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I'm a mostly uneasy user of social media, at least the real-names kind. Chalk it up to being found online by people I wish would forget me. Most people peg the start of the social media age with Facebook, 2005 or 06, though at that time it was still limited to those at academic institutions. At the time, that's where I was. I remember getting a Facebook invitation from a young woman I TA'd. I'd never heard of it. I signed up. Then, gradually, so did the rest of the world.
On Facebook, it's all real names, and that's true for almost every other site as well. (aliases, for the most part, disallowed, fading with forums - too hard to build up a user profile on doug_the_puffin, olp1996, or pixiestix66)
In the years since, I've tried Myspace, Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky, cohost, Mastodon, to varying degrees of enthusiasm. Twitter was my favourite by far, as I found a real community (poetry) that was actually representative of the wider poetry community. The front page of Twitter (or Reddit, or...) is awful. But in the everything-sites, once you find your community, the whole thing changes. Anyway, I've told this story before. It was good until it wasn't. I figure I got five or six years out of it. I looked at alternatives in late 2022. Threads was a no-go. That left cohost and Mastodon.
And I want cohost to succeed (and subscribe to back that up), but I don't think it will; unless it radically changes, at the very best, it'll just barely break even every year, because a site that's heavy on the shitposting with really poor discovery isn't a long term proposition. That's what cohost doesn't seem to get: you need a way to find your community. For all the problems with Tumblr, at least it was very good at search.
With all that out of the way, Mastodon is the more intriguing option, the site that most normal people try and then bounce off, the site that allows longer posts than Twitter or Bluesky, but is still firmly (for better or worse) a microblogging site. The software and protocol are largely immune to corporate control because instances can, and always are, spun down, spun up. People migrate when they find something better or the admins throw a fit. Bad instances are widely defederated. There are the usual creeps and fascists and dangerous folk, but they're typically contained to a smaller network of servers most people can't see. It's creaky. It's a mess. It's wild. And it works, despite its parts.
How to use the Lists feature on Mastodon
I've been wanting to use Mastodon more, and in the past, something's stood in the way of that. A weird combination of difficult discovery (though not as bad as cohost) and enthusiastic participation, my timeline quickly filled by people who followed me after a reasonably viral post (though I've currently got a little over a third the followers I had on Twitter). I followed back. It seemed the thing to do? Rude not to, so much of what we build being based on reciprocity.
But my feed quickly became overwhelmed. I couldn't scroll fast enough. The software being janky, or just beset with poor logic, it would randomly refresh while I was scrolling, putting me back at the top of my feed. The end result: there was a lot of stuff I was absolutely missing, despite wanting to see it. That's a problem. So I went looking for a solution.
The solution seemed to be Lists: put my few hundred followers into different lists so I can keep track of things. A lot of the people I follow post about what I'd consider to be normal stuff: news, politics, and so on. This is stuff that I want to filter out first. What I really want, in an ideal world, is to be able to move between poetry, games, and tech, dipping back into my wider feed when I've got time.
The problem's in the implementation. Click your Profile, then Following. Okay, now what?
Now, for every person you want to add to a list, you have to click their name, which opens their profile, and from there, click the triple dots, click Add or Remove from lists, then select the list you want to add them to.
Okay, now click Back. We're back on the list of people we're following...oh and Mastodon helpfully refreshes it, putting you back at the top. Have hundreds of followers (or more)? Welcome to hell.
So I made a list of 40 or so people. It was torture. Once I realized that Mastodon was refreshing the Following list every.single.time, I got in the habit of right-clicking, opening each profile in a new tab, adding them to the list that way, closing the tab, continuing on.
That at least spared me the Eternally Refreshing List. But in a half-decently designed piece of software, I wouldn't have to follow these steps to begin with.
It works, but it's awful. It makes me wonder if the people using the software have ever tried to make a list out of a non-trivial following list. Because I burnt a good half an hour on a task that should've taken maybe a minute at most.
Set your preferences - Mastodon documentation
So how would I do it? A dual list selector. Followers not in the list on the left, followers in the list on the right. Click on people, with Add and Remove between the two lists. Nice and stable, lets you work quickly and see your changes. No refreshing unless I refresh.
I harp on this because it's essential, and it's essential because Mastodon has a community problem. People in tech will put up with useful, difficult tech, and Mastodon is therefore a magnet for technical communities. I'm thinking especially of how InfoSec Twitter migrated there en masse. But other types of community are really lacking. The poetry community is one whose absence I keenly felt. For a while, I kept it up with a very small handful of poets from the larger writing community. We offered people invites for specialized servers. We let people know, via our old Twitter profiles and otherwise, where we'd be.
And it didn't work. There was that big jump of users in November 2022. But so few writers stuck around. Here's the pattern: intro post, a few tentative posts the first week, and maybe two or three total after that. The other pattern: an account created to stake out their name, in case this ever became The Place. And it never became the place, and so the accounts sit bare.
The poets collectively decided that Mastodon wasn't it, and I was left trying to figure out where they'd gone. The answer was, the general elsewhere: back to Facebook, back to Instagram, back to Twitter (for the weak-willed, including me for a few months). And to Bluesky, for those who could get an invite. A year and some later, that's still the situation. The online poetry community has collectively fractured. A few of us still hang around on Mastodon. And I don't want to miss anything they post.
So for some that means I turn on notifications. For others, they go into my simple filtered list, which at one point might've been a general poetry list, but now is just a list of people I want to keep up with amidst the noise.
One of my biggest gripes about Mastodon is that it feels like it was designed by people who don't use social media regularly, who aren't, in the parlance, Extremely Online. In a sense, this is good - it provides another perspective on how things could or should work - but it's also bad in terms of how things are designed: they're clunky, they're not streamlined, and when it takes a few clicks to do something simple, this adds up quickly. If something is a pain point, people will notice. If people have more compelling options, they'll simply leave.
One my mutuals on Mastodon, who I first met on Twitter years ago, maybe put it best:
Loves I really wanted Masto to be my place, but it's not. I have caved to the next Dorsey project, probably to my detriment. ... Not nuking this account though, I feel like it's possible we all wind up here anyway.
Stick it out with the tech-centric social network or go to one of the corporate hellholes which, to their credit, actually hire UX specialists? The last year and a half have proven that most people will happily move to whatever site is easiest, regardless of who actually owns it. Even after everything that went on at Twitter, even with the understanding that the most stable centralized platform must eventually collapse. And for those people, Mastodon's difficulties become strikes one, two, and three.