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Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

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Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#81

Post by sangnoir »

dingnuts wrote: post #53
sangnoir wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots with advertising, and is marketed by major companies as a huge "improvement" or "user need" (to sell more ads) You might have inadvertently fallen for the fallacy of composition. What to describe is only one type of algorithm; one meant to maximize engagement/revenue. Mastodon has the potential for a user-centric "Bring your own algorithm"…

Mastodon simply cannot be that user centric because the user can only control the subset of the Fediverse that your instance is able and allowed to see. Given that single user instances are largely nonviable due to the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks, your choice of homeserver matters more than anything. And of course, there's no good way to…

> the abundance of blocking in the 'verse in lieu of adequate spam controls, which ActivityPub fundamentally lacks

Bring your own algorithm can tackle spam (like adblocks). ActivityPub is flexible enough for Mastodon to build up references to algo-providers.

I've been frustrated by Mastodons slow movement on this, I considered approaching the popular clients to implement this. After all, ad-blockers run entirely on the client. A basic standard can be drawn up that governs how to boost or penalize toots' visibility based on keywords, author or instance, based on an updated list is viable today amd can run entirely on the user's device. Web-based clients are more complex, and require patching the standard Masto server or running in a sidecar.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#82

Post by spartanatreyu »

lxgr wrote: post #64
solarkraft wrote: post #3

Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.

There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all. The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view. Discoverability is another big o…

> The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view.

You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.

All the old content remains on the old account/server, and all the new content/notifications appear on the new account/server.

They have a "soft-migrate" (as opposed to a "hard-migrate" where all your activity would be migrated across to the new server) because Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub standard which has more than just Mastodon using it. Since it's an open standard, there are already proposals underway to allow the hard-migrate behavior, but it would be able to support Mastodon and all other compatible ActivityPub apps, not just Mastodon by itself.

> Mastodon's approach is firmly stuck in a past where sysadmins completely rule their respective kingdoms, and that distinction runs deep to the core protocol level and is, I'd argue, not fixable.

I see this as a feature, not a bug.

I'd rather have a reddit (before the great '23 moderator purge and subsequent death spiral) style moderation where each fifedom (e.g. subreddit/mastodon instance) has it's own rules and moderators that actually care about the designated content (e.g. cooking, gamedev, etc...) in their fifedom where the moderators are part of the community and the community can discuss and vote on rule changes.

As opposed to:

A facebook style moderation where the mods are a faceless corporation and where reporting something equals a filling out a form of preset answers which don't allow for further explanations and having maybe 3% of anything actually getting fixed.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#84

Post by duxup »

bachmeier wrote: post #63

> lack of algorithmic curation They can get that elsewhere. Mastodon will never win that battle. It's not wrong to want algorithms feeding you content, it's just that Mastodon will always be like the tenth best option for those users, and they always will be. Mastodon's advantage is with users that don't want posts written for algorithms. (I used Twitter that way for many years, but when they killed off Tweetdeck I v…

Yeah I’m all for good algorithms…. Especially if I can pick / have some control.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#85

Post by lxgr »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #82
lxgr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are fundamental problems with their model resulting from their architecture that I don't see them tackle at all. The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick (and picking is not easy). The latter is forgivable, but the former (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't, in my view. Discoverability is another big o…

> The most important one is that both your identity and your data are tied to whichever instance you pick [...] (i.e. the fact that you can't "port out" from an uncooperating server) really isn't [forgivable], in my view. You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account. All the old content remains on the old account/server,…

> You can "soft-migrate" to another Mastodon account and server my creating your new account, then pointing your old account to your new account.

Yes, on a cooperating outbound server. If it disappears, your handle is permanently gone, with no way for you to put up a redirect.

Contrast this with DNS-based handles on Bluesky, for example. All I need to do to change hosting providers there is changing a TXT record.

> I'd rather have a reddit [...] style moderation

Sure, that model works well in some situations, but why unnecessarily tangle content moderation with content and handle hosting?

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#86

Post by prmoustache »

andypiper wrote: post #4
solarkraft wrote: post #3

Mastodon is on the right track. They’ve been doing so much right, the UX has improved considerably. I think there’s some mainstream appeal, but there are also ecosystem issues that aren’t solved easily, as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important.

My personal experience is that I use a number of other tools (Sill, Murmel, Fediview) to add an "algorithmic curation" of sorts so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see. I think there's something to be said for the ability to have that added externally rather than built-in to the core. I guess I see both sides of the value of that kind of curation here; I definitely don't love it when I don't have a le…

> so that I don't miss content I might have wanted to see.

I think people should start by learning again that missing stuff is ok.

I sometimes spend a week or two without checking my mastodon feed, and there is no way I will try to catch up. I was much more miserable when I was addicted to content.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#88

Post by prmoustache »

andreamonaco wrote: post #19

I'm not very optimistic about the technical direction of Mastodon. Mastodon had a minimal HTML-only interface before, you could read posts and replies of each profile. They removed it some time ago, now you just see a blank page if you don't have JS, and I think it's a huge mistake; it was a clear albeit small advantage over mainstream social networks.

Note that you don't have to use the UI of your chosen instance. You can use whatever client you like, be it a web, desktop gui, mobile gui, tui or cli.

Re: Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO

#90

Post by dredmorbius »

runako wrote: post #36
WorldMaker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as well as a lack of algorithmic curation, which a lot of people deem very important. Twitter ran for enough of its early years without that and it still had "mainstream appeal". (Blogs and RSS for even more years.) I'm happier without algorithmic curation. I think a lot of people over-estimate what algorithmic curation is worth to them. Partly because algorithmic curation is a big business, tied in pretzel knots w…

I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least. I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon. Also some people p…

The solution to this for me is lists, though there are other options.

Lists group profiles, and I tend to have 2--4 of these, mostly organised by priority / interest, and explicitly NOT organised topically. Roughly, there's A, B, C, and maybe D. This is a system I'd come up with at Google+ and Diaspora*, and find it fits Mastodon pretty well.

I try to keep A limited to 20---40 people / accounts of greatest interest. That evolves over time, in part as people join or leave Mastodon, or as my own interests / frustrations shift.

B are still generally interesting but not as interesting. C and D are filled as I find profiles really aren't bringing me joy in A or B.

Mastodon lets you pin threads (in the traditional/power-user view), so I'll usually have 1--3 of my lists pinned to the display, unpinning as I find them distracting.

Other options are to use filters, to focus on your own instance's local users (if that's sufficiently topical), or to use various group systems (Guppe is the principle tool I use, there are others: https://a.gup.pe/>).

Note that for topical filtering you're far better off using either keyword filters or group/community systems such as Guppe. As was learnt many times over at Google+ (and its Circles feature), people don't know how you've classified them, and may have little interest in accommodating your ontologies. (People yelling at others for not conforming to how the yeller had organised the others got to be a rather amusing if cringe trope on G+, that site's equivalent of "you're holding it wrong".)

Other tools include limiting reshares by people or within lists, and of course, muting and blocking profiles. I'm of the block early and often school.

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