Zak, 10 months ago

I’ve been self-hosting Mastodon for a while, mostly using it to share pictures of birds. Here are my impressions:

Scolding / hall monitor problem

I see this come up pretty often and I think there are quite a few people who need to chill. Asking for content warnings for things that are mainstream-sensitive is reasonable, but those with specific phobias or trauma triggers shouldn’t demand that the rest of the world cater to them. It’s easy to filter by keyword when there’s something specific you don’t want to see. Liberal use of hashtags helps with both filtering and discovery so a polite suggestion that someone tag their photo of a #snake as such is a great option here.

A more curated space, such as a Lemmy community is a better fit than Mastodon’s public-square format for people using social media specifically to get support for trauma, phobias, and the like.

Discoverability

Discoverability sucks. There’s no other way to put it. I see at least three categories of user who aren’t well-served by how Mastodon works now.

Individual users have trouble finding their existing social circle. I recently added a friend who has had an account since last November and I had no idea until it came up in a conversation elsewhere.

People following interests probably represent the majority of those using things like Twitter. The current solution is to follow hashtags (itself a recent feature) or use human-curated directories. The web used to rely on human-curated directories as well, and it scales terribly. “Algorithm” may be a dirty word to many Mastodon users, but I think that’s a mistake. If not for spam filters using machine learning algorithms, Email would be long-dead as an example. Algorithms run by adtech companies and tuned to be addictive by finding “revealed preferences” (i.e. things we can’t look away from rather than things we want to see) are clearly harmful, but optional recommendation/discovery algorithms designed to serve users could be very useful.

People publishing things like my bird pictures want to get their content to people who want to see it. Our needs tend to align pretty well with the previous group.

I should mention Mastodon’s lack of text search. I know it’s intentional, and I think that’s a terrible take for social networking software. Some instances have implemented patches for better search and some compatible software like Akkoma includes in by default. A simpler search using Postgres text indexing is about a dozen lines of code; someone should probably maintain a fork.

It’s confusing/intimidating

Some of this may be unavoidable, but the onboarding process could be more friendly. Mastodon is actually trying this in its official mobile apps, but they’re doing it by just defaulting everyone to mastodon.social which I find contrary to the goal of building a decentralized network. The joinmastodon.org website presents a list of servers, which may put off newcomers.

I’d like to see both put a randomly selected server from a curated pool of established, mainstream servers front and center for each visitor.

Too serious

This seems like an issue of cultural fit more than a problem to be solved. It’s OK that not everybody is a cultural fit, though if Mastodon becomes more mainstream, the culture will change.

MyOpinion, 10 months ago

Mastodon is imperfect. Especially the totally boring Hashtags. Not sure what the majority are doing but snooze fest. Other than that this is the most stable social network I have been on. I find interesting people and I can subscribe to hashtags that I am interested in. It just works and works well.

PrinzKasper, 10 months ago

In my humble opinion, a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed, because most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow, otherwise everything you see is just benign uninteresting garbage. Lemmy/Kbin have the advantage that by nature all posts are neatly sorted into topic-based communities, and it's a lot easier to subscribe to the stuff you find interesting, and block the stuff you don't like.

DmMacniel, 10 months ago

Well that’s easy, just add tags to your toot and everything is dandy. No need for an algorithm.

DarienGS, 10 months ago

Brilliant! You’ve made one post findable!

DmMacniel, 10 months ago

because nobody tags their toots on mastodon, huh? And you can’t follow tags either. Very strange service.

esty, 10 months ago

you can follow tags though

DmMacniel, 10 months ago

yes you can, my comment as a futile attempt at sarcasm.

iorale, 10 months ago

deleted_by_author

Plopp, 10 months ago

Yeah the only problem imo is that people have to use them in their posts. When done correctly it’s hard to beat. If you constantly see people spamming hashtags, just block them. Curate your feed.

It would be great if you could follow a cluster of tags as one topic, but just following each tag as it’s own thing works. I almost prefer following tags over people on Mastodon.

petunia, 10 months ago

a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed

I grew up on Tumblr and it thrived for the longest time with a chronological timeline.

most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow

Yes, it was done through tagging. Notably, tags in Tumblr didn’t have to be inline.

Tagging died on Twitter because the inscrutable blackbox of the algorithm made people unsure if tags actually improved the visibility of their posts or not, there’s some folk-wisdom that suggests excessive tagging leads to deboosting of your profile, since it could have been considered spammy. Also, there’s only so many characters in a Twitter post and sometimes there’s just not enough left for relevant tags.

sab, 10 months ago

This is a really good blog post, with a lot of lessons to learn. I like how technical solutions are proposed to problems of platform culture.

At least some of the obsession over unwritten rules - especially content warnings - seems to me to have been a thing only around the time of the first Twitter exodus, and I never really saw too much fuzz about it before or after. Thank God, or I would probably have left too. People still make a deal about alt texts, but that's generally less alienating.

When it comes to serendipity and finding content, I think maybe the solution should lie in alternatives to Mastodon - while I prefer Mastodon for curating my own feed, the microblogging integration on kbin is nigh better for discovering interesting content around the fediverse more generally. It does, however, give rise to a Matthews effect that's intentionally absent from Mastodon.

It will be interesting to see how different federated microblogging platforms will deal with discoverability as they mature. And, not least, how Mastodon users will feel about their content suddenly being promoted by algorithms on services that are completely foreign to them.

rynzcycle, 10 months ago

Lemmy/Kbin are a more friendly Reddit.
Mastadon is a more friendly Twitter.
Reddit was more friendly than Twitter.
Mastodon is primed to have some peak "Reddit moments", but that's ok.

Its a good tool for sharing and finding thoughts/articles/news, but if I want good discourse, I'm logging into Kbin.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I'd argue that Kbin's a bit more - it's viewing and publishing capacity for users exceeds that of Mastodon or Lemmy given that it bridges the "Redditverse" and "Twitverse" styles of communication exceptionally well. Content is more discoverable as you've got the ability to follow (and block if need be) not only people, but communities and even entire domains, and the search capability scans both Mastodon and Lemmy.

For those using Kbin, your Mastodon posts and traffic show up in the Microblog section.

In my view, Kbin holds the most potential in the Fediverse, both for the average user and the content creator. It's pretty damn cool to be able to view and publish to pretty much every major instance, regardless of the platform they run.

Kaldo, 10 months ago

I kinda agree with most of hese points tbh, I still have an account on Mastodon but due to issues outlined in the article it is still very empty and soulless to me, even compared to twitter that after all the bullshit it's been going through still has actual interesting content and people there (and the algorithm that actually shows me their content I'm interested in instead of an chronological timeline with 90% worthless comments).

jocanib, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

#explore on Mastodon is a good way to find stuff you wouldn’t see on your own feed. (It’s how I found this article.)

And there are various bots that allow you to follow people on Twitter (birdsite.makeup etc). Although my instance has decided they don’t like that so it’s a bit harder to find them than it was.

But yes, I think the article does a good job of articulating the problems. I hope they get solved because there’s a lot I like very much about Mastodon but it does not have the depth and breadth of content (yet). And hashtags do not work well enough as a replacement for search (I followed #BBC to get more news in my feed and ended up with a bit of news and a lot of porn).

davetansley, 10 months ago

You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D

schwim, 10 months ago

Is there a reason why you didn’t continue your last long post? Is there a benefit to wiping those conversations from your OP repeatedly?

jocanib, 10 months ago

Oh. You think the OP wrote the link?

No. I’ll edit in some quote marks. Apologies for any confusion.

maegul, 10 months ago

The author is on mastodon: @kissane.

It’s not trivial to enable them to see such a post as this but it would be possible.

You could, on mastodon, post to her with a link to this post, or better, a mastodon specific link (PITA to find).

Or, if you’re game, post to this community from mastodon while also at-ing her.

These are just suggestions, not saying at all that you should have done any of this

jocanib, 10 months ago

Thanks. I’m never quite sure how to deal with that, if I’m linking to the author’s own work/site (I generally do try to make sure there is a relevant credit otherwise). Does the username help increase their visibility (good) or does it just encourage harassment from people who cannot accept that the Fediverse is ever anything less than perfect?

Probably a bit of both, and context-dependent so it’s always a judgement call.

I did try the Lemmy-on-Mastodon thing and hated it (just a stream of out-of-context posts dominating my feed) so I probably wouldn’t do that.

maegul, 10 months ago

Does the username help increase their visibility (good) or does it just encourage harassment from people who cannot accept that the Fediverse is ever anything less than perfect?

Well in this case, Erin is sharing her articles on mastodon directly knowing full well that large discussion threads will often start (that is, she talks about not being able to respond to everyone and that she will happily block anyone that is unkind etc). So attaching their name/tag is probably not a problem at all.

And yea … looking at lemmy from mastodon is rubbish, which really bothers me because it’s really simple things that are missing and making it rubbish.

Zak, 10 months ago

I’ve found posting to Lemmy from Mastodon easy and comfortable (just tag a community in the post), but following Lemmy communities from Mastodon isn’t a good experience.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed for different use cases. It’s great that they can interoperate to a degree, but heavy participation in a Lemmy community is best done from a Lemmy server.