The Subtle Genius of Anisota

this post is being made on leaflet instead of my blog as an experiment, and to see how it shows up on anisota, i will mirror it to my main blog shortly afterward.

First Impressions

I've been following dame for quite some time, since twitter was still Twitter and not a nazi echo chamber. When they mentioned they were working on a social media client, I will hesitantly admit I was not especially excited. There are so many social media clients, I thought, I really do not need another one.

Some time passed and eventually anisota became a large proportion of dame's posts. I began to grow increasingly curious, and eventually it was released privately to dame's Patreon. I am not sure how many people know this about me, but I used to work (and at some point would like to continue to work) in cybersecurity, so I thought I would take a shot at getting into anisota before its official release. It worked, and I managed to make this post.

Shortly after making the post, I sort of forgot about it altogether, swept up in a delirious haze of social media, friend obligations, and job applications.

Look Again

At the time I first looked at anisota, I spent quite a bit of effort setting up my proxy and manually editing network requests, which made accessing the site feel like more of a technical accomplishment than anything. I wasn't really in the mood to use social media and probably especially not in the mood to learn how to use an arcane, confusing form of it.

Luckily, Dame just announced opening anisota to the public, so I immediately went to check it out. The interface was the same, a sort of strange dark sparsely populated with small buttons and serif text

Hesitantly, I began to look around. The first thing I noticed is how strange it felt to use. Coming from modern web apps where everything is smooth scrolling, pre-loaded in the background, carefully rendered to avoid page breaks, anisota felt strange and empty, every interaction felt like it took an eternity, especially stuff like opening profiles and liking posts. So many things are hidden within menus that it forces pretty much any interaction with others to require multiple levels of intentional actions. You can't just click the comment button and start typing.

At first, I felt deeply uncomfortable using the app, like I had entered a physical space full of objects I didn't recognize and don't know how to use. But slowly, I began to feel comfortable swiping around, viewing profiles, even commenting on posts. I find these animated glow effects really beautiful and simple, the way they pulse is very calming.

Then, as quickly as I had grown to enjoy anisota, I ran out of stamina. The buttons no longer worked, the site became dead and inert. "What a strange thing for a website to do," I thought. But I put my phone away and went to do something else.

Later, upon logging back in, I noticed my stamina had recovered to something like 22%. Looking around I noticed something else. Posts felt different on here. Surrounded by other people, in a constant noisy feed, angry, political, or advertising posts don't feel so strange. Their individual impact is reduced to nearly zero by their surrounding content. On anisota, however, every rant, every news article hit like a hammer to my skull. I find myself inclined to unfollow people quite a bit more simply to preserve my happy space. Logging into deer again (another Bluesky client), I found myself struck at how loud it felt, something I had hardly considered before.

All this led me to a conclusion: If a few hours of using this website could force me to dramatically rethink my relationship to social media, it must be doing something right.

Learning to Love the Moths

Since yesterday, I have posed myself a challenge. I will only use Bluesky via anisota for the next week. I want to immerse myself in this strange world and see how it feels.

I have installed it as a web app on my phone homepage and have been super impressed how well it almost feels like a native app when you do that.

Qualms and Quibbles

Broadly, I hope I hope I have made it clear that I really like anisota and think it is a super impressive (and ambitious) project to completely design a frontend with no resemblance to the original.

I do have some minor quibbles though. I want to make clear these are not dealbreakers, just minor nuisances that don't feel intentional.

Tapping on cards feels too easy - By this, I mean that if you tap anywhere on the card it advances to the next post. In my mind, tapping on the left of the card should go to the previous post, and its a strange bit of asymmetry that you can only go forward in this way.

Reposts are not presented very well - When someone I follow reposts someone else, I feel like the subject is more the person I follow than the originemal poster. Furthermore, sometimes I want to unfollow the reposter or at least view their profile, which is made difficult by them just being a tiny name on the screen.

I don't find items very interesting - This might just be a very early release issue and maybe Dame has a big long-term plan for items, but to me they seem pretty random, perhaps even AI generated en masse. I do like the moths though, finding those is always a joy.

Curious and Curiouser

Things I am looking forward to

Overall, I feel like a mostly have a good handle on how anisota works and feel comfortable using it. There are a few oddities that I am hoping to see developed further / understand more.

The sItemsound generator - This is definitely one of the more hit features of anisota. I love it on my computer, but don't typically use it on my phone. I am curious how the soundscape collection will change over time.

Items - I mentioned them in qualms, but I could see a world where they feel more useful and interesting than they do now.

Moths - It would be so cool if i could see a photo of the moths I have collected.

Leveling up - Through using anisota, I've unlocked a few features and settings, I wonder what else there is left to unlock at this point.

Reactions / Lexicon extensions - As mentioned in the header, I am writing this on leaflet because anisota has a leaflet integration. It also shows dame's cancellation lexicon and can create post lists. This sort of independent experimentation with non-bluesky lexicons is one of the most exciting things to me about third-party clients, most of which do very little. One easy lift in my opinion would be to allow reactions other than just likes. Emojis would be easy, but they could also be moth themed moods.

Anyways, huge shoutout to dame for building this incredible client from scratch,