This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.
Rather than trying to head off the unusual unpleasantness about clout-chasers and the ritually/technologically impure, I will just say this:
I wrote this up for fedi people who are actively curious and interested in other people, and I'm not going to worry too much about how it lands for those who aren't.
@kissane I have to say, I understand these people. I'd say that Mastodon is a hard platform for non-tech people to find their place.
Hashtags feel foreign to me, as they aren't used as often (anymore) on other platforms. With Twitter, they are kinda discouraged because of the character limit. It's sometimes hard to find the right hashtags, or even come up with right hashtags for your post.
The "build your own feed" philosophy seems still bit hard for me. The "follow everyone, unfollow if don't like afterwards" also feels bit foreign to me, as on platforms that have a recommendation algorithm, I just follow the people that I want to see the content more often. Like, that person has to prove their worth to me, before I follow them.
From 0, finding people is really, really hard, especially out of your instance. If you have to leave your own home instance to for example view older posts, it might be an other frontend, theme or software even. And interactions from other instances work, well not very greatly without any browser extensions.
I am currently at a point that I have started to get my own little bubble big enough that I have new content on the feed pretty regularly and notifications pretty often (especially now with the release of #Mastopoet). But still I miss being able to scroll away and have new suggestions provided by an algorithm from accounts I haven't seen before. I didn't use Twitter before the algorithm was introduced, so I don't know a time before that.
It would be very likely that I would not have started to use Mastodon actively if it wasn't for @rolle moving here. I actually created my first account on March 2022 on social.isekai.fi, an instance that was deleted at some point, RIP. Oh yes, instances. Didn't even cover them!
Instances allow to have a lot of variety, but for a normal user, they probably don't care that much. For them the most important things are probably:
people there, same interests
rules in which they feel safe
possibly theme
Moving instances is bit difficult, especially if your instance has a WebFingered domain (like social.vivaldi.net being vivaldi.net on Mastodon). Got confused when I transitioned here.
It's also difficult, because your posts don't come along with you. You leave them on the old instance. And instances get deleted sometimes (like the first instance I was on, and the popular mastodo.fi here in Finland soon). You get your followers (if you transfered in time) and your following. Otherwise you are left with a blank slate.
I mean, I like it here. #Mastodon is amazing in it's own ways. I love the API, the developer community here, but I understand it's challenges with the non-techy people. It's just too hard for them to get their feed built and get to that dopamine rush by scrolling.
Twitter and other commercial social media are designed to be addictive. To feed you dopamine. To get you to be more active and use the platform more, to get more ad revenue. Mastodon doesn't aim for that, so people get withdrawal symptoms and resort back to Twitter or other social media.
@gimulnautti@kissane@rolle It's more chill. Lower barrier, no need to try optimize posts for the algorithm, because there ain't one.
Over the last few days I have found the fun in Mastodon and the community when developing #Mastopoet , before that I used it more randomly, to check what rolle has posted, etc. But I haven't really touched Twitter in the last few days, just to inform people I'm now here.
Seems like I have got enough dopamine from the interactions to the #Mastopoet posts 😎. And I enjoyed a lot creating a tool for the community, and to see people actually use it.
This also is because of some other things about my projects in the past not getting finished/released properly, and this project now being finally in a good state.
I enjoy writing here a lot. Thankfully on #MementoMoriSocial we have the 10k character limit here, even though I have wrote only about 4000 characters in a single post, this far. I probably should write more. I tend to write very long posts, this also being over 1000 characters now. Whoops. Just get the inspiration and feel to write for some reason.
@raikas Glad you got that feeling with #Mastopoet ❤️ for me it's been that with open source in general but Mastodon has kinda boosted it x100 like with #MastodonBirdUI and other tools.
But not only that, the instant reactions and more natural discourse are great here. I agree everything what you said about the barriers, well put.
As I'm someone who has lived through the growth of the Intenet, I really believe we can achieve the mindset of learning things again, the new more healthy and natural way of using social media. I like this movement and I hope this change continues. I'd like to see that someday people see what nowadays Intenet is doing to us. I'm hopeful.
I think it's crucial that we don't conflate "algos" with "evil algos," but also that whatever we do with recommendations and non-chrono feeds be handled with the kind of care we use with explosives.
@kissane@rolle But I have to say, I would never be this active on Twitter. The atmosphere there is just too oppressive? (don't know if that's the right term). It feels like that every time you tweet, you have the obligation to provide some value to your followers. You have to either create quality, professional tweets or entirely shitposts and parody.
@kissane On Mastodon, but also on other platforms too regarding topics that interest me also (like politics, city planning, etc), but that I know some of my followers don't give a shit about them, so I don't feel like talking about them, boosting posts about them, etc. because I have a feeling that I need to provide that kind of content that they are interested in and have received in the past from me to my followers.
This also goes bit to the Content Warning side probably, but I don't feel like using them. It's a hassle for the people that are interested in them to click every one of them open. Some people create multiple accounts, but I find it a hassle also to maintain multiple accounts and feeds.
@kissane I was part of the Twitter Migration immediately after the ownership change was confirmed. I took the easy route of joining mastodon.social instead of researching much. The few others I considered were closed to new people because of the migration. It took me a while to follow enough people to see an interesting feed, but it was similar to Twitter when I joined it in 2010.
@kissane Personally I never experienced incidences of being yelled at for breaking norms that I didn't know existed. It certainly would have turned me right off.
I was able to adjust more gradually. Maybe it is worse if someone comes in during a large migration? Or maybe I was just lucky.
something I didn't have room for in the post itself is that a non-tiny group of people have had instances blow up on them over the years, leaving them starting over again and again—this is especially destructive for newer folks, who don't always understand what's happening
@HarkMahlberg@kissane I could see that being helpful to some folks. Though we also have to understand that for a lot of people when an app kerplodes it's just done and they move on (ex: Vine, Google+, MySpace) and the technical aspects of switching servers is not something that's been normalized for more than a decade. If Threads does connect to the Fediverse that could help to change paradigms, but otherwise I'm not sure how to do it quick-ish.
Lastly! I squeaked this post in under a rapidly dropping door—I'm going to be really busy for a day or so and then offline for awhile. If you ask questions after today and don't hear back, that's probably why!
Please be cool with each other and don't make me come back to screaming fights in my replies. <3
I said "lastly" but then my replies become almost immediately overwhelming. It's great that a lot of people like this/want to argue about it/are thinking about it!
But I am just one brain so I'm going to miss a lot of things, apologies.
@kissane I’m confused that people wouldn’t research how it works. Twitter used to work entirely by hashtags and that’s what you need to do here. Instagram does still, although Facebook no longer does. And you can follow people on different instances if you learned how that works. Social Media apps aren’t all the same. Why would they be? That said, there are always going to be lazy folks who don’t like being able to customize their sm experiences.
@schoolingdiana@kissane The average user won't research, because they don't have to on commercial social media; algorithms will make them feel like they see stuff they want to see anyway.
@kissane it's interesting to see those perspectives - as someone who primarily uses Mastodon to keep in touch with a small group of people who I mostly already know, the problems of "discovering random people" and being on a lecture-y instance passed me by.
The frustration I find is "too many architects, not enough builders" - I find it hard to engage with people outside my immediate circle because too many want to act like they're in charge of the fediverse rather than chat and have fun.
@kissane thank you again for your humane and human approach to qualitative research, and your lucidity. The fediverse needs this, though I'm not sure it has earned it.
It was very difficult to sign up. I didn't understand and it took a week to get approval for my first account. I kept trying. I didn't have a clue I was picking different instances, I was just trying to get on. I have 3 accounts now
Search. It seems bad actors migrate to common instances and since I can block an entire instance it seems controllable at this stage. The mods on my instances do a good job. I would really like search.
Content warnings. I got my very first dick pic ever on Mastodon. I can't explain the levels of violation and disgust I felt. That's extreme but maybe frogs scare me too. I wish we could put a content warning on already published items on my own timeline and not have to mute or scroll fast.
As a user I would like to setup a filter that placed keywords behind a content warning. Including using programming or AI to assign a basic description such as food or reptile. Or have some check boxes to easily select when posting. I know this won't help with text readers.
@kissane Thanks for this, it was interesting and lines up with how I was feeling but without knowing if those feelings were shared. I'm happy on Masto because (with my librarian background) I feel like I can massage the tool to get at what I want discoverability-wise but it's easy to see how others might not have that same confidence or skill set. Also somewhat I've just been really really lucky with my instance and read a GREAT onboarding document early on and those things are so important.
@jessamyn Oooh this makes me even more interested in the opportunity to improve the early masto experience through better onboarding docs, I’ll ask about the glammr one!
@kissane Yes, while I love my instance they're not the ones that made the onboarding document, that was a more general purpose one and I'll see if I could track it down. It was nicely thorough.
@Agent661@kissane If it's smaller instances the obvious answer would be the owner of the one server in their living room said "fuck it, I don't want to deal with this anymore".
That was it for me, even though I haven't left Mastodon, and I don't intend to leave.
I'm only trying Bluesky because someone gave me an invite code. That person also tried Mastodon, but they couldn't stand the HOA vibe/etiquette policing.
It's nice to have a place not named Twitter that (hopefully) won't be shutdown over some admin or moderation drama [mastodon.lol], or be the target of a defederation campaign [mastodon.social].
@kissane Maybe try speaking more for yourself, as I find NONE of the things you mention stressful about this place, and definitely DON'T want an algorithm showing me posts it calculates are in my interest, since 99% of the time, it will be wrong. Instance picking is a literal 5-minute issue that disappears as soon as you pick an instance, which is not difficult to do. And since most of the rules AREN'T RULES, they're opinions, you can ignore those just as easily as anything else.
@kissane There still a bunch of us that don't have a problem with anything you mentioned. Think that it might be you for like 10 seconds. More rules are going to mean more #enshittification, especially begging for an algorithm.
Whoa, there. Take a deep breath, big guy. You're freaking out.
I know you're smart enough to realize that you not having a problem doesn't mean that other people don't have a problem. That's pretty basic logic.
I appreciate you're feeling all hostile because you don't want to see the Fediverse changed, and, you're not wrong in recognizing this is in fact a call to change how things work. Erin's report is an argument that things should be different around here for the sake of people who aren't you, and I can certainly see how that would be marginalizing as hell.
Are you just having a knee jerk reaction to the idea of change at all, or is there something specific here that rubs you the wrong way?
@whknott@kissane Wyatt, read the room eh? Maybe you'd be a more successful writer if you learned to walk in others shoes?
Anyway the point of her post wasn't to speak for everyone, it was to gather some insights into other people's experiences of the platform. Your experience differs, as does mine. It wasn't meant to be scientific or authoritative either.
But as your kind of proving the Time To Scalding is quite small on Mastodon if you don't follow everyone's individual ruleset
@kissane
I'm seeing the first one happening more and more over on B-sky these days. There's a lot of "Oh, I can't talk about my art or work? I don't know the etiquette here yet" after they get yelled at for "marketing" or some such.
@kissane While being yelled at is not fun and likely needs to be cut down, a lot of these other things subtly point towards key differences in what people want from a social network. I'm noting two big divides.
Number 1: a lot of people want to be tracked. They don't say it explicitly, but they're asking for features that only work if the network is doing tracking.
Number 2: people want the "right to post", but they really don't want to be partake of the governance required...
@kissane I really think the whole instance thing is needlessly stressful. Masto makes a big deal about it, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. You can follow people across instances just fine. The only thing that matters from a new user perspective is number of characters per toot and bespoke emojis.
Instance picking felt like I had define my identity by one thing. Then it turned out, it doesnt seem to matter, which is exactly what you’d wonder if the instance was well run
@robotmonkeys@kissane I’m new to the fediverse. And the 1 thing that is confusing to me is, you say you can follow others and read posts across instances. But how do you find those people? Where do you go to see them or to follow them or to read posts. Something like Instagram or Twitter has an algorithm that shows you things that it thinks you might like. here you have to go looking.
@Tekk@kissane same way you find them anywhere else. Look at who gets boosted and people you know and who they follow. My experience is that you need only one or two seeds to create a decent follow list.
I say that as someone that managed to import a partial list from Twitter before it was shut down, but honestly I try not to look back, and instead find all new people.
@Tekk
It will show you posts from other instances too... That your instance has a history of federation (in this case, fetching content). If you see solo instance accounts making their introduction posts and asking to be boosted, that's basically why.
The rate of fetching however may not be so fast - the technical reasoning I can't follow but it seems based on which instances yours 'talk' to a lot. @robotmonkeys@kissane
@Tekk
> Something like Instagram or Twitter has an algorithm that shows you things that it thinks you might like. here you have to go looking
A lot of folks are pretty traumatised by The Algorithms, thanks to their time on the DataFarms. So there's a strong aversion to them here. But 'chrological order, from most recent' is an algorithm. So is 'one post from each person followed by people I follow'. There's plenty of ways we could add serendipity.
@kissane everyone says this and I really disagree. Instances determine community norms, who you’re federated with, and crucially, who you can discover! I like math, and so I’d like to see posts about math, but because no one uses tags it’s not easy to find them. Instead what I have to do is open mathstodon.xyz in one tab and be constantly pasting links from there to another tab where I’m signed in on my instance, and that’s just a nonstarter on mobile.
It’s like reddit if you had to sign up for each subreddit separately.
@robotmonkeys
> I really think the whole instance thing is needlessly stressful. Masto makes a big deal about it, but honestly it doesn’t really matter
Yes and no. Some people have had the experience of joining a "Safe Space" server, then finding the friends they want to talk to are on a server it's blocked. Or to avoid that, joining a "Freeze Peach" server, and getting dogpiled by griefers. It's not the be all and end all, but it's misleading to say it doesn't matter.
@kissane I find it interesting having seen hundreds of people on bluesky argue for their "right" to use ableist slurs this week are also possibly the same people that had a hard time with feeling picked on because someone asked them to use a CW.
that part i actually like, and consider it part of figuring out the social structures of a new social media. for me I've been more into bluesky definitely because of discoverability and its simplicity
@Fullnihilism Maybe! I block a LOT of people on Bluesky for shit like that, so I feel like that should reduce some of the worst nonsense, but I'm sure some slip through.
A couple were scientists talking about their work and being told to CW, several wanted to talk about their experiences with racism or their transitions and got yelled at. Probably a mix.
@kissane yeah those instances are not ok at all, I want to be clear. but I have seen many people that have complained about that (being chided for not using a CW or following various rules they werent aware of) that are also the people arguing to be able to use ableist slurs which were overwhelmingly a majority of mutual followers, it was kind of shocking.
@kissane I think the best way to make instance-picking more accessible for people is to make it so that instances have a description built right into their representation as a server or whatever, and make it so that those descriptions can have hashtags in them. That way, on joinmastodon.org or whatever, someone could just put in all the hashtags they're interested in and get a list of the instances that share the most amount of those hashtags. Maybe a standardized way to format and present moderation rules and instance values would be great too. Not necessarily something that's like built with software but just kind of a template that everyone can use if they want to to make it easier to scan.
@anarchopunk_girl Totally agree, I think there needs to be a lot more information and a lot of it needs to be better structured. I also suggested elsewhere that fedi is eventually going to need a reputation system, but culture here is SUPER not ready for that yet, with all the drama.
@kissane
It's happening slowly, but in a very gossipy way. At some point we're going to need a fedi_wank community, and as it is, some people are going to be accidental lorekeepers, tripping their way into becoming the Lainey Gossip of their side of the fediverse. @anarchopunk_girl
Hey, @kissane , thanks for doing all this research!
Regarding the issue of what is described as the difficulty of finding people on Mastodon: I'm struck by the fact I'm not certain what people are talking about when they invoke that, because off the top of my head I can think of three [edit: make that four] [edit: no wait make that five] extremely different things they might be alluding to:
"How do I find the Mastodon presence of somebody I know from some other context?" For instance, a friend or colleague or fan of yours might find themselves thinking, "I hear Erin is on Mastodon somewhere; how can I find her in follow her there?" They may be coming to the Fediverse with the Twitter-conditioned assumption that they should be able to type your name into the search box, and have it turn up your Mastodon identity. If I understand federation right, that works fine on bigger instances, & terribly on smaller ones.
"How do I find all of the people I used to follow on some other platform?" (Presumably Twitter.) This is related to the previous sense of "finding people", but I don't think anybody would consider it really satisfactory to have to manually search on every member of a, say, thousand-person follow list. It's really the question, "How do I auto-populate my follows here based on my follows on Twitter or somewhere else, to reconstitute my Twitter experience here on the fediverse?"
"How do I find a particular scene to become a part of it?" One of the valuable emergent phenomena on Twitter (and a different but similar thing is true of Reddit) is the ability to participate in "$thing Twitter": Black Twitter, Librarian Twitter, Fashion Twitter, Epidemiologist Twitter, etc. As I am not really a Twitter user myself, I'm unclear on how that actually happens and how people connect with it. Something something hashtags?
As I understand it (admittedly as an outsider looking in, i.e. maybe wrongly!) people can go looking for and engaging with these emergent communities without any intention or need to follow all of the members manually, or even follow them at all because... hashtags maybe? Algorithm? Search terms?
"How do I meet new interesting people that I have something in common with and with whom I can start up a friendly acquaintanceship? How can I find new people to socialize with?" Again, if I understand how federation works correctly, on big instances you get exposed far, far more to the breadth of content in the Fediverse. On small instances, the Fediverse can feel shockingly deserted. On a big instance it can be hard not to meet people; on small instances, it can feel like where IS everybody?
"How do I find new entertaining people to follow to have parasocial relationships with?"
As much as some old school Fediverse denizens don't like it, one of the reasons people enjoy social media is a chance to follow entertainers, educators, activists, and all sorts of people who reliably and frequently post good things to read. In following these accounts, there's not necessarily any intention of being buddies with these posters; their content is consumed as entertainment and/or enrichment.
It's not unreasonable for someone to want to be able to find that sort of appealing content here on the Fediverse. Hence the question, "Who's good to follow?" I think this is the primary thing being referred to when people say it's hard to find people on the Fediverse without an algorithm; I suspect when people say it's hard to discover people on the Fediverse without an algorithm, this is the use case they have in mind, with finding a scene the secondary use case.
So given these five very different meanings of "finding people on the Fediverse", it's not entirely clear which of them your respondents are complaining of difficulty with. Maybe all of them - I honestly think that Mastodon and clones are bad at all five.
It seems obvious to me that these five different senses of "How do you find people here?" refer to very different problems,
requiring very different solutions. An algorithm isn't going to find your friends for you; a Twitter to Federverse user mapping service isn't going to help you to find cool new content; search is probably not actually going to help you surface people you would like to become friends with.
It would be interesting to surface which of these things people are bouncing off of hardest, not least because it reveals what desires people are bringing to the Fediverse, and finding that the Fediverse doesn't support (or doesn't seem to, or does so erratically.)
Oh one more just occurred to me! I don't know if this is what anybody means by "find people" when they're complaining of difficulty doing so on the Fediverse verse, but it seems plausible if unobvious, so:
"How do I find people who are talking about a specific topic at a given moment?" Here I'm not talking about finding a standing scene, but rather things like trending hashtags or topics that surface on search. If I hear a loud noise in my city, theoretically I could check Twitter, using it search function, to see if there are people talking about that loud noise they just heard in #$mytown. If I want to know what opinions are about a referendum we're going to vote on, I could search Twitter for the referendum number and state.
The purpose isn't to find people to follow or scene to join. It's totally ad hoc, and the purpose is to find information. But the way you found that information on Twitter was by finding the people who were discussing the information you wanted.
@kissane
This is something it seems, again, may work okay on very large instances (though honestly I've not found it to work very well even on Universeodon), and not at all on smaller instances.
Also now that I think about it, I want to stress sometimes people have problems making the Fediverse work for them because they are trying to do something on the Fediverse that, actually, you can't. For instance, even if the Fediverse technologically supported surfacing discussions like the ones I describe here, that doesn't mean those discussions are happening in the first place! It would be great if I could search the whole Fediverse for recent posts about my town, but that doesn't mean anybody's actually talking about my town on the Fediverse.
This problem also shows up for trying to join a scene. Even if Mastodon et al. supported scenes in their discovery as well as Twitter does, that doesn't mean those scenes exist here.
@kissane It's reasonable enough to want to port your follow list from Twitter to Mastodon, but there's no guarantee that all or even just some of your Twitter buds have a presence on Mastodon in the first place. It's understandable that people want to hot swap Mastodon for Twitter, but insofar as one's personal experience of Twitter consists of one's curated list of follows, one can't just hot swap the Fediverse for Twitter, because the people you followed on Twitter are not necessarily on the Fediverse, and there is very little technology can do about that.
@siderea@kissane this is a use case for hashtags, and i think, the expected way to handle it here. That, of course, assumes that users aren't already disincentivized to use hashtags for discoverability after seeing the abuse and resulting degeneration of function (and the eventual widespread deprecation) that they have gone through on other platforms.
@siderea@kissane If Mastodon wants to be all things to all people, some instances will eventually develop algorithmic feeds Mastodon.social already has an explore tab that looks a lot like Twitter's did, full of good news, memes, politics, and drama. Let's also hold space for those instances that say "if you want to be entertained by popular accounts and not participate, Threads is that way ↘️".
Bruh. What's with the assumption that someone who wants to follow entertainment/info accounts doesn't also want to participate?
I keep seeing people on the Fediverse make this assumption, really contemptuously, and it's wild. It's obviously false, for one thing. Like, duh, having a television doesn't mean you don't call your friends on the phone.
For another, even if somebody only used an account to follow entertainment/info accounts, and truly "doesn't participate", how would that be any skin off of anybody else's nose? If they're not participating, who are they bothering? Why do you think their not participating as some sort of crime against an instance? Especially if they're doing their part to support that instance?
I mean, I get it: lots of people on the Fediverse have constructed a Boogeyman version of Twitter users where people who like consuming media your average Masto nerd disdains are caricatured as shallow, drooling fools who don't do internet right, and must not have any contribution to make to their communities. It's the updated internet version of the stereotype of the teenaged female Beatles fan from the 60s.
The hostility needs the justification of there being something antisocial about them, so this nonsense about Those People not doing their share of providing content to others ("participating") is manufactured.
But they do participate. They do contribute. It's just that a lot of old Fediverse denizens don't like their contributions because they're the wrong kind of people.
The idea that people who are followers of media accounts, in particular, don't participate is so wildly at odds with reality as to be offensive.
Consider K-pop Twitter. There is an utterly massive American K-pop fandom on Twitter, organized around breathless following of all their favorite bands, artists, and critics. It's exactly what Fediverse cranks express such contempt for.
And it has also been a massive engine of political activism. This was the fandom that reserved all the tickets for a Trump rally so the stands would be empty. These are the people who manually DoSed a police tip line asking for video of BLM protests by uploading, natch, k-pop videos. https://time.com/5866955/k-pop-political/
That's who y'all are scorning. The Fediverse should be so lucky as to get the k-pop fans.
@siderea@kissane I DID do a lot of librarian twitter, and now you have me thinking about how exactly I did that. I think it's a combination of:
following a critical mass of people in that discourse community (doesn't need to & can't be all, but enough that if there's a thing Everyone's Talking About, you keep seeing it)
quote tweets: honestly huge; the reaction/commentary turns things into Discourse (IIUC even bigger in Black twitter where it is also situated in call-&-response norms) 1/
@kissane I find the combo of 'no real community'/ 'have to do too much work' bit interesting, because it's something I always tell friends considering Masto - you get out what you put in, you're not a consumer here. (IMO 'community' is something to be made, not something readymade to be waltzed into and consumed.)
And soooo many people don't realise the joy of being able to follow hashtags and follow their interests, not people!
@JMMaok
> A feature like Slack's of option to suppressing link previews, and a norm of using it, could help
I don't use any of the "official" Mastodon apps, but in the all the apps I use with my Mastodon account, link previews are optional. I'm not convinced they're even a good feature, since they can totally slashdot a webserver is a post containing a link to a page hosted there goes viral here.
You can turn off viewing link previews. For lots of visual content they are a plus, though (data charts, maps, nature, history).
I am talking about an option to suppress link previews when including a link in your own post, so that even if someone usually views link previews, they don't get a preview from that specific link.
Take a look. A lot of important news stories use aggressive images that are not informative. If you have image previews off, you probably don't see.
@JMMaok
> I am talking about an option to suppress link previews when including a link in your own post
Ah! OK. That would be handy. Loomio has this, and I believe Discourse does to. It would certainly be possible to implement it in fediverse UI. Have you checked the forum to see if anyone's requested it as a feature for Mastodon? If not, that would be a good place to start on getting it to happen:
@kissane I hope people listen to this because mastodon is currently a pain in the ass and it's obnoxious to have people lecture me about how I both need to work harder at the platform and am a bad person for expecting anything from the community here
@kissane "I think the other piece of this is probably the idea of organizing people into interest-based instances, which I think is fundamentally flawed, but that’s a subject for another time."
Fully agreed! I'm a mod on an interest-based server, and I frankly think it's a horrible model. 2/3 of the people I follow are on other servers, so what good are interest servers?
Interest-centric indexers could be useful. But picking a server is really picking your mod team. That's non-obvious.
@Crell@kissane Well following people on other servers is sort of the point, so I don't think this is really a criticism.
Problem is, interest-based servers are needlessly restrictive as people have many interests, not many people are defined solely by one interest.
Other than wanting specific moderation or a sort of broad community (LGBT or PoC, for example), I think the best type of instance is regional. I was on the UK instance for a bit and it was enjoyable actually seeing local stuff.
@mattswift@kissane That's my point, yes. If I want to follow "space stuff", there's no reason I must be on space-stuff.social or whatever. Aside from the issue of setting up cross server follows, which are just a flat out bug to fix. So space-stuff.social doesn't really need to exist.
@kissane@mattswift
The problem imo is that you’re not going to be surfaced space stuff through the local feed unless you joined the space stuff instance, meaning you have to hope the people talking about it are using the right tags and your instance is indexing it
@Cuniiform@kissane@mattswift I've found following tags to be far more useful than my local feed. I basically never use the local feed, because most people don't talk mostly about their server's topic. Plus, what if I want multiple topics? (I do.)
Discoverability is a legit problem, but "pick the right server" is the wrong solution.
@kissane I was laughing as I read this because I happen to prefer Mastodon to BlueSky because of the very things you listed that people complain about Mastodon. I’ve only been scolded on BlueSky! I have issues with discoverability and there don’t seem to be many people who actively post with similar interests. BlueSky is like walking into an empty western town with tumbleweed and cardboard cutouts of townsfolk in the windows and someone is whistling somewhere but you can’t find them.
@kissane
I was actually very happy to leave Meta and Twitter a few months ago, to explore Mastodon. Mastodon was very nice and very sufficient for my needs, but after a while, I went to FireFisch, because of some precious functions I like, for example the newspicker. But bottom line, it doesn't matter, because all flavors of the Fedivers are connected and user can interact, no matter if they prefer Mastodon, Firefish, Pixelfed, Bluesky or whatever. This is the beauty of a federated Network and I also believe, it is the future of Social Networking. #socialmedia#fediverse#firefish#mastodon#bluesky#pixelfed
1/ Agreed. There's a lot to like about Mastodon, but a lot of development & evolution needed too.
I'm tech savvy, but found the server choice perplexing & stressful, as I didn't want to setup my profile, only to realise I'd chosen the wrong instance.
I also needed 3 attempts to setup my profile as I wanted. I found several things confusing & counter-intuitive, do much so I wrote detailed instructions of how to join, importing bird site followers, to finding new followers...
@kissane@kissane In illustration of one of your points, I've been on Mastodon more than a year. I'd like to read the (currently) 617 replies to your post and can't figure out how to do it. Constant frustration!
@kissane
"I’m tech savvy and have found mastodon simply opaque. I’ve set up 4 accounts, each on a different server, and don’t know how to amalgamate all the people I’m following everywhere" is repeated twice in the same list of excerpts.
@jodmentum@tikistitch I can sometimes get them to load in a browser but sometimes the tab hangs, lots of replies seem to be something Mastodon isn't expecting. 🙃
@kissane It’s fun getting to this piece and the replies three months later. I love the engagement level on this post!
I’ve been on Bluesky a bit recently – mainly because I enjoy following some of the writers there, many of whom were briefly on Mastodon before heading to a place where they felt they were getting more engagement.
Right now Bluesky seems to have a bunch of contentious threads that feel very Twitter-like and I find myself appreciating Mastodon all the more.
@kissane Thank you, this is excellent stuff. I strongly believe that Mastodon needs to evolve beyond being a cozy little Linux hobby project and take on the task of democratizing social networking at a larger scale, and your last few points lay out what's necessary for that really well.
@kissane
Interesting, yet not sure about the responses. I have yet to see those issues, and I assure you that I won't, and don't put anything under "CW. When science gets censored as such, then we will have a problem indeed.
Take care,
Heidi-Ann
@kissane the “linkedin version of twitter” group is also a discoverability problem. I made it my mission to find shitposters on mastodon and I did, but it took days and intentional research.
@kissane
Very interesting. I would say much of this reflects my experience. As mostly a lurker to learn from others I am still not satisfied with my information flow. I feel I am on a good server but not being able to easily increase who I follow has left holes. Making better use of hashtags helped
@kissane Finally read this after bookmarking it a way back. Excellent, thanks for writing it (and your other posts which I've discovered thanks to this one).
This is fascinating, because I found Masto to be insuperably confusing until I figured out what it's analogs to Twitter's Home, Notifications, & account screens were. (The side by side columns really threw me for a long time.)
As for finding people, during the Nov '22 mass exodus from Twitter, I quickly discovered the trick of going into the follow/follower lists of people in my (longtime, comparatively stable, midlin' large) crew to add follows. >
> None of this is lab-conditions research—sorry, I meant NONE OF THIS IS LAB-CONDITIONS RESEARCH—and I hope it’s obvious that there are shaping factors at every step: [list of examples]
When I share casual investigatory research like this I ALWAYS get research purists telling me
that I should have done it the RIGHT way
and that my casual research (which always includes disclaimers!) has no value 😂
@kissane brilliant article, perfect tone. I am only still here because I’m not tech savvy enough to go anywhere else or know what might be better - for very much the reasons to do with discoverability and quote tweeting which was my main way of using Twitter. But I’m hoping if we hang on in there and people like you get traction we can make it better.
@kissane thank you. I admire the phrase "moral brine shrimp."
One thing I think that is missed in these discussions is the intention of designers and administrators. A big part of what is wrong with Facebook is, simply, that its model is making a profit through data mining by getting people to overshare, and everything else is secondary. It could hardly fail to be destructive. If your model is a cooperatively focused place for fun and interesting socializing, and perhaps also providing →
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