Vicinus

What is Catadon:

Catodon is open source software for building federated communities

Catodon is a fork of Sharkey, but with many features ported from Firefish, and some new ones! Its target is to provide a smoother, more comprehensible UX - so terminology is simplified and made more descriptive, and several features of Misskey/Sharkey that were not widely used or not federated were removed from the frontend. There is also an attempt to make the design more minimal wherever possible - see the redesigned posting form for example. One of the main design goals is to make something more user-friendly, where you can invite your friends and they can adjust easily.

Please join our Matrix space at #catodon-space:matrix.org for direct communication! Feedback and code reviews are much appreciated.

Main differences from Sharkey:

• A new, rounder look!
• You can follow hashtags and words in you Home timeline, by adding Custom feeds (Antennas) to Home
• You can integrate GIF search for your users through Klipy
• Improved notifications: Added a “mark all as read” button to the Notifications widget, there is a highlighted divider between new and old notifications, and they are marked read easier when you view them, so that you no longer need to use the “mark all as read” button as much. You can also see a list of who reacted in grouped reaction notifications
• Threads in timelines (imported from Firefish), greatly decluttering timelines for longer threads
• Users now have the choice to link to external media (including GIFs) without permanently saving them to their Storage, using a new dedicated cache - allows admins to provide less permanent storage space per user, keeping server resources under control
• There is a global, admin-definable cap to the cache for remote files, so that you no longer need to manually delete it regularly
• Different/simpler terminology so that new users can understand what everything means more easily
• Decluttered buttons under posts: Like/Reaction (merged), Reply, Repost/Quote (merged)
• Deprecated/removed from the frontend the gamifying or local only/not widely used features: Channels, Achievements, Gallery, Clips, Games, Chat, Play
• Redesigned left sidebar. Much fewer items in the Navigation Bar, which now expands/collapses with a button. The profile picture now acts as a direct link to your profile, as it’s separated from the account menu that sits under it
• Fewer timelines, no hardcoded links in the header menu - everything is a timeline
• “Accounts timeline” based on the “Following” page, but upgraded to a timeline with columns scrolling independently and a search bar
• The local timeline now takes the server’s short name, adding a unique touch to your community
• Custom feeds and Lists are in their own dedicated timeline
• More filters in timelines and Lists - you can now view your following accounts’ replies to others (or only to accounts you also follow) in Home, choose between Following and Mutual followers, and include the public posts from your server in Home (covering the functionality of the deprecated “Social” timeline)
• Post area is now clickable everywhere, not only over the text area
• You can view all reactions together under a post in detailed post view (added “All” tab). You can also see the total number of replies+subreplies next to the number of direct replies, showing instantly how deep the discussion under a post goes
• Redesigned posting form with buttons in more practical positions - also the collapsed posting form at the top of timelines takes up half the space the old one did
• The posting form autoexpands as you write longer posts - imported from Firefish
• Autocomplete also shows results for names of users - you no longer need to remember the exact username to mention or DM someone
• You can disable sign-in emails by deactivating sign-in notifications
• You can now close the alt text window over images, which can make parts of them hard to see/read, by clicking on it
• Much better key navigation - both with h/j/k/l and arrows. Focus is more often where you expect it to be, so that you can key nav instantly when opening a page. You can also swipe through timelines on desktop with left/right
• Countless bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements!

Only server i found: https://catodon.rocks/

I didn’t see it and can’t find it now. Can you point me to it?

Edit: Found it. Small print at the bottom, time: 1:50.

That was unexpectedly pretty great.

No worries.

I had to click the “Expand to Continue Reading” tab/button to see the rest of the article. Don’t use reader mode too often, so I’m not sure if it is a common issue you have to worry about, hopefully not.

Remainder:

People who were most impressed by corporate BS were unsurprisingly also more likely to see their leaders as “visionary.” (All they need to be impressed is a hail of random buzzwords, after all.) They were also more likely to be satisfied at work. But this contentment came at a cost. They also performed worse on the various tests of cognitive and work performance.

Here’s how Cornell Chronicle summed up the results: “Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by ‘visionary’ corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.”

Don’t let your company get buried in empty jargon

Confirming that lovers of corporate BS are often not the sharpest operators at the office might cause a little mean-spirited glee among jargon haters. It is satisfying to have scientific confirmation that the people who annoy you might not actually be all that bright.

But once you stop cackling wickedly, the study actually flags up a serious concern for business leaders. These results highlight how BS can snowball as those who are impressed by empty rhetoric admire, hire, and promote like-minded bloviators.

“Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell warns. The end result is a corporate BS death spiral.

How to fight back against corporate BS

Imprecise, empty language leads to unclear communication and bad decision making. The results are often not funny at all. So what should leaders do if they see a tendency toward corporate BS beginning to creep into their companies? When I asked Littrell, he offered several suggestions.

First, forget trying to ban BS. It won’t work.

“Unfortunately, bullshit and bullshitting are unavoidable. It’s just part of human behavior, especially in competitive environments,” Littrell explains. Technical jargon used appropriately can be useful, he also points out, further complicating the idea of issuing a blanket jargon ban.

Instead, it is “more productive to focus efforts on rewarding ‘anti-bullshit’ behavior,” he continues. This means making “communicating with clarity” a company norm and modeling clear communication from the top.

“If senior executives communicate in ‘bullshitty’ ways, then everyone else will too,” Littrell warns. “They should normalize clearly defining their terms, focus on shorter, to-the-point sentences, and resist using ambiguous buzzwords.” Rather than announce you are “focusing on our strategic realignment,” say “here’s what we’ll start doing differently on Monday.”

Finally, reward people for asking questions. “Publicly praise good-faith attempts at clarification (e.g., ‘Thanks! That’s a great question. Let me rephrase this in a clearer way …’),” Littrell says. When performance review time rolls around, make sure to explicitly credit employees for things like “communicating clearly,” “flagging empty claims,” and “turning ambiguity into actionable plans.”

If all else fails, leaders may need to force employees to speak plainly through the use of “anti-BS templates that force company-wide messaging into straightforward concrete claims (what is true/what will change), observable metrics (how will we know if X works?), and specific timelines,” he concludes.

The corporate BS receptivity scale isn’t ready for prime time

What you probably should not do as a leader is use Littell’s “corporate bullshit receptivity scale” to evaluate candidates or employees. At least not yet.

“The scale is a promising tool for researchers, but it’s not quite ready yet to be used as a high-stakes screening instrument by private companies,” Littrell clarifies. “We still need to investigate it more robustly first.”

While we’re waiting for a miracle tool that can detect and blast away meaningless jargon, this study offers a helpful step forward in the battle against corporate BS. First, it confirms what many of us have long suspected. High-falutin’ words are generally not a sign of high performance. Quite the opposite. They can also be catching.

That means leaders need to be vigilant against the spread of corporate BS and take decisive action to root it out when they start to see it spread.

Filtered out: Slam, slams, slammed.

Removes a lot of non-news “news” posts.