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Exploring Mastodon

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Re: Exploring Mastodon

#241

Post by dredmorbius »

kragen wrote: post #240
dredmorbius wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more than others, but most certainly not all. Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another…

Yep, I hope it continues working.

It's worth noting that whilst the present migration is still in process, the magnitude is approximately 1/5 of extant profiles. That's more Academic than AOL scale. (1 million new profiles on a base of about 5 million.) Based on past history, perhaps 20% will remain, though how many of the extant profiles themselves are active I'm not sure (I suspect probably also ~20%, which means it all washes out).

At the time of the September that Never Ended, Usenet was ~1m total users (based on data from John Quarterman's The Matrix (1990) citing DEC researcher Brian Reid, which I've referenced in earlier HN comments). I believe AOL at the time was at least of an equivalent magnitude, if not several times this.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#242

Post by giantrobot »

rchaud wrote: post #239
giantrobot wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be real though, nested directories aren't necessarily the best way to organize or find documents. In an era where systems support tagging, full text search, and other graph connections between files nested folder structures aren't necessary for everyone. They're a conceptual holdover from a different time with much more limited means to persist data. That's not to say they're obsolete but it's not necessary for…

For me, folder structures in Windows and MS-DOS helped me grasp the basics of information architecture. That is still how most website URLs work. Even if websites are now database-driven CMSes, and not actual folders on a web server, URLs are still written in that way to give both humans and search engines an idea of the structure of the site. I would posit that it's easier to understand things like objects, arrays a…

You're not wrong. At least not for yourself. At the same time a lot of web-based apps and even local apps don't necessarily work on directory hierarchies.

In many cases hierarchies are just ceremony or boilerplate that slow down a user. Say a note taking application. It can store the actual notes in a database that can sync between machines and the web. Using search to find notes, especially if it supports some sort of inline tagging like hashtags, is faster for the user than trying to come up with some folder hierarchy. Hierarchies also are inconvenient when documents straddle multiple categories. Grouping by tags let a note/document exist in multiple categories without reorganizing everything.

Thirty years ago the only "view" into storage was directories and files. File systems were relatively sparse in terms of metadata support. Directory hierarchies were the only tool for organization. Information Retrieval systems were all about adding an over the top database and document indexing system on shitty sparse file systems.

Today a lot of those Information Retrieval concepts are rolled into online storage systems (Google Docs etc). So hierarchies aren't the primary organization unit since they're not the only mechanism the backing store has for organization.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#243

Post by pwinnski »

solanav wrote: post #234
pwinnski wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I know that to see content about X, I connect to the X discord server, and to see content about Y, I connect to the Y discord server, and so on. But to message someone, I don't need to know or care what server they're on, or where I know them from. I just message username#uid, and that's it. Discord is different enough from other tools that many people are confused by it. But even then, Mastodon is different en…

How is "I just message username#uid" different from "I just message username@instance"?

Okay, taking this at face value.

I load Discord, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and right there is a text box for me to start typing a direct message to them. Alternatively, there's a "Direct Messages" option in my left toolbar where I can hit "+" to start a conversation with any "Friend."

I load mastodon, and I see someone's post, and I think to myself, I should message that person. So I click their username, and then on their profile page, I click the three dots and choose the "Direct message" option. So that's not quite as direct, but not too bad. Alternatively, there's a "Direct messages" option in my right toolbar where... all I see is "You don't have any direct messages yet. When you send or receive one, it will show up here." No options to start one from here, and no friends list here. Hmm, there's a "Follows and followers" sidebar link which takes me to the expected list of people, and then I guess I can click on their profiles and again navigate to the three dots, and... huh, this person doesn't actually have a "Direct message" option there. Okay, maybe that person doesn't accept DMs, at least from me. Let me try someone who is following me back. I click their name and... their profile doesn't have a three-dots link. Oh, in fact several of these don't.

Well, I guess I don't actually know how to DM most people on mastodon. Let me try something else. If I go to Notifications, and since I have "show every option" enabled, I can see just my "follows," and I can click on those names, and yes, there I have the three dots and can DM people.

So maybe I can only DM people who follow me? Or who have showed up in my notifications? No, there, if I am looking in my timeline view, then I can get to the three dots for anybody.

Anyway, perhaps it seems like I'm making this too complicated, but I assure you that I won't be the only one wondering why "Direct messages" doesn't let me send direct messages, or why sometimes I can see contact options and sometimes I can't!

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#244

Post by kragen »

dredmorbius wrote: post #241
kragen wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I hope it continues working.

It's worth noting that whilst the present migration is still in process, the magnitude is approximately 1/5 of extant profiles. That's more Academic than AOL scale. (1 million new profiles on a base of about 5 million.) Based on past history, perhaps 20% will remain, though how many of the extant profiles themselves are active I'm not sure (I suspect probably also ~20%, which means it all washes out). At the time of…

That sounds right.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#245

Post by roywiggins »

dredmorbius wrote: post #216
roywiggins wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's confusing if someone posts a Mastodon handle on eg Twitter. If it's a link to their profile, you can't follow them on that page . You have to go to your own instance and paste their handle into the search box and follow them that way.

That is a legit UX annoyance, yes. Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs. Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.

Oh, and I should add, it doesn't work if you ended up on an instance that doesn't federate with the one that your followee is on. And the UI for that is "it just doesn't show up in search."

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#246

Post by dredmorbius »

roywiggins wrote: post #245
dredmorbius wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a legit UX annoyance, yes. Similarly, local-to-your-instance links to a specific toot, vs. globally-accessible / canonical toot URLs. Both can be resolved through the Search dialogue on Mastodon, but it took me a while to work that out myself.

Oh, and I should add, it doesn't work if you ended up on an instance that doesn't federate with the one that your followee is on. And the UI for that is "it just doesn't show up in search."

Much of the feedback around blocking (instances and profiles) is less than transparent, some of which is by design.

Fully-transparent blocking tends to play to the interests of griefers, abusers, and trolls.

For many instances, blocks are listed on the /about/more page of the instance. Mind that you'd also have to check to see if the remote instance is blocking your own.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#247

Post by dredmorbius »

vidarh wrote: post #238
dredmorbius wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. And yeah, that's ... very roughly ... my understanding. Though a relay would have multiple instance's feeds, ideally. One question I have is whether or not larger instances might serve as gating relays for smaller ones. Sort of a hub-and-spoke / leafnode (w/ reference to the Usenet utility intentional) concept. Reading now ... And yes, relays do of course serve multiple instances. I find the "instances wantin…

Yeah, hub and spoke absolutely makes sense. I think in general, though, the relays are a bit of a hack in the sense that they're papering over poor discoverability and search mostly. It makes sense to have some nodes on the network with the ability to serve up search results for a reasonable fraction of the network, but most small instances have only very limited use for taking a large feed once people have followed…

Mastodon search is so limited anyway that it's almost a non-issue.

Though relays for tracking hashtags and finding members of smaller instances should be useful.

Re: Exploring Mastodon

#248

Post by simfree »

skybrian wrote: post #141
simfree wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing the federated timeline, searching by hashtag and looking at who other people you know are following is the discoveability mechanism. Unlike Twitter, ActivityPub sites generally don't beat you over the head with follow recommendations. The goal is not to get you mentally addicted to spending hours a day on Social Media.

That doesn't help at all for following a particular person. (For example, consider finding the account of a band that you already know.) A Google search is probably the most common discovery mechanism. Once people start putting their Mastodon addresses on their web pages, it will start getting easier.

Google has terrible indexing of Fediverse posts. Your better off just using a large instance to search from.
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