
- built API-first
- and noticed it completely changed the way you thought about things depending on which client app you used
- A > tinder for tabs was one of our first experiments
- M > how'd it go?
- A > we didn't really go forward with it...
- we were still trying to figure out what we were
- we were in an accelerator
- couldn't make an adequate biz case for the Roam-like thing
- existing tabs are like, having a bunch of dishes but you can only put them on the dining table or the kitchen counter... no drawers or shelves or cupboards or whatever
- M > people can't see their own frame
- and equivalently, nobody is questioning the basic premise of tabs
- lots of tab-managers
- A > resigned emotions
- thinking about the word "fragment"
- A > I aggressively use mission-control on mac to manage spaces
- each space has a thumbnail
- then I use workona to pull open each of those work contexts
- and the browser workspace is a workspace
- and now it feels like I don't have most of the issues you're talking about re tabs
- though still issues around research etc
- I'm wanting to make a Swift thing to integrate this right into the desktop
- (huh, I'm realizing I could maybe do a GNOME plugin for this)
- remaining things for browser-qua-browser
- scratch stuff
- looking up weather, movie-theater closing
- researching stuff
- fits with trail-based workflows
- M > what about twitter?
- do you have the issues I'm talking about in Designing a better browser\workflow for Twitter & more?
- A > me going into deep convos on twitter has been relatively rare until recently
- I do get tab explosions from that
- A > how do you use twitter?
- M > eg here's a tab that's open...
- I'd like it to kind of fullscreen until I either decide to reply (in which case I may want to access other tabs to thread) or decide not to reply
- I don't want to have it kind of nebulously there, for the most part
- A > model of
- directed vs undirected search
- directed = a specific question, eg "what's a volt?"
- undirected = random pings to the universe, like twitter replies
- M > instapaper & pocket are like Designing a better browser\workflow for Twitter & more but for the non-interactive web
- consume-only
- A > time & context-shifting interactive stream/thread-based content
- M > also similar is like, the mode where email clients show you the next email after you archive, instead of going back to whole inbox
- removes a ton of choice
- A > seems like you maybe want to have a viewer that then has some more opinionated buttons than "like"
- eg "reply but not right now"
- M > let's keep talking, and maybe collab on doing workspace mgmt plugins
- mutual inspiration, you on macOS, me on GNOME
- A > awesome, yeah, I want to switch to linux sooner or later as well
- intention: a long coworking call sometime in February