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How Does Mastodon Work?

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Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#161

Post by wild_preference »

Vinnl wrote: post #132
intothemild wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that first wave are huge with using content warnings for the silliest of things. [cw: food] I ate a burrito I've since disabled content warnings, because I think it gets in the way.. But then it fails the second and third waves, because they post childporn and sex ads.. So I've ended up blocking pawoo.net and switter.at Which is kinda the problem on mastodon, there's nothing in between silly content warnings wri…

I think the Content Warning thing is a different "problem". People in my timeline say they're using it in order to not clutter your timeline, i.e. you can quickly scan the headline ("I ate a burrito") to determine whether you want to read the rest. Ironically, that might be because Mastodon allows longer posts :P Perhaps they'd need to implement a summary tag or something, so that people can configure their clients t…

Then it sounds like an option that should exist when reading your feed rather than something that requires the action of each individual person per tweet.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#162

Post by [deleted] »

Vinnl wrote: post #131
apatters wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the adoption pattern and growth rate of Mastodon, it has around 1.5M users, the majority of which have arrived via three big waves. The first wave was people with left wing identities who were tired of being harassed on mainstream platforms like Twitter. The second wave was Japanese lolicon enthusiasts (without diving too deep down this rabbit hole, lolicon is a popular but weird and nerdy thing to be…

I don't see how the story about the waves and about users not fitting in would lead to less outrage. Sure, by being able to block (groups of) people, they might not come in contact with the people they are outraged about as much. However, the main thing that seems to turn Twitter/Facebook and now Mastodon into an outrage machine is exactly only seeing their own circles. That's what I'm currently observing at Mastodon…

[deleted]

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#163

Post by skybrian »

intothemild wrote: post #109
jancsika wrote: post #60

> Well, finding the right one is very difficult That sounds like a rather critical UX bug. Just give me the instance I should sign up on in the "sign up" area of mastodon.social. Use what you think is the most suitable algorithm to cycle through a list of "appropriate" instances, where you-- the people with domain experience-- define "appropriate" for the potential user. Otherwise you end up with this passive-aggress…

there's two solutions to this already, the official one: https://joinmastodon.org/ and the alternative: https://instances.social/

Neither of these do what I want. Preferably I'd like to see something like a Wirecutter review.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#164

Post by rainbowmverse »

intothemild wrote: post #116
subdivisions wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The potential for division in the fediverse as a whole is worse. On twitter, there were McCarthyesque, opaquely curated user blacklists to worry about. A conglomerated instance could enforce this kind of arbitrary censorship across entire communities by imposing rules on who their federation partners can federate with, and control network disruption by refusing to federate with new, <100 user instances under the excu…

The blocklists are equally as McCarthyesque.. I remember being on mastodon when the second wave of users hit (pawoo.net). Suddenly overnight we had to worry about what was on our servers cache.. suddenly there was lolicon porn, which might be legal in japan, but outside it could be illegal. So naturally blocklist's appeared, blocking all the new wave of Japanese servers. I remember there was a disagreement between th…

I think this is what led to instance muting. Now admins can mute an instance, but people can still opt in to following someone there, probably without caching.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#165

Post by rainbowmverse »

Mindwipe wrote: post #137
kowdermeister wrote: post #103

I found a survey about Mastodon: https://medium.com/@cassolotl/a-mastodon-survey-ac74948765c7 It says the main reason for not joining / abandoning is lack of friends. And also hard to use which doesn't help pulling in more people, so no friends, then a downward spiral. Is there a way out?

I feel like a simple plugin that pulled in your public Twitter friends usernames and offered to follow anyone with the same username @mastodon.social would really help here. Pretty hard for Twitter to stop it if it were a client that scraped the list too.

It exists. https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#166

Post by colordrops »

robjan wrote: post #114
colordrops wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A (distributed?) search that crawls the federated network and indexes toots could be the killer feature that grows adoption. The search API could be seemlessly integrated into any mastodon client. Or does such a thing already exist? My short experience with it made it seem hard to find anything.

The developers have avoided implementing full text searching to reduce the risk of harassment

There's no reason a third party couldn't do it.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#167

Post by intothemild »

wild_preference wrote: post #161
Vinnl wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Content Warning thing is a different "problem". People in my timeline say they're using it in order to not clutter your timeline, i.e. you can quickly scan the headline ("I ate a burrito") to determine whether you want to read the rest. Ironically, that might be because Mastodon allows longer posts :P Perhaps they'd need to implement a summary tag or something, so that people can configure their clients t…

Then it sounds like an option that should exist when reading your feed rather than something that requires the action of each individual person per tweet.

Yes there needs to be a global "disable all CW/Spoilers/ETC"

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#170

Post by rainbowmverse »

glenstein wrote: post #106
mobilehnuser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's bad design or not this is one of the aspects of Mastodon that appeals to me the most. The friction is just enough to stop the context collapse that plagues Twitter

Right. I'm also a fan of friction any time I hear an argument that "well, [bad behavior] is inevitable, so you may as well purposely include it and design it to be easy to do!" We've seen that design can shape behavior in profound ways, and we have no obligation whatsoever to follow pressure toward a lowest common denominator if we think there are better designs that consciously resist that pressure.

Yep. I don't think it's coincidence that Twitter's slide started right around when they started giving you notifications for likes/retweets of retweets and replies when before it was only for your own posts. Then it got worse with quote tweeting.
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