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Exporting is the differentiating feature? As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite misguided. Users want more than exporting. Wh

Exporting is the differentiating feature? As someone who worked in the social space for years, I find this quite misguided. Users want more than exporting. When building a social produdct, you have to be able to excite a mainstream audience. The math behind a superior network connection model or techy-feature like exporting is practically useless to these people. Build something people (from St. Louis) want.

sp332 9y ago
It's not a differentiating feature. The article it's replying to says that Masotodon et al. don't have large networks. But since the little networks are federated, they still get most of the benefits of having a large network. This article points out that exporting and moving somewhere else is not a showstopper.
egypturnash 9y ago
The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be: * less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances) * you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered "content warning" tag is damn nice too.
- wpietri 9y ago
  > you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a feature for writers, but it's not always feature for readers. I use Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-feature.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they emit a complete thought? How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?
    - falsedan 9y ago
      That's what the unfollow button/muting 'Thread.' is for.
    - wpietri 9y ago
      Of the people I follow? It's a pretty rare for me to see multiple tweets in a row. The quoting of one tweet in a thread is more common, but that's fine by me. Indeed, I follow a number of people specifically because they're good at that; it helps me increase breadth.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    There's still a limit on how much people can post, it's just more forgiving than Twitter's increasingly-archaic 140 characters. IIRC, Mastodon defaults to a 500 character limit, which is more but not War and Peace more. (Personally I would remove the limit altogether and just hide everything above 500 characters behind a "read more" link; this would let people write as much as they want/need to without cluttering their friends' timelines any more than a hard 500-character limit does. But that's my opinion, not the Mastodon devs'.)
    - wpietri 9y ago
      Yeah, my scaling limit is words read, so more characters is generally worse for me. I do think it would be better if Twitter allowed people to write longer posts that would show up as an attachment to a tweet, sort of like images and videos. But they can do that easily enough now with a Medium account or some other blogging tool, so it's not a huge need for me.

sp332 9y ago

It's not a differentiating feature. The article it's replying to says that Masotodon et al. don't have large networks. But since the little networks are federated, they still get most of the benefits of having a large network. This article points out that exporting and moving somewhere else is not a showstopper.

egypturnash 9y ago

The two biggest differentiating features in my circles seem to be: * less nazis/gamergaters/people who think it is fun to be assholes on the internet (unless you wanna go hang out on an instance that welcomes them, which is probably banned from federating to a lot of other instances) * you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence Being able to hide the bulk of your post behind an arbitrary user-entered "content warning" tag is damn nice too.

wpietri 9y ago
> you can actually emit a paragraph containing a complete thought instead of a very simple sentence This is one of those interesting things about a two-sided product. That is a feature for writers, but it's not always feature for readers. I use Twitter for breadth; I follow a lot of people. The more people can write, the fewer people I can follow. So for me, "they can write more" is an anti-feature.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  How many of these people regularly make 3-4 tweets in a row, in which they emit a complete thought? How much of your Twitter feed is people quote-tweeting the first of many of these, with a comment along the lines of "Thread"?
  - falsedan 9y ago
    That's what the unfollow button/muting 'Thread.' is for.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Of the people I follow? It's a pretty rare for me to see multiple tweets in a row. The quoting of one tweet in a thread is more common, but that's fine by me. Indeed, I follow a number of people specifically because they're good at that; it helps me increase breadth.
- smacktoward 9y ago
  There's still a limit on how much people can post, it's just more forgiving than Twitter's increasingly-archaic 140 characters. IIRC, Mastodon defaults to a 500 character limit, which is more but not War and Peace more. (Personally I would remove the limit altogether and just hide everything above 500 characters behind a "read more" link; this would let people write as much as they want/need to without cluttering their friends' timelines any more than a hard 500-character limit does. But that's my opinion, not the Mastodon devs'.)
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Yeah, my scaling limit is words read, so more characters is generally worse for me. I do think it would be better if Twitter allowed people to write longer posts that would show up as an attachment to a tweet, sort of like images and videos. But they can do that easily enough now with a Medium account or some other blogging tool, so it's not a huge need for me.