Travis Briggs

Musician. Programmer (Wikipedia/Big Tech). Digital Gardener. Atheist. Life, the Universe, and Everything. Toots auto-delete after 90 days. I'm audiodude pretty much everywhere, including at gmail.com

pronouns: he/him
github: https://github.com/audiodude
garden: https://travisbriggs.com
band: https://dangerthirdrail.com

Last Notes

2026-07-10 15:48:11 UTC

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Ah crap, GNOME? I signed up, but I use Cinnamon.

2026-06-30 19:44:23 UTC

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Also decentralization kind of sucks? Like federation == good, but I currently message like 40 friends across 7 or 8 different messaging apps, with a bunch of overlap. That sucks. Everyone who does this knows it sucks.
I would be much happier with something centralized. But I guess it's that people don't want to have their "World's colliding" moment (George from Seinfeld). Aka, they want to be a geek in the githubs, and a freak on the mastos. Or something.

2026-06-30 19:40:43 UTC

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> a great technology
I would call it "a great concept". A site with profiles of real people that let you share and message and interact with your friends.
I don't think there's any particular specialized technology statck required for that.
And yes The Algorithm is the boogeyman of anyone who spends time on social media (including YouTube and TikTok and whatever). But it's not one big scary thing. And the awful, user-hostile, enshittified product choices are what really amplify it. I don't cling tightly to "chronological timeline". I think it's okay to have An Algorithm that suggests things.
It's the product that sucks. It's the lack of choice in Suggested v Chronological timeline. It's the Twitter thing that blue checks bubble to the top of the feed.
If you take The Algorithm to include every design and product choice, then I think we agree 😂

2026-06-30 18:48:28 UTC

I'm not saying that mainstream social media is a bad product. And I'm not saying it rots people's brains.
I'm saying that it's a bad product AND it rots people's brains!
#socialmedia #facebook #instagram #linkedin

2026-06-14 03:36:33 UTC

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I know this is about writing, but it applies to songs I publish too.
> The biggest pushback I hear from writers is: “But my website doesn’t have an audience! Substack does.”
Right, that's what I thought about Soundcloud in 2008. I will post EVERYTHING there, I will put all my eggs in one basket. It will be my sole home for all of my music.
Guess what? Those "adjacent" views never came. I was never recommended, I was never featured. I was another anonymous blip on their radar of vaccuuming up all of the "content" (don't get me started on that term) that real people put so much effort into and Soundcloud could give 2 shits about.
My music never had an audience, and Soundcloud didn't solve that problem in ANY WAY.
But of course in 2015, suddenly "Your plan has run out of quota. Click here to upgrade and keep uploading songs".
So I said fuck it, I reclaimed my digital sovereignty, and I built https://songs.travisbriggs.com. I also worked on a project called Rainfall to help others do this.

2026-05-03 08:08:18 UTC

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I would pay $9 for the convenience and the consistency of the quality and preparation.
People don't eat fast food because it's tasty or cheap, they eat it because it's conveniently everywhere and a "known quantity". It's brand loyalty, and Starbucks certainly will "get away with this".

2026-01-17 18:13:12 UTC

“May the earth be gentle with those who were denied gentleness in this life.”
https://missionlocal.org/2026/01/dead-unhoused-homeless-san-francisco-memorial
#SanFrancisco #homelessness #unhoused #compassion #grace #mercy

2025-12-24 21:09:05 UTC

For fifty years the narrative around obesity has been "Oh no, we're not body shaming you! It's just so unhealthy to be overweight. It's a public health crisis, it's a medical issue!"
But now suddenly now that GLP-1s like Ozempic are available, using them is "cheating", it's a "shortcut".
If obesity is a medical issue, what's wrong with treating it with, you know, medicine? Or was it about something else all along?

2025-08-17 04:43:44 UTC

I'm just not sure of the value of moving off GitHub in favor of FOSS web apps. Self hosting a web app is so much more complicated than installing a FOSS application/binary. Something like Gitea/Forgejo is like "here's a free engine, now you have a car!". No I have an engine, I have to obtain and assemble and pay for the rest of the car myself
#github #foss #SelfHosting #gitea #forgejo

2025-02-09 01:45:31 UTC

"Our Silicon Valley thought leaders and mavericks need unprecedented injections of capital in order to… do internet piracy and conquer a new frontier in cheating on your homework?"
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/court-documents-show-not-only-did-meta-torrent-terabytes-of-pirated-books-to-train-ai-models-employees-wouldnt-stop-emailing-each-other-about-it-torrenting-from-a-corporate-laptop-doesnt-feel-right/
#AI #LLMs #piracy #SiliconValley #ethics

2025-01-02 03:19:32 UTC

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I agree completely, and I was happy to take it even further by creating a "digital garden":
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
Complete with my own interpretations of the "principles of digital gardening":
https://travisbriggs.com/garden/digital-gardening-principles/

2024-11-13 19:07:22 UTC

Rainfall v1.4 is released! (https://rainfall.dev)
This is a *HUGE* milestone for the app: You can now deploy your site to Netlify (https://netlify.com), where it will be hosted for free, using an OAuth integration! No need to manually upload your ZIP!
Rainfall is a Bandcamp exodus tool that lets you upload your music and create a static site using the lovely Faircamp (https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/). You can download this site as a ZIP and host it anywhere on the web.
You can read some of the rationale behind why I built this here: https://travisbriggs.com/garden/bandcamp/
The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/audiodude/rainfall
All feedback is welcome!
#bandcamp #exodus #alternative #foss #opensource #music #artists #faircamp #rainfall
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/477/191/459/555/913/original/351be483b4846ffc.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/477/205/050/257/581/original/32b9ae31102c4647.png

2024-11-03 03:42:19 UTC

I would like to shake hands with the man or woman or nonbinary person who can tell the difference between Michelob Ultra and Bud Light.

2024-08-09 16:26:55 UTC

OMG! My first PR for Mastodon has been merged!!
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26910
ICYMI, this fixes a really big (IMO) problem where, by default, you don't see replies from everyone when viewing a thread. More details in my design doc here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YpdrZVTrk-yt0GpnSxuDybYvFQOA0B-IfkELBYNwSOg/edit
My sincere hope is that this helps with redundant responses and "dogpiling" because hopefully people will be more aware that they're not seeing the whole conversation, and will click through to see that the comment they're about to add has already been added.
🥳
#mastodon #dev #foss