Hmm, I would have thought a post starting with @mention would not be visible on the main timeline but only under posts and replies but apparently not.
I guess it’s “full attention of everyone following you” or “direct message.” Would be nice to have “public but I’m not shouting it to all my followers” as the default for @mentions.
@decathorpe I just made a case for how it should work from first principles. And yes, that’s how it’s implemented on Twitter (or was, last I know). But the latter follows from the former, not vice versa.
@aral As far as I know, there's no such thing as "directed posts" on Mastodon, so you just described a feature request for something you'd want to work - that's not "first principles", but ok 😅
Either way, even if there's no distinction at the protocol level (yet), it should be relatively straightforward for clients to implement something like that and not show "directed toots" in feeds ...
@decathorpe Designing from first principles is about discovering the right problem to solve (e.g., how do we encourage civil discourse) and then working out from there to arrive at means of solving it.
What it’s not is looking existing artifacts and emulating them without understanding the needs, success criteria, and process(es) that led to them even if you end up in a similar place at the end (most times, you won’t.) It’s about constantly questioning fundamental assumptions.
@aral Sure, but that's exactly what I'm trying to say ...
The way this works on Twitter (and how you'd apparently want this to work here) is completely non-obvious and has no effect on the UI whatsoever. I used Twitter for years before I accidentally discovered this was even a thing. If you'd actually design a feature like this, making "at-handle at the start of the text is secretly magical" is definitely not the way you'd do it ...
I disagree.
I start public conversations with certain people this way and would expect, unless I put it on direct message to be public. Switching this, depending on the order I find more confusing (in the case of replies)
I would guess that this is learned behaviour from other networks and I highly doubt having to watch out for word order is a good way forward.
I set my client to go unlisted and only change it to public timeline on selected posts.
For me I consider most of my posts not "public timeline" worthy.
I agree that in case of replies it should go auto unlisted, regardless of mentions. Long 20 post threads are equally useless for public timelines if not structured.
@aral I'd go further and say that I would like an explicit DM function where the post is private, with the recipient being asked whether they want to receive the message, a bit like what Twitter does. Private messages open additional abuse vectors and handling those should be part of developing a dedicated feature.
@aral@brunogirin I also like that I can go private in a thread when the conversation drifts to a point that's not of general interest. It keeps the context intact.
@Cheeseness Yep. Tried unlisted but still saw it listed in the main timeline (at least for me). Been using it for what, seven years now? You’d think it’d be more intuitive by now 🤔
@krzysztofdrozdowski Possibly; I’m still not 100% sure as it looks the same to me on my account (listed under posts) whether or not it’s unlisted so I guess I’d have to use a second account to check. Not sure if what followers see and what a signed out person sees is the same but guess I can see if there’s a difference when I sign out and view my feed.
@aral@krzysztofdrozdowski 'Unlisted' reduced visibility from the Public feed (from people who don't even follow an account), but those replies are visible for people who follow you. But when logged out, posts starting with @ mention are still public.
If you switch to "Mentioned people only", post goes to "Direct messages", but since people might not get notified about those, they might not see the reply. Inconsistencies in the usability of Mastodon are confusing many.
@autiomaa@krzysztofdrozdowski Not to mention (no pun intended) that there is a very real social difference between a public @mention that you don’t want to broadcast to all your followers (should be the default) vs a direct message. The default should be that you can say something to someone publicly without pointing at them and shouting “hey, everyone, listen to what I’m about to tell so-and-so!”
@aral@Gargron For sure, the current default behaviour of Mastodon application can easily lead to a lot of unwanted attention. Problem with the current situation is that it enables (way too effective) Dogpiling attacks against people...
@autiomaa@Gargron Not to mention now we’re apparently going to be on encouraging such behaviour by introducing first-class support for quote tweets (sorry, did I just say tweets?)
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” – George Orwell, Animal Farm
@aral@autiomaa@krzysztofdrozdowski@Gargron what you're proposing is something that twitter ran into a long time ago, where many people would post something like "@trwnh is a cool person" and the mention would just be a mention. it necessitated hacks like the .@ syntax, which is completely non-obvious to anyone that didn't already know about it.
either way, this whole "hiding mentions to non-followed people" thing isn't a protocol thing, it's just an app policy... -oma/-key show all mentions.
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