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Yeah, the big challenge with Mastodon is it's basically Twitter as it was like 15 years ago before they added a lot of features that define the modern Twitter e

by Pxtl 4y ago

Yeah, the big challenge with Mastodon is it's basically Twitter as it was like 15 years ago before they added a lot of features that define the modern Twitter experience, like trending/searching on keywords instead of just hashtags (something the leadership has said they do not want to support ever - imho a flag on the toot declaring it scrapeable would be better), an algorithmic feed that considers your follows follows and likes and whatnot to easily-discover interesting people, quote-toots, showing tweetthreads in correct order, and considering whether you've seen a tweet before before showing it over and over as your follows retweet it, muting conversations, etc. Now obviously a lot of these features are also toxic engagement-maximizers so you don't want to necessarily force them onto users the way Twitter does, but they're also positives in their own ways since they provide content discoverability and legibility. Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off.

tedivm 4y ago
>something the leadership has said they do not want to support ever Since Mastodon is decentralized what the leadership wants doesn't always matter. There are several instances which have patched their code to add full search in. This is one of the big advantages I see to the fediverse as a whole- different instances can experiment around with changes and even entirely different software stacks, and if someone doesn't like the way the mainline software is being run they can fork it (and there are several successful forks already).
- tobylane 4y ago
  I suspect I’ll move to a server more capable in these ways, as I want to know what’s most discussed with or without tags.
WorldMaker 4y ago
> Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off. Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it. It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was there. I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no engagement metrics" Twitter was something I missed and was part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on. Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember Twitter was never more useful to me than those early days during conferences/conventions when you'd turn on SMS notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't matter, no one cared. I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me. I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall community. I think the community is just fine without the algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter without those things, those things were stuff that started me rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost me to Mastodon because I wanted to escape that.
- faizmokhtar 4y ago
  > Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life This is what I like about Mastodon now. People(including me) posting about their mundane life. There's no "growth hacker" looking to game the algorithm, there's no listicle about JS and the algorithm didn't try to push for the latest "viral dumb takes" to you.

by Pxtl 4y ago

tedivm 4y ago

>something the leadership has said they do not want to support ever Since Mastodon is decentralized what the leadership wants doesn't always matter. There are several instances which have patched their code to add full search in. This is one of the big advantages I see to the fediverse as a whole- different instances can experiment around with changes and even entirely different software stacks, and if someone doesn't like the way the mainline software is being run they can fork it (and there are several successful forks already).

tobylane 4y ago
I suspect I’ll move to a server more capable in these ways, as I want to know what’s most discussed with or without tags.

WorldMaker 4y ago

> Twitter 15 years ago was a home of weirdos and journalists mostly. There's a reason it needed changes to take off. Journalists ignored Twitter until the mainstream was on it. It was definitely full of a community of weirdos. I was there. I was an early adopter of Twitter and the "no algorithms, no engagement metrics" Twitter was something I missed and was part of why I left Twitter around about 2016. It is something that I like that Mastodon provides a somewhat clean slate on. Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life. I still remember Twitter was never more useful to me than those early days during conferences/conventions when you'd turn on SMS notifications (!) of a friend or two to help coordinate meetups and meals and use the rest of the feed flying by for a general zeitgeist of exciting things around the next corner to maybe give you a direction to head. If you missed a Tweet when it flew by it was probably too late to see the thing it was talking about and content "discoverability" didn't matter, no one cared. I know that's not what Twitter has been in a while. I feel it fair to say that when a lot of the algorithm stuff came into play, especially with its toxic engagement-maximizing, but also with its toxic drive-by miscontextualizations, that stopped feeling like a useful Twitter to me. I'm not going to stop instances from exploring some of that stuff on Mastodon, but I also am going to use rights to silence and block them and otherwise defederate with them at my discretion for how useful I think they are to the overall community. I think the community is just fine without the algorithms and the everything ever tooted is always searchable and scrapable for ever and ever and always relevant for miscontextualization later. I preferred Twitter without those things, those things were stuff that started me rethinking my relationship with Twitter and eventually lost me to Mastodon because I wanted to escape that.

faizmokhtar 4y ago
> Twitter was about ephemeral day to day life This is what I like about Mastodon now. People(including me) posting about their mundane life. There's no "growth hacker" looking to game the algorithm, there's no listicle about JS and the algorithm didn't try to push for the latest "viral dumb takes" to you.