Why people who park illegally can probably continue to park illegally without being bothered by me
I read a discussion on Mastodon about sidewalks being blocked by illegally parked cars. It mentions weg.li, a tool for reporting illegal parking. I have had other, similar apps and then never used them or only used them once, for example one for reporting irregularities at my place of residence. It happens too rarely so it can’t become a habit, instead I forget the app exists.
But right now I’m motivated by reading the Mastodon discussion. To my surprise, there is no link to an app on the weg.li site. You can only register. There are many ways to do this:
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I choose email out of habit, but I’m kindly warned in advance:
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I don’t want that because the redirection from kulturindustrie.com to gmail.com means it can take a quarter of an hour for my email to arrive. For that reason, and out of curiosity because I’ve never seen this as a sign-up method, I choose Telegram. Things happen that I didn’t take a screenshot of. This is what remains in the chat with “Telegram” in the Telegram messenger:
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It feels exotic, like in a parallel universe in which different registration procedures have developed than the email address + password thing I’m used to.
Unfortunately, the fact that there is no app will probably cause me to forget everything straight away. Readers who like to park incorrectly can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not that I prefer apps in general, I really like doing everything without apps, in the browser. But for matters like this where I probably won’t remember the day after tomorrow that weg.li exists and I wanted to use it, I need the app to help me remember. (Although it’s not very reliable either, I regularly find apps on my cell phone that I must have installed at some point for similar reasons and that I have no memory of.)
Oliver Laumann suggests in the editorial chat that I could also “put a shortcut on a website on the home screen, then it feels like an app?”
I’ve thought about that too, but I’m kind of reluctant to do it. Maybe because I occasionally do it for my mother on her iPad for the exact same reason, “look old lady, even you can remember it that way.” On the other hand, I really like doing other age-related things, like setting all font sizes to “as large as possible.”
Maybe it’s not so much ageism as my historical aversion to having everything made into an app or disguised as an app that’s fighting against my actual habits here.
Addition: “These shortcuts are not a crutch at all, but as a PWA they are hot and, above all, politically most desirable shit. Since the vast majority of apps are no longer native anyway, but only PWA with a browser included, it makes little difference in the options in the app, but gives you more privacy and makes it easier to publish apps that Apple and Google don’t do so well fit.” (Nicolai von Neudeck near Mastodon)
(Kathrin Passig)