I believe I have finally manifested the Drafts interpretation of Winders users’ dreams.

If you still follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen me posting a lot of mockups and links related to Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, lately. I know it probably seems like a phase – and I suppose it is, technically – but I’ve actually been using this darned application for the entirety of my adult life. It’s just that I’ve only recently (read: since 2020 or so) returned to Drafts as my primary text living space from Bear for what I’m sure you’ll regard as silly reasons. In terms of themes for Drafts, I’ve already hit you with one based on this very blog and “Windows Iowa” – both of which have faired far better than I would’ve ever expected on the Drafts Directory.

Now, though, I would like to present “Windows Eternal” – a celebratory theme of ye olde Winders™ Aesthetic, based on one of my very favorite themes for Telegram Messenger for iOS.

Telegram Theme

I’m actually not sure what it was called originally, but I’ve archived the Telegram theme as Windows Eternal, too.

If you or someone you know might remember who the original creator was, please do get in touch because they absolutely deserve to be credited here and elsewhere.

Details

If you’re interested, the full source of Windows Eternal is publicly available, though I would recommend using the “Open in Theme Builder” button on its Drafts Directory page to view the details visually, especially if you’re a Drafts user who’s never tried it. You’ll note that I made heavy use of #327c7d (that darkish green color) as often as possible along with #bfc0c1 (the main gray) and #000DA6 (the main bright blue.)

• Drafts Directory Link
• GitHub Issue
• Source
• Tilde (More screenshots)
• Telegram Theme

#software #configuration

Other Destinations

• Telegram

• Telegraph

• Current Song to Song.Link to Clipboard to Safari

• Wake Up Weather Spoken Aloud

• Audio File to Base64 Text

• Make Audio of Article Body

• Marco!

• Apple News to Safari

• Capture to Drafts

• Collect References

• Scrub URL

• MusicHarbor Artist List

• Overcast Show Notes to Drafts

• Overcast Show Notes to Markdown

• Overcast Show Notes to Bear

• Capture Web Page in Markdown

• Custom Text Image

• They/Them

• App Store Marketing Tools

• David Blue

• Audio Element Embed

• Speedy Frames

• Mastodon Share

• Make Audio of Document Text

• Mastgur

• Reminders Backup

• Siri Shortcuts for Scrubs (Library Links)

• Safari Tabs Jar

• Noir Configuration Utility

• What's wrong with Spotify?

• Safari Tabs Archive

• Sleep Now (macOS)

• Siri Speech Synthesis (MacOS)

• BIG WORDLE 

• Title Case

• Data Jar List

• Spy Kids 3 Spam (macOS)

• @blue’s RoutineHub Library

• DavodTime

• Action Directory

• Restore Safari Tabs

• BIG WORDLE

• Spy Kids 3 Spam

• Clipboard to Telegram Message

• Seek Telegram Message by ID

• Holy Bible Spam

• URL List to Telegram

• File/App Icon Extractor (macOS)

• Last Trip Average Speed (mph)

• Clean URLS

• TrippleTap Reminder

• Paste to Clipboard

• Holy Bible Spam (macOS)

• Paul

• LookUp Collection to Clipboard

• Capture Web Page to Drafts (macOS)

• Paste to Apple Note

• Twitter Jail

• Clipboard to Mastodon

• Post to Write.as Blog (macOS)

• Safari Tabs List to Drafts

• Paste to Jar

• Make Bear Notes from RSS Feed

• List .md Drafts Open Links by Tag

• cowsay

• Links List to Bear Notes

My new Twitter Jail Siri Shortcut marks a milestone in Social Foolery.

I graduated high school in 2012. Back then, TweetDeck was still a standalone desktop client[^1] that allowed one to post with just the ENTER or return key. I'd made it part of the Drywall Prime Directive to generally keep @ihadtopee in Twitter Jail as much as possible, which meant pounding my way into it ASAP, daily. This was often my very first task upon returning home from school. All memories – much less computing memories – are quite obscured from that era, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was spending a cumulative 45 minutes every school day punishing the fuck out of my first flat generation w/keypad Apple Keyboard to TweetDeck in Windows 7.

Who's up grinding?

— T W I T T E R JAIL (@TWlTTER_JAIL) June 24, 2016

It's not that automating Tweets wasn't possible in that era – I'd been posting WHEN IM COMIN DINE IN MY FOREIGN AND IM ROLLIN ONE DEEP THAT SHOULD TELL YA BOUT ME across all my social accounts every morning at 0610 since Freshman year via IFTT (now IFTTT) – but doing so at any sustained rate required actual knowledge.

Today, even an rube like myself can whip up a Siri Shortcut capable of jailing a user account in less than four minutes from nill – what appears to be a statically-set rate limit of 310 Tweets in that time. Mind you, we're talking about entirely on-device processing here, and – in case you weren't aware – the device I'm referring to is my fucking cellular phone.

Twitter Jail technically requires three apps – two of which are ridiculously small, 100% Apple cross-platform, and entirely free – and the third represents simply the most refined and delightful means anyone has ever interacted with The Bird Site.

Requirements

• Actions – Free across all platforms and just 3.3mb to download!
• Tweetbot (You might also try Aviary if you absolutely cannot bring yourself to pay a subscription fee, ever.)
• Data Jar (More or less optional.)

Upon installation, you'll be asked 1.) to set the default number of repeats (Tweets) per run. Obviously, I'd recommend ~310 to optimize your jailing. 2.) To specify which Tweetbot-authenticated user account you'd like to get jailed, and 3.) which “key path” (jar) you'd like to store the URLs of said Tweets in. The third is almost certainly useless and entirely optional (just delete the Data Jar action,) but... you never know when... you might need... those URLs.

Depending on your device (to some extent, I'd imagine,) proceeding to run the shortcut shouldn't take long. It randomly generates 91 characters text from a string (which you should also feel empowered to customize/add to,) Tweets them from your specified account, and stores the URLs of those Tweets in the jar you may or may not have specified.

You might expect me to express envy of any youths reading, but I absolutely feel none. All I can do is encourage you to fucking try Mastodon for God's sake and your own.

Update: macOS Version Published

I’ve created a macOS version of Twitter Jail which also requires the Actions app but substitutes Aviary for Tweetbot given the former’s native Siri Shortcuts action does not require the app to open for each Tweet.

[1] It's actually still available from various sources – including the Mac App Store – but has fallen way, way out of support.

#automation #software #configuration

A Drafts Action Group for interacting with WebDAV-enabled sites.

Thanks to recent learning, I have managed to manifest one of my alltime fantasy integrations: I have tied Drafts and NeoCities together directly via my NeoCities Action Group, which uses Drafts' native WebDAV support to (technically) interact with any website based on the protocol. I created it largely to interact with NeoCities over iOS, but frankly I was already doing so more effectively than the Action Group will ever offer with the iOS app Koder. It’s odd and a bit out of support, but incredibly useful and supported all the way back to iOS 9. Unfortunately, many of its functions – like deleting remote files, for instance – will result in a crash on modern devices. Also unfortunate – I’m afraid my Action Group doesn’t offer solutions to these problems. On iOS, it’s limited in function to pushing files to your WebDAV server and then opening them in a web browser.

It wasn't as simple as HTML encoding the [draft] content with percentage signs, either. In order to produce satisfactory results, I had to wrap every output in a very custom HTML template which I would very much encourage you to personalize before using (considering especially that it includes my personalized footer links and colors.) You can view that template in full here. To be honest, I can’t quite recall where I found the original, but it was probably either included with a native Drafts action or found among Stephen Millard’s TAD library.

The most reliable means of identifying, pushing, and retrieving a draft from a WebDAV site (that I found, anyway,) is by using its Universally unique identifier (UUID) in its pathname. An apt example: the draft I’m currently whittling on, enumerated 7247282E-340B-4890-A2F7-0481AF31321E. The action above – Draft to /drafts as UUID.html – will push the contents of your current draft to /drafts/the Draft’s UUID.html. (That's how I created the example.)

I've done my best to color code the actions based on the potential “severity” of their result, but the way they display will depend almost entirely on which particular Drafts theme you're using at the moment. Nevertheless, blue/green indicate the “safest” actions – like the ones that simply open a link to a draft you've already pushed – and yellow/orange/red actions involve pushing/manipulating files at the root of your site.

Below is the full documentation of each of the actions (and the separators, even,) including individual install links, though I would very much recommend you install the whole bit. You'll need to edit each action and replace davidblue.wtf with your own URL(s) unless you'd like to try and attempt my absolutely gargantuan NeoCities password.

NeoCities Action Group

Root

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 69B625EC-D9E2-41B7-9767-3532666E7C97
Description:

Push Draft to Root as HTML

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: 383-keyhole
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 81C89DC8-F26E-4644-87D7-BF454B345C24
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file by the draft’s safe_title.

Draft to Root as UUID.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: binary
Colour: yellow
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: ABAA6A02-806F-4B45-BEA6-E9D5F8D32236
Description:
Push the current draft to the root directory as an HTML file titled by its UUID.

Draft to Root as Text Timestamp

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: alarm
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: EFF08ADA-81B6-49C3-B132-5DB477A95685
Description:
Push the current draft to the root directory as a .txt file titled by timestamp.

Draft to /{title} as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: indent
Colour: red
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 15401CFC-114E-429C-B747-054E19C46911
Description:
Push the current draft to /NeoCities as index.html

Open /{title}

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 34630C90-6180-4394-A296-C2A5018DFEFB
Description:
Open /drafts/[Current Draft UUID].html.

/path

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 6F0BE49F-3B6F-49AF-ABA7-04BA7F437C1A
Description:

Push Draft to /drafts as HTML

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: 383-keyhole
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 34A59A1C-95A8-42A9-9C23-677E9731EFC8
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file by the draft’s safe_title.

Draft to /drafts as UUID.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: binary
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 9C9FCDA8-687C-475A-8213-A8185CEFEE4D
Description:
Push the current draft to the /drafts directory as an HTML file titled by its UUID.

Open pushed /drafts file by UUID.

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: BADE45C1-AEC4-46A6-B4BE-7B88B2357C04
Description:
Open /drafts/[Current Draft UUID].html.

Draft to /drafts/{title} as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: indent
Colour: violet
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 5555699A-B3A6-432D-9A20-ECA78F6A5D88
Description:
Push the current draft to drafts/NeoCities as index.html

Open /drafts/{title}

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: idea
Colour: green
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 1E5CB9D6-B8FE-4934-8AEC-E795A651C45A
Description:
Open /drafts/{title}

Draft to Specified Path as index.html

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: signs-alt
Colour: orange
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 2
Unique ID: A7D5BE00-36D3-4E08-9058-7923571189AA
Description:
Push Draft to specified directory as index.html.

/[input]/index.html

Misc

Type: Separator Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon:
Colour: none
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 0
Unique ID: 06296787-B9EE-4759-9B9C-5F994CAA894A
Description:

Push clipboard .txt to clipboard/timestamp

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: clipboard-content
Colour: blue
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 98AF9E4B-1D48-4F95-8D2D-C879FE16BE40
Description:
Push contents of the clipboard to the /clipboard directory as a .txt file.

Open NeoCities Workspace

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut: ⇧⌃N
Icon: cat-face
Colour: gray
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 1
Unique ID: 4B8E95CE-F6A3-4F53-88CB-B01C8398A990
Description:
Open workspace entitled “NeoCities.”

NeoCities list / (macOS-Only)

Type: Action
Keyboard Shortcut:
Icon: directions-merge
Colour: gray
Confirm to Run: false
Notifications: All
Log Level: All
Number of Steps: 2
Unique ID: 898038F4-E5E4-4BDA-B15A-D2ED2D388D82
Description:
Calls a shortcut entitled “NeoCitiesRoot” with a Run Shell Script action containing the following:

neocities list /

Can only be run on macOS and requires the NeoCities CLI.

#software #configuration #automation

Earlier this afternoon, I put out an ask on Twitter regarding how to use JavaScript to create a native Drafts Action for Zalgo Text. Delightfully, tagging @draftsapp in that post paid off, for just a bit ago, Greg – Drafts’ sole creator and guardian – actually replied with a link to an action he’d just posted called “Zalgos.”

N̡̥̬̆͏͊҉̷̧̧o҉̗͖̣ͨ̽͝͏͗̀̿̕t̡̰͢ t͋o̬̟̙ h̲̲̹̓̑ͨạ̸̧̡̨ͯ̋̊r̶̛̩͍̖̹ͥ̽͜d̲̙ͬ?̶̛̱͉̓ https://t.co/2W0ZJTtkbV

— Drafts (@draftsapp) February 12, 2022

Obviously, I installed it immediately, and configured it to ^ + ⇧ + Z. Now, within Drafts, I can select and Z̻̯͔̘̲ͥ́̕̕͝a̵̜̤̫͓̘̘̾́͊͛͜ĺ̸̶̦̣̉ͧg̶̶̟̩͒͗̊̆ͦ͜͡o̲̎̿̇́̂ ą̨̙̳̟̕n̆̄҉̸̥̳̯̱̲̂ͧ̊͟͞y̺̋ͮ͟ t̻̣̾ͣ̔̏è̘ͮ̋x͎̣ͫt̢̺̙̋͒.

As I said on Twitter, this is almost certainly the second most thoughtful gift I’ve ever recieved, though I had to share it with you. I’ve also created a shortlink: bit.ly/ddzalgo.

#software #configuration

I am not funny anymore feels as though it has finally achieved penultimate meaning as a longtime habitual phrase of mine – as in, I can no longer remember a tangible self without that sentiment always at the ready in a handy intercranial stash. Its significant, I think: the stoutness of my confidence saying it, now, after the year two thousand and twenty-one. The sensation of it has always been most powerful when reading the oldest of my words published, here, but it now has so much more substance. The argument that this general process is the very most natural for my age – the Peak Specialization Period on the general Human Existence roadmap – has been platituded to all fuck, and yet I cling to it newly and with ever-renewed desperation as I have to any and all authentic manifestations of certainty, of late – even the common knowledge sort I still viscerally despise.

Certainly moreso than in any other calendar year for this blog, I have changed, and so has the tone, theme, and subject matter of the eleven items you see above. In case you can't be bothered, it doesn't take much scrutiny to note that all but one of these entries – the second-latest, debatably – are directly related to the Fucking Apple Phone. Indeed, The Year of our Lord 2021 saw me watch every single one of Apple's two billion special “live” events in their entirety, all the while marveling... screaming... at the overwhelming volume of completely indiscriminate hype that still pervades the greater vaguely interested in consumer tech online biosphere. I witnessed folks take days off work solely for the sake of these pre-recorded “live” events, listened to pre-show podcast gameshows involving real money bets on what might be discussed/released during said events, and subscribed to two exclusive iOS-related publications: Matthew Cassinelli’s newsletter and Club MacStories.

Separate the blogroll, I indulged resolutely in a severe App Addiction, published a bunch of Siri Shortcuts, frequented r/Shortcuts more than I ever thought I'd find myself doing so on Read It, subsequently investing more of my time than ever in personal automation on Apple devices, while also becoming most critical of the practice. I first described myself as an “iPhone Poweruser” some four years ago, in a rambly episode of End User immediately following my original discovery of Apple's absorption of the automation app Workflow and its rebrand of their work into “Siri Shortcuts” in the beta of iOS 12. If indeed this label was ever meaningfully appropriate to self-apply, it certainly should be, now. Before 2021, my knowledge of iOS as a platform was extensive, sure, but notably constrained to user considerations. I was completely unaware of any “dev-facing” interworkings. For instance, I now have a vague understanding of Apple's late push to change iOS' primary programming language from Objective-C to its own Swift thanks to my “investigation” into why Tweetbot “feels” so different from its contemporaries. As per my commitment to write the missing documentation for Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts support on iPhone[^1], I have even become familiar enough with SwiftUI to identify a given key command's result in source code.

Editorially

The most significant editorial initiative of the year was my complete rewrite of /About. In the interest of providing a much more succinct and informative logline, I took direct and obvious inspiration from the About document Casey Newton drafted for his newsletter, Platformer. I expected the process to take months on end, but the end product was mostly written in a single sitting. This excerpt is as close to a Statement of Purpose for The Psalms as I've ever come:

...observing and selectively amplifying the characters, organizations, and stories surrounding the most abrupt, profound, and spectacular communicative renaissance in the history of the human species. Less abstractly, its beat is wholly digital, namely in tools (software, services, and methodologies) and culture (music, film, podcasts, and media) from a distinct lens established at good distance from California.

Also included is a list of important editorial considerations, most of which could be interpreted as complaints about the general state of “technology media” at present. It’s up to you to judge how well I’ve done at keeping them in mind, publicly.

As I said at the beginning of this Post, I’m going to miss being clever, but it’s become much more important to me to spend my time creating content that first and foremost provides tangible value for real people. I can't say I could've before imagined what a particular challenge composing guides/tutorials/documentation would be as a writing discipline. Frankly, I'm quite terrible at it. On this topic, I think my particular challenge, going forward into 2022, will be to make sure my continued improvement in this area benefits others more than myself as simply another arrow in my writing quiver, if you will.

A MERIT-MONGER is someone who only does good on the promise of personal gain.

— Haggard Hawks ? (@HaggardHawks) January 11, 2022

One of the far too many projects my todo list accumulated over the year, the “Please Fuck With This License” – my very own public domain-equivalent license – started as a joke, more or less, with the footer text of my very first website: “PLEASE STEAL FROM THIS WEBSITE.” Extrapolating this pubescent sentiment of mine into a minimally-ideological, yet fully-formed intellectual property license has been yet another total departure from my writing comfort zone into the domain of the legal.

The originator of the matter may be held entirely responsible for consequences upon any being or other distinct matter legally, ethically, morally, spiritually, etc. All forms of correspondence re: the matter to which this document is attached – including feedback, criticism, praise (due and undue,) general bereavement, damnation, condemnation, complaint, advice, advisement, assistance, counsel, guidance, input, recommendation, suggestion assistance, briefing, coaching, mentoring, priming, prompting, teaching, tutoring, caution, alarm, etc. is not only welcome but encouraged as per the core ethos of this document.

I'd like to think the sentiment I'm going for, here, feels entirely complementary to the thoughts I've expressed about creative existence, allegorically, in the past year, but I could just be insane.

The Git Bit

Eighteen months ago, I had no idea what Git was. Somehow, in the relatively short interim, I have managed to integrate it into the very foundation of my creative life. Every bit – if not more – of The Psalms substance exists on its GitHub repository. It's rather disorganized, but then again… so is this blog, and so am I. For instance, I’ve been intending to write a dedicated post on the subject of how I’ve integretated Git into my creative life for more than a year, now. In theory, this means my revisions are tracked via commits, though to be honest, I’ve yet to make much use of them.

On iOS, Working Copy has been absolutely invaluable considering how much writing I’ve done on my phone this year. So too has been Drafts.

Technically

Footnotes have finally been re-implemented! Though they still screw up line spacing.[^2] Thanks to changes to the Write.as platform, you can now view The Psalms without any of my CSS if you can’t stand looking at it, but that’d be a shame, in my opinion. Nevertheless, the footer has been amended to include a “Tiny” link at first position. A link to Extratone’s Telegram has replaced the Discord link as per my newfound focus on the former. It’s my hope that the addition of Siri Speech Synthesis at the top of each post might make The Psalms more accessible, even if just for those who find my words too verbose to read.

Going forward, The Psalms will be integrated with the new Discussions platform in the Write.as suite, Remark.as. Here's a link to my profile. You'll start seeing this link at the bottom of posts:

Discuss...

Write.as Pro users (exclusively, for the time being at least) will be able to comment on my work via these links.

I wanted to make this review significantly more expansive, but it's well into February now, so I think I'll leave it be and focus on further pursuits. If you'd like to see the full extent of what I intended to include – including amendments to posts with updated news – see this post's corresponding GitHub Issue.

[1] Which I will not be discussing further in this particular Post. [2] CSS wizards with a solution to my problem: I'd love to hear from you.

#meta

A setup for posting to Write.as blogs directly using Siri Shortcuts, the Write.as CLI, and (optionally) Drafts for Mac.

Though there is currently a Write.as desktop application in the works for macOS and the web editor is certainly no slouch, I thought I'd attempt to take advantage of my newfound knowledge of the Write.as CLI, Drafts Actions, and Siri Shortcuts on macOS to manifest one of my all-time dream integrations: publishing directly to write.as with Drafts.

To start – assuming you already have the CLI installed – lets run writeas help post in our shell:

For my own use, I really needed to consider just two arguments, here: which blog I'm posting to and in which format. Since my blog's CSS overwrites all but monospace, I always publish in --sans. Keeping this in mind, I allotted for these two options in my Siri Shortcut as customizations set on install.

Now, whenever it's run, my shortcut will be running this command: write-as post -c chaff --font sans plus whatever input I've given it. By default, it will grab from the clipboard, but I'm going to use a custom Drafts action to send input, instead.

Very simply, this action simply calls a shortcut entitled “Post to Write.as Blog (macOS)” sending the [[safe_title]] of the Draft as the markdown title followed by a space and then the draft's [[body]].

Discuss...

#software #automation #configuration

If you’re like me, your cumulative experience of typing on iPhones for more than a decade is probably saturated with needlessly disruptive, unsolicited, and inaccurate autocorrection. Certain proper nouns and a dozen or so quasi-localized dialectal terms in our day-to-day writing/speech have been treated by the system's autocorrect as foreign objects, regardless of how frequently we use them. Technically, this isn't supposed to happen, but – if you've got the patience and the time – there's a native feature across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that allows you to declare your own user dictionary called Text Replacement.

You can find the Text Replacement menu on iOS – as pictured in the screenshot embedded above – by navigating to General ⇨ Keyboard ⇨ Text Replacement or (maybe) by tapping this link. If you think you might use it often, I'd suggest installing this Siri Shortcut I created that navigates directly to the Text Replacement menu. To be honest, I’ve no idea what you’ll find there if you’ve never created a single entry and – since there’s no way to import or export from the menu – I’m not willing to delete all of mine to find out.

Tap the plus (+) symbol in the upper right hand corner of this menu and you should find yourself on a screen identical to the one shown in the screenshot embedded above, with two text entry fields labeled Phrase and Shortcut. To simply define a phrase – like “Extratone,” for instance, we needn’t actually use the latter, though I almost always do. I would suggest making two entries for those terms that aren’t always lowercase/uppercase – Extratone and extratone.

My suggestion: you needn’t waste too much time sitting and noodling over potential entries. Instead, try to notice the next time you encounter a frustrating misapplication of autocorrect. Add the Siri Shortcut I shared above to your homescreen so that you can quickly access the menu in this situation. Adding a single word shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds, this way.

Here’s the result of my continuing this practice for the past few years:

Text Expansion

The goal of this guide was to help those experiencing repeated incorrect autocorrect actions, but Text Replacement’s explicit purpose is also worth consideration. Similar in function to a favorite third-party app of mine called Text Expander, you can also use Text Replacement to create text shortcuts to lengthy/tedious/otherwise difficult to replicate text strings. This includes emojis! As you’ll note in the Gist embedded above, my typing out moyai with replace the text “moyai” with “🗿.” In order to escape the shortcut and simply print the word “moyai,” all I need to do is tap the esc key on my keyboard or the x in the upper right hand corner of the autocorrect object. See this demonstrated in my video guide and/or the GIF embedded below:

What I forgot to mention in the video is that the Text Replacement dictionary is persistent by default across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via iCloud. You’ll find the menu in the last one at System Preferences ⇨ Keyboard ⇨ Text.

From here, you can actually Select All and drag the contents of the text menu to Finder, which will result in a file entitled Text Substitutions.plist. Technically, this does allow one to back up their Text Replacement configuration, although actually restoring said backup would have to be done by hand, term by term.

Discuss...

#software #configuration

Shortcuts, bots, and some other methodologies discovered since my Big Telegram Post.

Since I published “I Trust Telegram,” the messenging service has been in the news. Their launch of Sponsored Messages predated its publication, but I omitted any mention of them because I’d yet to see any meaningful effects on my own use of the service. All I’ll say now: nearly four months of daily use later, this is still the case. I’ve published a few Siri Shortcuts and a Drafts action in the interim, though, and thought these few additional discoveries worth another Post.

Siri Shortcuts

Seek Telegram Message by ID

As I noted in the Big Telegram Post, navigating to/referencing specific messages in Telegram is ridiculously easy due to its URL format: https://t.me/[Channel@]/[Chronological Message ID] My Seek Messages by ID shortcut will prompt you to set defaults for both Channel @ and message number upon installation. This could be useful for channel/group administrators who need to reference/update a message containing community rules, but specifying them is entirely optional. Otherwise, the shortcut will prompt you to enter a channel or group’s @ (minus the symbol itself,) followed by the numeric ID of the message you’re looking for. It will then copy the complete URL to the clipboard and open it in Telegram Messenger for iOS. I’ve found it handy when joining a new channnel/group to quickly indulge my curiosity about its first few messages.

URL List ⇨ Telegram

Effectively, this shortcut allows you to send links to a set of Safari 15 tabs to a contact of your choice in Telegram. It’s the singular one of the shortcuts shared in this Post that makes use of Telegram Messenger for iOS’ native Siri Shortcuts actions, and is therefore the most finnicky. In the first take of my video demo, it timed out trying to send 200+ links to my Saved Messages channel, but was successful in the second (the take I published) in sending just four links. Upon each run, the shortcut will prompt you to select a contact. The selection must be a phone number, ideally in International Format.[^1] It will then parse a list of URLs in your clipboard and send them one at a time via Telegram’s native action without opening the app.

Clipboard ⇨ Telegram Message

This one makes use of Telegram Messenger for iOS’ URL scheme, which isn’t really documented properly anywhere.

tg://msg?text=[Content]&to=[TargetPhone#]

Upon installation, the shortcut will prompt you to specify a target phone number in International Format. In the following runs, the shortcut will open Telegram to the conversation with the phone number you’ve specified (use your own phone number to set it to your personal Saved Messages channel) with the contents of your clipboard in the text entry field. You’ll need to hit Enter or tap the Send Message button to actually send the content.

Other Integrations

Drafts

Users of Agile Tortoise’s Drafts for iOS can use my Send Draft to Telegram Saved Messages action to do exactly that.

a widdle demo. pic.twitter.com/z2S2pu2LNc

— David Blue ※ (ɥ̶͇͖͉̠̰̟͔̒́̆ͧ͋̀̀ ????) (@NeoYokel) February 1, 2022

Like the last Siri Shortcut above, the action utilizes Telegram’s URL scheme to send the contents of your current draft to a Telegram conversation with a phone number of your choosing. (Remember to change the action’s placeholder!)

If you’d like to specify a different conversation, this action published to the Action Directory by user maique omits the phone number bit of the URL scheme – tg://msg?=[DraftContent].

TextExpander

Group and/or channel administrators, especially, might find my public Telegram-specific TextExpander snippet group to contain some useful inspiration. .tid, for example, will help you construct a Telegram message link by ID just as the first Shortcut in this Post will, while .scheme will replicate the app’s URL scheme.

Tot

If you happen to have Tot Pocket on your iOS device already, I’ve found it a particularly ideal place to compose Telegram messages with formatting and hyperlinks considering its similar format limitations. Drafts users can use my Append to 7th Tot Dot action to send draft content to the last Dot directly. Some markdown formatting will need to be altered – #-headings aren’t supported by either Tot or Telegram, for instance – but formatting can be directly carried over to Telegram in Rich Text format by selecting all in Tot and copying, as displayed in the screenshots embedded above.

Bots

Raindrop.io Bot

As far as I’m concerned, @OlegWock’s Raindrop Telegram Bot is an absolute must for any users of the Raindrop.io bookmarking service. Not only does it allow one to send Raindrop bookmarks directly to a chat when in inline mode (as demonstrated in the above screenshots) – it is also the quickest method of saving images, videos, and documents to one’s Unsorted Bookmarks list on an iOS-running device. As I mentioned in the Big Post, Telegram’s sharesheet integration remains by far the least discriminate of any such integration on iOS.

Rose

I’ve gone through the standard gauntlet of freemium administration bots for my experimental local Telegram group. The one I think I’ve settled on, though, is by far the best documented and most inuitive I’ve come across. Miss Rose comes conservatively-configured of the box in a sense that one will experience better results than its “competitors” in moderating a small group like mine just be leaving the defaults in place. My personal favorite functions are /notes – which allows one to save group documents that can be recalled with /or # – and /export, which exports the entirety of one’s options (including those notes) as a .txt file. (See the rightmost screenshot embedded above.)

Other Insights

Telegram as Task Manager

I had absolutely no idea that Reminders existed in Telegram until a few weeks ago. When sending to one’s Saved Messages channel, holding down on the Send Message button will display the option to Set a Reminder. Anything that can be sent can be added as a reminder, including – in my case – .exe files of programs I’d like to install on my PC later. Frankly, I can’t think of any other task management/reminders application that offers this ability – paid or otherwise.

The macOS App

A recent update to the Telegram for macOS app has rendered it by far the most beautiful way to use the service.

Themes

I’ve spent quite a bit of time archiving third-party Telegram themes, lately. Below is a list of installation links to some of my favorites which I’ll do my best to keep updated. Otherwise, refer to this Telegraph post or type #themes in Extratone’s group chat. 1. 𝘞𝘐𝘕𝘋𝘖𝘞𝘚 𝘌𝘛𝘌𝘙𝘕𝘈𝘓 2. Allo4Life 3. Fresh Mint – Tweetbot 6 4. Greyhound 5. Space Piss 6. Vampire Reference 7. Signals 8. Futuretab 9. Slander Crimson 10. Academia 11. Hermitage 12. Divorced Empress Navier 13. Roro Jump 14. Dark, Post-Academia 15. UOrange 16. Vaporfucked 18. Dark Shell 19. Honey Highlight 20. Mirage on Kimberly 21. Lynch on Rhino 22. Mars Orange 23. Sepia Blues 24. Strawberry Night 25. Tapbots 26. Green Dark 27. Puaro 28. DarkQD 29. Mineshaft Gold 30. Jellygram 31. Japan Serenity

[1] Ex: +1 (573) 823-4380

Discuss...

#software #automation #configuration

How I’ve used Telegram as the ultimate cross-platform Universal Clipboard, file sharing service, and more.

Believe it or not, I, too originally sought the Russian-owned, cross-platform-as-hell messaging service for “privacy” – or perhaps solitude would be more apt. It was in 2017, amidst the shock that the Tump Presidency was actually going to happen [^1], that I happened to hear about his pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, whom had just 18 months prior led myself and some twenty thousand other poor souls in a most capitalist prayer to the Christian God for prosperity at her pyramid scheme’s ultimate “superbowl” gathering in Cincinatti. I had decided to “infiltrate” AMWAY under the ridiculous assumption that I might be able to contribute some new insight in writing critically about what I might witness. (In truth, I found my experiences that summer so utterly traumatic, existentially, that I never was able to do so.) I don’t know what consequences of her ascension to the Lord of American Schooling I expected to happen, but I was pretty hysterical about it – that is, more unhumorously alarmed about some grander world happening as I’d ever been by a long shot. For the first and only time in memory, I felt compelled to take some sort of malicious, obscured action – to organize somehow for a purpose other than to be publicly critical of this person, and to use my knowledge about digital media to the fullest possible extent to scrutinize her administration’s every movement and to be prepared, even, to take some sort of real action if she… well, I don’t know. I didn’t know anything, really, about anti-government organization, generally, but I was not acting rationally in the slightest.[^2]

I’m bringing this up for a few reasons, and the fact that the very first digital decision of my personal hysteria was to set up a private Telegram channel is telling, though I can’t recall just how much or how little I actually knew about it at the time. I launched myself back to the channel’s very beginning (easier to do with regular URLs than in any other service I’ve ever encountered,) but was only able to bring myself to dig just long enough to grab the utterly absurd photograph above… Though I certainly did not consider myself actively interested in automation at the time,[^3] Telegram’s infamous bot ecosystem proved so prevalent (and accessible,) that I was able to configure at least three bots on that channel within days of first establishing it: a repeater hooked to DeVos’ Twitter account, an RSS-powered bot watching the main feed of a website set up by Senator Elizabeth Warren called DeVos Watch, and another republishing everything from the Department of Education’s press releases feed.

got called on telegram to be shown a big tub of worms pic.twitter.com/vCik1IgETv

— AHHHH!!mmnontet (@ammnontet) October 17, 2021

Was any of it genuinely useful in helping me maintain Action Readiness in hypothetical defense of American education? Most certainly not. It was, however, genuinely comforting to have such diligent, automated minions keeping watch – to have a centralized, private, reliable, and purely-chronological feed of information in a super-handy location, regardless of whether or not it was usable. As I began to unconsciously integrate Telegram into my day-to-day online life on both of my PCs and my iPhone, the usefulness of my private channel for other applications became rapidly apparent. On iOS, not even dedicated file managers like DEVONthink are capable (or willing might be a more accurate term) of handling the diversity of data Telegram will happily pass on for you, especially through the Share Sheet.

honestly I don’t think Telegram’s Share Sheet has changed since it was first implemented, and for very good reason. this is how quickly one can share a URL, but the thing is… you can also send literally any file or text the same way, which is definitely unique. pic.twitter.com/QA4FCqLgB7

— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) September 27, 2021

Drafting

I have used this “flow” so extensively for so long that it has come to define the whole of the abstract method in my muscle memory. Observe me browsing the web on my phone in an exhausted or particularly distractible state and you’d probably catch at least one or two completely irrational, inexplicable instances of sharing to my “Saved Messages” Telegram channel, which would be problematic for just about any other link-saving service. Add too many links to Safari’s Read Later list and you’ll end up crashing the browser on your Mac. I don’t even feel comfortable sending links willy nilly to the brilliant bookmark managing/curatorial service Raindrop, these days, after finding out that my Reading List feed has actual daily followers, but there are zero consequences to sending ultimately-worthless or duplicate links to my personal Telegram channel, which has no content limit and is instantly and competently searchable.

Over the years, I’ve discovered a bunch of other uses for the Saved Messages channel. As demonstrated in the screenshots embedded above, the Send to Telegram Action for my writing app, Drafts, utilizes Telegram for iOS’ Universal Links support (in the format tg://…) to instantly send the whole text of the current document in Drafts to a Telegram channel of one’s choice. I suspect this was intended to streamline posting for admins of public channels, but I’ve used it to quickly “back up” work as well as to transfer edits directly to my (Windows-running) PC. By adding &to=+[my phone number] to the end of the action’s URL, I was able to remove the single, unnecessary step of choosing the destination chat. Because text messages are automatically split at 5000 characters, though, I usually depend on the Share as Markdown File Action (the output of which I also send to Saved Messages through the Share Sheet) for the latter function. Anecdotally I’ve also used this method literally just to inspect unknown content passed to the Share Sheet because it’s often faster than Quick Look to share to my Saved Messages channel and then immediately open it in the app. (Hilarious, I suppose. Mostly sad, these days.)

I found my inspiration for this Post in replying to a thread on the Automators.fm Discourse forum regarding a Windows equivlalent to the same Mac/iOS/iPadOS app Drafts mentioned above. I suppose my reply was a bit off-topic, in retrospect, but still worth including:

I have been using Telegram, of all things for years. Notably, if you hit Ctrl + 0 from anywhere in the Windows client, you and your cursor are taken to the compose field beneath your personal “Saved Messages” channel, which is searchable, has an extremely high per-message character limit (after which it just automatically splits,) and is ridiculously reliable in saving “drafts” live as you're typing. As in... I have actively tried to lose characters by killing the application and then logging in on my phone and have yet to accomplish losing a single one (among other advantages: zero formatting added to plain text by default – not even line breaks – no total file limit and 2GB per file limit uploads, absurdly cross-platform, literally more reliable than SMS in poor network conditions.) You can immediately reenter a sent message with ↑ to edit, copy it, escape with just Esc and then paste to start a new revision.

The feature within Telegram that makes this whole usecase worthwhile was introduced in June, 2016, and is entitled – appropriately – “Drafts.” Unlike the Drafts function in Twitter’s various native clients, for instance, Telegram’s really is impossible to fool, though it’s not perfect. Markdown formatting support is inconsistent across Telegram clients – the iOS app being the most woeful – and the few keyboard shortcuts the app supports on iPad are not supported whatsoever on iPhone.

Universal Clipboard

Users familiar with the MacOS + iOS + iPadOS ecosystem should be well-acquainted with “Universal Clipboard,” which instantly synchronizes clipboard content across Apple devices. More recently, Android + Windows users have supposedly had access to an equivalent functionality. To my knowledge, though, truly cross-platform clipboard sync has yet to be realized.[^4] As someone who’s used iOS and Windows regularly – along with Linux, occasionally – for more than a decade, now, I’d put my full weight behind Telegram as the best available solution from (far too much) personal experience.

When first entering a new system, real or virtual, regardless of OS, my very first step upon completion of its setup process has for years been to install Telegram, largely because all of my passwords for any/all given services are huge – 30+ characters, at least – and complex enough that typing them out is both tricky and absurdly time-consuming. Authorizing a new Telegram client, however, is as simple as entering a one-time numeric passcode or scanning a QR code. Managing logged-in sessions (see: the far right screenshot embedded above) is quick, reliable, and includes a handy button to kill all but the current session. Thanks to these considerations, I feel quite comfortable sending myself passwords in Telegram, including .csv exports of whole password vaults, when it’s appropriate, even when working on systems I do not own. For this function, I can’t think of any other service/software capable of replacing Telegram.

For day-to-day hyperlink sharing across my platforms, a variety of alternatives continue to come and go. The “Send to [device]” features represented throughout the palette of available web browsers – Firefox, Opera, Edge Chromium, Chrome, etc. – aren’t exactly reliable, in my experience. Most recently, I discovered a service specific to Hewlett Packard machines called “QuickDrop,” which – along with its accompanying iOS app – does indeed allow me to send files, links, and text between my iPhone and Big Boy HP tower, though even my brief testing was filled with inexplicable prompts to reauthenticate and intermittent hangups, neither of which lend easily to regular use. I still maintain high hopes for Snapdrop, which allows devices to share files and text over a local network from within any web browser, but it, too, is prone to frustrating hangups.

File Transfer & Cloud Backup

Amidst the saga of my failed move to Portland spanning 2017-2019, I ended up losing all of my physical file storage – my old desktop and its hard drive, as well as 3 external drives containing a bunch of raw video I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to using, anyway, site backups for Extratone, and who knows what else. This loss taught me many grand, metaphysical life lessons (I hope,) but more practically, it affirmed a (admittedly gluttonous) truth about digital assets: if one truly wishes to make a file permanent, they must back it up in as many different places as possible.[^5] Perhaps the single most durable of these in my own computing life to date has been Telegram, which still has no per-account file upload limit and a per-file size limit of two gigabytes. The amount of pre-2019 work I’ve recovered solely thanks to Telegram is too great to enumerate here, but a rough draft of my 2018 Thankful for Bandcamp Mix comes immediately to mind.

How exactly the service is able to maintain this virtually unrestricted storage, infrastructurally, borders on don’t want to know status. My own net server impact as a user is fairly difficult to estimate, but I’d bet real paper currency it’s between 50 and 100 GB, the vast majority of which I uploaded several years ago. Within any mainstream cloud file storage service – Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, iCloud, etc. – the cost of storing that amount over time would have added up to a not-insignificant chunk of change. I don’t want to advocate for Telegram as a cloud storage replacement for loaded cheapskates, but for working-class users on a $0 budget, it can be counted upon to keep large files in a relatively shareable, ultra cross-platform, and super-accessible manner. Students, especially, should take note.

Community

At this point in my life, I must acknowledge to both readers and myself that I am completely inept at community organization. Especially when it comes to grand suggestions about how I suppose online communities might be ideally-run or just better served by particular software environments and configurations, I have literally received zero positive feedback, and not because I haven’t spent significant time positing publicly within the space. I spent the first half of my twenties trying to Peter Pan an independent online music magazine into existence, written by fresh-minded youths on the fringe at 140% throttle and managed to accomplish startlingly little for my all my invested time and gumption. The relevant component of that tale was a significant and all-out commitment from the beginning to run the whole project entirely within Discord.

The one absent activity throughout my years of Telegram use – save for intermittent correspondence during one relationship – has been messaging other users. I managed to find and participate in a few group chats – “Telegram iOS Talk” and It's FOSS' official channel, notably – in my preparation/research for this post. I’ve discovered plenty of new clever bits, like the button to jump to one’s nearest mention in a chat. I’ve also done my best to actually apply some much-needed administrative attention to my years-old attempt at creating the definitive location-based local group chat for the Mid-Missouri area where I live. Truthfully… It hasn’t exactly gone as I’d hoped, but the failures have been all my own. I have yet to find a satisfactory balance in terms of moderation bots, so I’ve (as of this writing) resorted to manually removing the (significant) spam bot traffic by hand. Also, I must admit that I’ve never had to do so more than once or twice on Extratone’s public Discord, despite how much more circulation its public, open invite links have received.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the privilege of watching MacStories relaunch their premium membership program, Club MacStories, on their incredible bespoke CMS. Part of this launch included their first exclusive community space, on Discord, which has been deeply rewarding for me, personally, but has also highlighted some serious limitations of that service which I not-so-long-ago advocated so heavily for. Namely, hyperlinks to specific messages within Discord are a hopelessly problematic endeavor. Even for a public server like Extratone’s, navigating to a message link like this example will require any and all users to log in to Discord on the web, which – on mobile devices, especially – seems to struggle to navigate to the precise position of the subject message after you’ve successfully done so. Slack’s public message links are smart enough at least to prompt users to open them Slack for iOS, but Telegram’s system for message links in public channels and groups makes both services look daft.

Telegram message IDs are purely chronological from their channel/group chat’s creation – the first message in a channel or group chat is 1 and the 15th is 15. Together with the simplicity of channel/group chat IDs, which are just their alphanumeric @ names, this format makes URL schemes for Telegram message links super malleable and easy to understand. The sixth message posted in the @extratone channel, for instance, can be found at https://t.me/extratone/6, which even those without Telegram installed can view natively within their web browser. Within Telegram clients, said links are ultra-responsive, regardless of whether or not one had previously “joined” the channel or group containing the message.

In MacStories’ case, there’s another essential point of reference. When I pinged the staff in their Discord regarding their experiences running their now-abandoned Telegram channel, John Voorhees replied:

I don't really have anything to say about Telegram one way or the other. We ran it for a short time 5 years ago as an experiment and it didn't stick.

I wasn’t yet a subscriber in those days, but little details like behind-the-scenes voice messages are definitely missed. Federico’s initial audio introduction describes a potential for the channel I wish more readers had enjoyed. They’re much more intimate, even, than the publication’s new exluclusive Town Hall events on Discord, which doesn’t make much sense, I know.

Streaming

Admittedly, another attention-grabbing feature that contributed to my finally getting around to this Post was the introduction of “Live Streams” for channels and groups (really just a slight augmentation of their “Voice Chats 2.0” features) at the very end of this past August. Discord, of course, was way ahead of Telegram in implementing Voice Chats and Screen Sharing back in October of 2017, and it's long since become one of the services' core features. However, recording live content of any kind is not natively supported, though there is a handy utility bot named Craig who can accomplish this for you. For the sake of transparency, I should admit that not a single one of my live streams on Discord has actually included any viewership, but I have participated in a handful of others’ and viewed a couple dozen.

btw this is what happens to Discord's desktop app any time I try to join/create a call or stage or join a voice channel. @discord pic.twitter.com/t5atAFtyhH

— ※ David Blue ※ (@NeoYokel) October 15, 2021

For the past few months or so, participating in any sort of voice or video chat in Discord desktop has led to a spectacular relaunch loop that can only be solved by reinstalling the application, entirely.[^7] It’s not that Discord for iOS’ now full support for such streaming – both in terms of participation and simple viewership – isn’t impressive, but honestly, Telegram for iOS’ superiority should be immediately obvious to anyone who’s tried them both, recently. Not just in pure capacity’s sense, but in moderation tools, shared link customization, and, obviously, native recording support. I’ve embedded two recordings of different test streams of mine, below. The first (embedded in YouTube form,) was streamed from both my Surface Laptop 2 and iPhone 12 Pro Max.

The second is a very brief recording (in native form directly from The Psalms’ GitHub Repo) of a stream I did just from the share screen function of my phone, in the wrong orientation.[^8]

Below is a screenshot of the recorded file’s metadata (as provided by Telegram for Windows.)

As you might note, there’s definitely something to be desired from the quality of Telegram’s stream recordings, especially in its included audio. I find it a bit strange that it’s recorded in 48 kHz just to be compressed down to 46kbps. When you’ve stopped a recording, you’ll receive both the video file and just the extracted audio in an .ogg file. Unfortunately, the latter is no less compressed than it is combined in the video file. (Both are sent to one's Saved Messages channel immediately upon stopping a recording, from where they can be forwarded virtually anywhere.) Aside from a boost in audio quality, though, Discord’s default 720p base resolution is matched by Telegram. Via server boosts, this figure can be upgraded significantly, though the end result is quite costly. According to a not necessarily trustworthy site, accounting for Discord’s recent reduction in boost requirements, here’s the pricing laydown to boost a server (per month:)

…a total of $34.93 for Level 2 and $69.86 for Level 3. That’s $24.45 for Level 2 and $48.90 for Level 3 for Nitro subscribers.

Among quite a few other abilities, here are the extracted audio/video requirements per server level only:

1. 128kbps audio/720p video upped to 60fps
2. 256kbps audio/1080p 60fps video
3. 384kpbs audio/no video boost

So, if I had the spare change to maintain a level 2 boost for Extratone’s Discord server, myself, I could do so for $34.93 per month, which would allow me to stream (not necessarily record) in 1080p/60fps video and 256kbps audio to up to 50 viewers (as of this writing.) Theoretically, at no cost, I can stream with virtually identical features (though I prefer Telgram's) to my Telegram channel to infinitely many users in 1280p/30fps with absurdly low-quality audio and share/manipulate recordings natively/instantly from within any Telegram client. If I were All Powerful, I would make all the members of my “Family Tech Support” iMessage group install Telegram on their devices so we could use it, instead. I would also make them collectively attend occasional live streams, where they could ask questions verbally of my demonstrations sharing my own screen, or even share their own screens to demonstrate an issue or provide context for a question. The reality, though, is that I do not expect any sort of anticipation for my personal live help events on any platform, which innately suggests Telegram over Discord, I'd argue, for when I do stream such content, given its total lack of investment.[^9]

Location Sharing

One of Telegram's most unique (and potentially powerful, I believe) community features is Live Location Sharing on its mobile apps. Borned by Siberian native developer Roman Pushkin, LibreTaxi is the single truly exciting open ridesharing alternative I've ever encountered.[^10] As an item for CBC radio from 2015 (among other assorted coverage compiled here as of July, 2017) explains, it utilizes Telegram's live location sharing functions to act as a decentralized Uber/Lyft alternative in the form of a bot, which connects users needing a ride with users providing them, free of any fees or service charges. Discourse surrounding LibreTaxi has been silent for years, but this channel tracking all LibreTaxi orders in realtime is proof that it really is helping folks get around.

As for the persistence of Live location-sharing, I can vouch for its reliability on the Android side, at least, as per my aforementioned experience with a partner who used Telegram and shared their location with me for both safety and convenience. As someone with the most immense possible privilege regarding safety and dating, I would also like to suggest sharing one's live location with a private Telegram group chat with friends as an alternative to services like Tinder's Noonlight.

Permanence

I've long evangelized (and extensively used) Alexey Golub's Discord Chat Exporter to make beautiful, stylized archives of Discord channels and/or entire servers for safekeeping. Telegram's native Chat Export Tool came just a year after Alexey pushed version 1.0 of the tool to GitHub, in August of 2018. In features, they're very similar utilities: both can export in either stylized HTML or data-only JSON formats between infinitely-configurable time/date constraints. Again, I wouldn’t know how much external backup of community activity actually weighs in the day-to-day operations of large online communities. I know I personally find it comforting to have a swift, polished method of exporting text, especially, living in this era of blatant disregard for users of suddenly-abandoned online services.

Transparency Opacity

One of my primary justifications for the time spent in composing this Post has to do with the immediately-available discourse surrounding Telegram on the web, which is wholly incomplete, at best. The main obstruction, from my perspective, is the subject of encryption. Even within publications as legitimate and frankly out-of-scope as Forbes, one can find an article like my chosen example, from February of this year, entitled “No, Don’t Quit WhatsApp To Use Telegram Instead—Here’s Why.” It was written to address a mass “exodus” of users from WhatsApp after a grandiose misunderstanding(?) of its Privacy Policy caused a noisy controversy (catalyzed by Idiot Melon, himself.) I've been unable to find the added/altered text, itself, in my brief reading, but it's not as if the happening wasn't thoroughly covered elsewhere. It's not that I doubt the expertise of “Cybersecurity Expert Zak Doffman” when he notes “Telegram’s cloud-based architecture is a serious risk when compared to the end-to-end default encryption deployed by Signal and WhatsApp, which also uses Signal’s protocol,” nor that I do not believe the following details are as true as truth gets:

All group messages on Telegram are only encrypted between your device and Telegram’s cloud, your message history is stored on Telegram’s cloud, and if you (unwisely) transfer your WhatsApp chat history to Telegram, then this is also stored on its cloud. Make you sure understand that Telegram has the decryption keys to any of your data that you store on its cloud...

To this argument and the many variations of it present in Telegram for iOS' App Store reviews, obscure German PeerTube servers, and even within public chats on Telegram, itself, my formal response for the record is: Okay! Affirmative! Received and understood! I must acknowledge – given my own introduction to the service, narrated above – that Telegram's brand is vaguely associated with privacy and security. I can see that the second of nine duckies in the Ducky Grid on the root of telegram.org sits above the subhead “Private” and a caption with the following claim: “Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.” (The seventh ducky's subhead is “Secure.“) Continuing on in Doffman's Forbes article, we find an overview of several vulnerabilities found throughout Telegram's native clients by Dhiraj Mishra – surely they with the most ghastly typographical preferences in all of cybersecurity – on their blog, Input Zero.[^6] The specific example hyperlinked concerns a bug in the MacOS client that resulted in “the application leak[ing] the sandbox path where [a sent audio or video message] is stored in '.mp4' file.” (The whole of the ghastly-typewritten summary is embedded below in screenshot form.)

Just to be clear, I am being sincere when I acknowledge that these are genuinely problematic issues that no doubt affected real Telegram users who depend upon its Secret Chat function. Even something so benign as the file path to local media storage on my device is not something I'd want piggybacking my otherwise-anonymous, NDA- and/or law-breaking messages to a journalist, for instance, but frankly, I don't know of any journalists who maintain public Telegram contacts, anyway. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen a Telegram username publicly associated with a journalist. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of anonymous modern messenger service tip lines advertised by news organizations and news people which I've come across have all linked to Signal. In this particular case, then, Mr. Elon’s advice is sound.

The question I would like to surface: what if I have no use for encryption or privacy across my purposes for Telegram? All the channels I have ever engaged with have been public, and those private ones I’ve come across have either been shady crypto spam channels or shady porn channels. I realize this doesn’t exactly reflect positively on Telegram’s community, but – as I argued regarding Discord, long ago – why let the community or even the app’s branding, itself, confine how you use it as a utility?

A Hearty Foundation

My thinking while drafting this argument kept returning to a single, simple realization: in age, Telegram is just two years ahead of Discord, yet the various software distributed by the two organizations for their respective services represent quite disparate opinions in design terms. Discord's desktop “application” is an Electron app – Telegram's is virtually pure C++. Telegram's iOS app is mostly written in Objective-C (I'm to assume the 30.8% Swift code number on the repo as of this writing is mostly comprised of its widgets/other recent iOS-specific integrations,) while Discord's is mostly ???. That is, because Discord's software is proprietary and the source is closed, all I can tell you is that it was written in React Native as of December, 2018. What I can tell you is that the current build of Discord for iOS on the App Store weighs in at 153.2 MB – significantly less than Telegram's 185.1 MB. As I've noted plenty of times this year, I am not a software developer and therefore I can't promise you an app's initial payload size is actually all that relevant, but I was surprised to see Telegram wasn't slimmer than Discord, given how the two apps behave and my previous experiences with the platform, this year.

Returning to the topic of their age… In its eight operating years, Telegram has embarked upon – and actually completed! – a gargantuan amount of projects. Telegraph, the CMS, its Web, Android, and Linux clients, embeddedable comments widgets, its online theme creation tool, and on and on. Across their various types, Telegram’s software is universally simple, frugal, robust, and easy-to-use. Frankly, by contrast, Discord has done nothing? Though you’ll find openly-available solutions to accomplish much of what you can on Telegram in terms of moderation and other utilitarian concerns, like the aforementioned Craig bot, they are all the work of third-parties. While Discord the company is much more transparently profiled on the web than “Telegram FZ LLC,” the latter’s actual work is very well documented across GitHub.

If you’ve stuck with me this far, perhaps it’s not too much to ask that we retreat a bit and ask ourselves what we’d truly like prioritized in community chat software for 2021. I really do show my age in my bias, here, as someone just old enough to have had extensive experience using IRC,[^11] I think there’s a less-than-adequately discussed division happening which its successors might benefit dwelling on. IRC was extremely frugal and it was easy to find a freeware or FOSS IRC client for one’s given platform which was well-optimized to sit in the background of their desktop operating system, completely untouched and barely acknowledged visually for days… weeks… months at a time. It was easy to find oneself a member of a dozen or so IRC channels for specific interests, projects, or organizations averaging a dozen or so actual updates/pots per day, each. It was distinctly low pressure – many of my channel memberships functioned more like a wire service or, much more contemporarily, like an RSS aggregator, than a local party line.

As I see it, the ultimate shift dividing those solutions from these is the big fucking obvious one: IRC was conceived in a world where computers were mostly static objects associated by their intended use and physical dimensions with the referential, unmoving waypoints around which we orbited (the kitchen counter, the desk in your study at home, parallel series of workstations within the public library, etc.) The entirely contrasted needs of community engagement on a handset should have – in my opinion – done much more to break apart these communal contexts than they have. As prolifically and extensively as I have used Discord for iOS since before its official release, even, it is hopelessly compromised by its loyalty to the PC gamer’s paradigm. My 12 Pro Max is not just capable of keeping 100 Discord channels up-to-date in the background as I move about the world – it is all too fucking eager, and for not a one rational explanation. Going on down this vector eventually leads to an adjacent argument I’ll name but otherwise save for later: it is literally over a decade past the time when we should have ceased celebrating the fact that mobile computers had matched and outdone desktop computers! We have to snap the fuck out of our obsession with lugging desktop computing alongside our persons and refocus entirely (once again) on exploring what “mobile computing” can/should mean, going forward. Please Gourd, help us do so ASAP.

Unlike my heroes in most (if not all) of these tedious comparisons, I would not say Telegram is the single software manifestation of total clarity in direction within the subject, or anything, but in the area where it fails along with the rest of them, it has comprehensively iterated, invested in trial and error, and eventually produced tools that remedy the disparate gluttony. How swiftly and easily one can find one's installation full of media files, for instance, after any time spent exploring within its mobile apps.

It very well could have been mostly chance that contributed to Telegram's current lead in terms of thoughtful design decisions and development investment toward mobile-first optimization. Perhaps it was their comparative longstanding Hype Famine, especially in the United States, these past few years. Maybe Discord hasn't built anything because they simply can't hear each other over the buzzwords overflowing their name in mainstream Discourse so abruptly thanks to The Big Virus.

Telegram's story certainly stands out, though the voice of its creator, Pavel Durov, actually telling this story at length can now only be found on WIRED UK's MixCloud account, in episode 256 of their WIRED Podcast. Telegram was experiencing the peak of its presence in mainstream Western news media, who just would not let go of the fact that some leader of some terrorist organization recommended Telegram to someone for something at some point in time.[^12] Listening back, it's the nomadic “decentralized” beginnings of the organization – which I had forgotten entirely – which sounded a big, resonant Parallel Alarm in my brain: for very different reasons, Bandcamp also operating without an office (from a public library, charmingly,) at that time.

“Can there only be one winner in the messaging wars?” asks David Rowan, which Pavel – in the deliberate, uncomfortable-sounding tone he uses throughout the interview – answers first noting a real truth for actual users: we tend to end up with a billion, each grouped generally by types of relationships. iMessage is for your family and local friends, Facebook Messenger is for your school group project, IRC and Element are for your insane, privacy-obsessed Linux friends, and Telegram is for unsolicited video chats of worm tubs.*

*For more, up-to-the-minute information on Telegram as well as Configuration files from me, see my Telegram Raindrop Collection (embedded below,) and/or this post's corresponding GitHub Issue.

[1] I still have not accepted this, by the way. I’m still back there. [2] If I were to be 100% sincere, I might ask you to consider that this (hilariously brief) intent was a method of coping with the great existential truths I was facing for the first time. [3] I definitey was, though. For whatever reason, I do not remember associating the term “automation” with such activities, but I just found the “receipt” for my “purchase” of IFTTT for iOS… From July, 2013. [4] I am currently working on a less-than-instant solution using iCloud and CopyQ’s clipboard sync function. [5] I would’ve said “one can never have too many backups,” but the result of such thinking is ridiculously wasteful and not something I actually want to encourage. [6] I'm almost positive I've heard of/been linked to this blog before, which is perhaps only notable in that I managed to keep my typographic opinions to myself. [7] Not that the process of doing so could be any easier on Windows. [8] It’s also worth nothing that word of screen sharing framerate issues was circulating at the time of this recording. [9] Simulcast services like Happs – which still exists, astonishingly – offer an intriguing utility for those intending to stream regularly and wishing to do so across multiple platforms. It does not, at the moment, support either Telegram or Discord. [10] Speaking as someone with actual extensive ridesharing experience, notably. [11] Yes, there are some fellow Open Source Folks who’ve frankly struggled to let IRC go. It was an amazing protocol and will always be intertwined with the very first layed bricks of what we’d call the Social Web, but my friends… I sincerely think we should all try our hands at ham radio, instead. I think that would legitimately be a better use of our time than trying to implement two-factor authentication for IRC in this year of our spiteful Lourde 2021. [12] Disparaging Telegram for this is akin to shitting on Google because it is or was almost certainly the Taliban's favorite search engine, no?

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