You know why #Bluesky is going to take off once it opens up more capacity? Because you can actually find stuff when using the search. I like Mastodon, but some of the choices made here are like trying to grow a platform with one hand tied behind your back
@FinchHaven@jbwharris That only surfaces posts with the submarine hashtag in it. What the original post was about was just searching text within a post.
That does need some work, I admit. But, Bluesky isn’t without its problems either.
@jbwharris I believe there are pull requests to enable full-text search via PostgreSQL's built-in full-text indexing. Right now, it requires the Mastodon instance to set up Elasticsearch.
If Bluesky is serious about being a federated protocol, full-text searching will depend on the instance supporting it. If it's just going to be another centralized system, then it's just kinda different.
@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris
I've felt for a while that Mastodon is likely to fade as the dominant #fediverse microblogging platform. Calckey or other non-Masto platforms can add or change features more quickly because they don't have to drag their feet through treacle to get community buy-in.
Also, less-imposing stacks are going to be important, search implementations aside.
@FeralRobots@jbwharris I don't know much about this, but why would Mastodon need to get community buy-in while other platforms like Calckey don't.
What makes Mastodon an imposing stack? Ruby? The dependencies on ImageMagick and FFmpeg? Redis? I haven't tried installing it so it might be more of a pain than I know.
From what I've seen, it seems like there could be some decoupling of the front-end and back-end stuff in the Fediverse.
@LilahTovMoon@FeralRobots@jbwharris From what I've heard it's more an unwillingness for certain features to be considered for implementation. (Look how long it's taking to get Quote posts going, for instance)
@paisley_peinforte@jbwharris@FeralRobots Yea, I sort of heard about that. I thought some of it was wanting to avoid the Twitter-style fighting that would happen with quote-posts.
Logging into my Calckey instance, replies are shown in the timeline really nicely with the context of what they're replying to.
@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris@FeralRobots It is a cultural issue, yeah. It does cause friction because newer users want it and older ones don't - whereas other projects like Calckey are relatively unburdened by the argument and simply press on with development. Those seeking more feature parity with other platforms right away thus choose non-mastodon options. (This is all anecdata, mind)
@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris@FeralRobots That seems like a really good explanation to me. It feels like Mastodon was developed to be one thing (a privacy-forward, anti-viral microblogging platform) and then a bunch of people flooded in from Twitter expecting something else. Conflict ensued, the developers froze, now they’ve decided to accommodate the new population, but probably too late imho.
@misc
There's also a degree to which Mastodon made unwarranted assumptions about how other platforms would work. E.g. ActivityPub has no provision for privacy of posts, but Mastodon bolted it on anyway. Which led to unwarranted assumptions about privacy that no one seemed to notice until the disapora forced a conflict over them. @paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris
@FeralRobots@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris Very true. Mastodon made implicit promises it couldn’t keep, and now that’s coming to a head. A lot of people are shrugging and saying “you should have known you didn’t have this privacy to start with” which is understandable - but the response I’d like to see is “how can we provide these people with what they thought they already had?”
@misc@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@FeralRobots That feels very accurate, and really is similar to changing demographics you might find in a city. The reality is spaces are constantly evolving and changing. I know in my city I've seen plenty of long time residents move elsewhere because of the changes happening in the city didn't align with what they wanted.
@jbwharris@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@FeralRobots I mean, my primary sympathies are with the original inhabitants being displaced, in both cases. Especially given that Mastodon took this long to change, I think they should have just passed the baton for Twitter replacement to something like Calckey. But the situation is what it is.
@jbwharris@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@FeralRobots I agree with @FeralRobots that something else will likely take the baton anyway. Too many people now associate Mastodon with their bad first impression. Even if there’s a breakaway “introverse” that gives Mastodon more cultural range of motion, it’s probably too little too late, compared to others that are starting with more of a blank slate.
@misc@paisley_peinforte@LilahTovMoon@FeralRobots A big part of the problem with that is the idea there are other options. I'm a savvy user, but at the same time have accounts on multiple instances and services that I don't use (Hive, CoSo, kbin, Pixelfed) and then consider why most people I know in "real life" signed up and bounced from here ages ago. It's confusing at the best of times. For a time I wondered why people kept talking about something that sounds like an iOS calculator app
@jbwharris@misc@paisley_peinforte@FeralRobots Yea, I'm not so interested in things like Hive and other closed networks. ActivityPub and ATProto mean I'm not tied to a single company (at least not permanently). With things like Pixelfed/Mastodon/Calckey, I can have one account and don't have to care (to an extent) which one they're on. The value for me is that ActivityPub starts acting like email - anyone can send, anyone can receive.
@LilahTovMoon@jbwharris@FeralRobots It is a cultural issue, yeah. It does cause friction because newer users want it and older ones don't - whereas other projects like Calckey are relatively unburdened by the argument and simply press on with development. Those seeking more feature parity with other platforms right away thus choose non-mastodon options. (This is all anecdata, mind)
@paisley_peinforte
This is mostly what I'm talking about. There's heavy pushback. To some extent Eugen can do what he wants but he's beein in f/oss trenches long enough to know that's a good way to make hard enemies.
Using *key as an example, they have a richer history of hard-forking, & they don't have a lot of deeply personal investment in the design of the features. @jbwharris@LilahTovMoon
@Pheneatis@ngmi but the question is, how many people are talking about the submarine without using the hashtag? Like this very post I’m typing will be invisible to those who are interested in seeing discussion about that topic. Therein lies the problem.
@ngmi@Pheneatis The problem with that is most users of social platforms stopped using hashtags in earnest in 2015. As someone who lived the evolution of Twitter, it feels like a relic of a bygone age. I know some feel it’s a viable solution. I do not.
Add comment