Five Links #39
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot about Ivory, a Mastodon (and fediverse) iOS app from the makers of the now-defunct Tweetbot Twitter app.
I suspected the hype might be overblown, but I was wrong. It’s brilliant and – for the first time – my Mastodon timeline feels alive in a way that Twitter used to.
Who knew that design could have such a positive impact on user experience? 😄
All this to say: if you’ve tried Mastodon and found it difficult to get to grips with, try it again with Ivory. It’s brilliant.
Absorbing
Five links for your inbox from this week.
1. User interview and follow up cheatsheet
I haven’t got much experience in conducting user interviews, but this cheatsheet from Stéphanie Walter makes the prospect a lot less intimidating. There are plenty of incredibly reasonably priced user interview/research resources in the shop, too.
2. HaveIBeenTrained
HaveIBeenTrained lets artists search the datasets behind models like Stable Diffusion “for links to their work and flag them for removal. We partner with Laion, who built these datasets, to remove those links. This helps ensure that future models will not be trained with work that has been opted out.”
3. OpenAI/ChatGPT pays content moderators less than $2/hr
Who would have thought that a copyright-infringment-as-a-service company would outsource content moderation in the most Facebook-like manner possible.
4. Mastodon link preview
“Tweets look really good when you send them in Messages on iOS/macOS. Mastodon posts… don’t.” This tool fixes that.
5. 21 small thoughts (and counting?) about information architecture
A great set of takeaways on information architecture in this post.
Projects + other things
- Back in September, the studio I’d been building over the last couple of years took an unplanned hiatus. I threw together a one-page site to represent me as an independent freelancer once again. I’ve given this some tweaks over the last week or so to talk about my process, ethics and a few other things.
- My Unoffice Hours are available every other Wednesday. Next slot: 8th February.
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If you come across a link/app you think might be of interest to other people on this list, hit reply and let me know.
Until next time,
Dave