Round, not purple

Recently, I got an email response to my previous post that contained advice "get as offline as possible". Somehow this simple and probably obvious idea made me think, and I came to the conclusion that I have been holding many things completely wrong.

Weight of the world

Since the day I parted with Debian, I have been lamenting about being forced to use so-called "modern" tools, that required graphical web-browser and running untrusted JavaScript to poorly solve problems I already had solved with my command line setup. GitHub instead of cgit, ssh, mailing lists and debbugs; Discourse instead of mailing lists; Matrix, Discord instead of IRC and mailing lists. You see, mailing lists can do almost everything.

No doubt, graphical web-browsers and JavaScript suck, but until this moment I failed to pinpoint the most significant problem with these "modern" tools -- they don't support offline work. They don't support asynchronous work.

Back then at Debian, almost everything -- bug reports, design discussions -- was done via email. I had a nice workflow when I would download email at morning and work my way through my inbox with little to no need to access anything else. I would draft responses, save interesting stuff into separate folder and, crucially, only send these drafts next morning.

Don't get me wrong, "debian-devel" is no paradise and people can be infuriating, but this process gave me time to cool down and edit (or sometimes just discard) my response. Don't type angry, you know.

Not the case with GitHub and Discourse. When something happens, like somebody reviews your pull request or mentions you in some thread, you get an notification. After you click on it, it is marked as viewed and gets lost in the list of old notifications. GitHub does some rudimentary support for unread-read-done states, but it is pathetic compared to flexibility of proper email management system like mmh.

http://marmaro.de/prog/mmh

What is even more important, you don't have option to save the notification and its context (e.g full story of the issue) offline to think about it and act upon. Instead, you are pressured into acting upon the notification instantly, probably context-switching between the terminal and the browser, while being exposed to all distractions.

Probably GitHub has financial incentives to be like that, but also it follows the trend. People are used to these incessant interruptions, conditioned by the social media. That is how they expect things to be. Annoying, but familiar. And I guess that would be the reasoning for non-profit Free Software projects that happen to care about user adoption. You don't want to be a weirdo like SourceHut, right?

https://git.sr.ht

So what this realization means for me (and hopefully, it will be useful for somebody else), is that I was fighting for the wrong goals. I was trying to maximize amount of stuff that I can do from /dev/tty, in reality I should have minimized amount of time with "ifconfig up".