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Re: Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isnā€™t

An interesting post from last summer that I didnā€™t see until now:

The most commonā€”but usually not the onlyā€”response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 repliesā€”had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured.

Iā€™m not happy that Fedi is this way. There was an ā€œanti-Septemberā€ frenzy last summer when people were scared that CWs were gonna go away etc.

I am partially culpable for this since I sometimes scold people for no alt text.

I wish this could change (in a healthy way, ofcā€”there are plenty of ways a change could go south).

For me, it was that Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability. One of the things I loved most about Twitter was the way it could throw things in front of me that I never would have even thought to go look for on my own.

Right. I love this part of Mastodon. I think itā€™s the main reason Iā€™m even on here. I donā€™t get a constant flow of things to discover.

The new Explore tab that Mastodon has introduced is especially toxic since itā€™s the same on every instance (that has that enabled).

Algorithms are bad for two reasons:

1. The addictive flow of moremoremore. I donā€™t get that on here and I think thatā€™s great. I can go read books or catch up on Campaign 3 or something.

2. The curation. Remember that post that went around a while ago about how in science fiction, thereā€™s a huge gap between the well-known, best-selling authors vs the second tier. Being among the ā€œsecond-bestā€ selling authors means basically no-one reads you. Same thing happens on social where some posts go absolutely viral. Itā€™s lagom that posts do that on their own, that they do it via boosting/reblogging. We donā€™t need a page that takes the most amplified posts and amplifies them even further.

However. I do have some fondness for groups and web forums. Once groups work a liā€™l better, thatā€™s gonna be able to replace hashtags in a good way and be a good replacement for subreddits, tumblr tags, phpBB sites and so on. FEP-1b12.

The next big cluster includes group #3, too confusing/too much work getting started, group #5, felt siloed/federation worked badly, and group #7, instance selection was too hard/intimidating.

OMG yes. This is a mess. The technical issues are bigger than the social ones.

Problem one is whether it works: Posts gets dropped, go missing, never go through, donā€™t show up. I want it to get much flakier.

Problem two is how it works. Iā€™m browsing the web & Safari and I find a fun liā€™l post on someoneā€™s Masto or Pixelfed. I know how to boost, like, even reply to it and Iā€™ve created a Shortcut (or Bookmarklet) to do so. And figuring that stuff out was not easy.

Until the ā€œFedi linksā€ proposal becomes real, we need an UI that makes it absolovinglutely crystal that A. ā€œhere you can find the permalink to that postā€, and B. ā€œhere is where, in your frontend or app, you paste in that permalink URL to find the postā€.

A, sometimes called ā€œoriginal postā€, is a complete labyrinthine experience worse than GDPR and different on every instance, and B. looks like a ā€œsearchā€ box and you need to somehow have been told that thatā€™s for importing posts.

(And I understand that anytime thereā€™s a technical issue on line thatā€™s partially on me because itā€™s my job to go fix every god damn thing and send patches in order to be a good FOSS citizen but my liā€™l backlog on that is just growing & growing.)

People in this category talked about a seriousness that precluded shitposting or goofiness, and a perceived pressure to stay on topic and be earnest at all times.

Hereā€™s another category where Fedi as it is right now is a pretty good fit for me šŸ’šŸ»ā€ā™€ļø

But once we get groups going people can find their meme groups so they can esspost and goof to their hearts contents there.

And I donā€™t think the Health First school has come to terms with the fact that in an non-authoritarian society, you canā€™t make people choose networks that feel like eating their vegetables over the ones that feel like candy stores

So itā€™s not a win for me that every man, woman and child is on Masto or Fedi. But the goal I have is that itā€™ll work well as open infrastructure not controlled by for-profit interests or deliberate darkpatterns like using addiction psychologists to make your app more addictive. I love email and RSS and if Fedi can become something thatā€™s as reliable of a backbone as those things, thatā€™s a win, thatā€™s a huge win.

Iā€™m getting less and less convinced by the non-authoritarian societyā€™s ability to deal with climate change (not that the authoritarian society does any betterā€”greetings from Sovietā€™s fossil&steel economy) but as Iā€™ve said before, the ancom direct action, federation toolbox, for all its inability to deal with climate change, is pretty good at making your own individual life a liā€™l better with things like worker coops, unions, and labelling for addressing labor issues and with things like rough consensus and running code to get a useful non-toxic smolnet for you & me. It doesnā€™t solve the problem for everyone but it solves it for us.

(That said, our broken climate is a consequence of our broken economics which is a consequence of our broken political system which is a consequence of our broken media, especially social media. So the fact that Meta and Twitter and Google hƄller pƄ with their siloing and their fever-pitching algorithms is ultimately a problem for the entire planet. But on a more direct, short-term level I do not want the Fediverse to become what Twitter was.)

Iā€™m not implying that her post & analysis & conclusions were not good. They were! šŸ‘šŸ»

Mastoā€™s ā€œexploreā€ tab

Books vs Internet

Groups yes, hashtags no