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I found that the federation aspect of the fediverse breaks the things I most like about Twitter. Sure, there are advantages to it but they're outweighed in my m
by jghn 4y ago
I found that the federation aspect of the fediverse breaks the things I most like about Twitter. Sure, there are advantages to it but they're outweighed in my mind by the disadvantages.
What you bring up is a big one. Another big one for me is search. I used Twitter search all the time. For local things like "what're those sirens I hear in my neighborhood", to cultural zeitgeist like "who is this artist performing on SNL", to using it as a quasi-Google.
- camjohnson26 4y agoCouldn’t somebody write a simple service that just scrapes profile info for following? Really doubt anyone would care if that aspect is centralized if it’s just a UX improvement. Same with search, although you’ll always have a vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped.
- piperswe 4y ago> vocal minority angry that their public posts are being scraped That's the problem here: there have been scraping efforts before, but they always receive a tidal wave of community backlash.
- camjohnson26 4y agoThere’s no legal issue though, and I think most users are willing to accept the tradeoff if it gives them search. The ones who it really bothers always have the option of joining a private instance. Unfortunately posting public data by definition always means somebody is going to do something with it that you don’t like, you can’t opt out of the world.
- dnissley 4y agoThe issue is thinking that this is simply a bolt-on ux improvement when it's really a core part of the ux. Such a service would quickly rival the value of mastodon itself and soon overtake it. It might even eventually become what non-technical people refer to when they say "mastodon", kind of like how many older non-technical people think of google as "the internet".
- camjohnson26 4y agoI don’t know about that since it’d really just be a read only cache of public mastodon data. Account ids, follower counts, most recent posts, etc. but it wouldn’t support any of the write operations, you’d still need federation for that.
- hgsgm 4y agoSo? Is it wrong for people to be happy?
- HillRat 4y agoThe extreme backlash against this in the fediverse makes that approach a non-starter; you'll get defederated as soon as anyone realizes what's going on. Having said that, AP/Mastodon not only have poor search and discoverability experiences, but also suffer from serious performance issues relating to federation and fanout that can have outsized and unexpected effects on servers (or, in Mastodon's case, sites hosting URLs linked in posts, since every Mastodon server will repeatedly bash the site to create thumbnails from the URL). Bsky's core approach of making indexing and "algorithms" an explicit and decoupled part of the overall stack is the kind of thing that I think should make it into the fediverse, but I feel like the way the community works in that space means that either it ends up in Mastodon (which de facto sets the standards now) or in a working group that never ends up delivering anything.
- _heimdall 4y agoSearch on Mastodon is broken on purpose. Anyone running a server sits in a tricky gray area of potential liability from hosting user-provided content. Specifically for content that is considered illegal to poses or distribute in some countries. For a more thorough explanation https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ And for a github discussion where some of the Mastodon devs and hosts discussed this at length https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847