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The irony is that I prefer Mastodon's sort by time and don't try to be clever approach to this expensive and futile attempt to feed me an endless stream of clic
by jillesvangurp 4y ago
The irony is that I prefer Mastodon's sort by time and don't try to be clever approach to this expensive and futile attempt to feed me an endless stream of click bait. I objectively spend more time on Mastodon than on Twitter at this point. It's more engaging for me. It's how Twitter used to work when it was still nice to use.
If Twitter wants to put a stop to the user exodus and save lots of money in the process, here's what they could do:
1) Add an off switch to the for you feed. I'll click it right away and never turn it on again. Stop wasting minutes of CPU time on my behalf. I never asked for it. It doesn't do anything for me that I need or want.
2) Sort by time, filter by hashtag. Twitter used to be about real time information. I don't care about things that happened days or weeks ago. I don't need to see all of it. This is the core feature that made Twitter popular. Mastodon has it and it is absorbing users from Twitter by the millions. It still works. Restore this feature and make it the default.
3) Join the fediverse. That's where a lot of the former hard core users went. They still exist. They still post messages. They still engage with each other. They just don't use Twitter anymore. Allow people to follow mastodon users. Allow mastodon users to follow Twitter users. Not that hard to implement and probably would do wonders for user engagement.
- ISL 4y agoAs near as I can tell, Mastodon doesn't really have #2 in the list above. Last I heard, the social architecture was hostile to comprehensive indexing of the entire fediverse for search. That's probably one of the biggest reasons that I have remained on Twitter even after setting up a Mastodon persona.
- J_tt 4y agoMastodon searching is a lot more focused on hashtags rather than the contents of peoples posts. Consider it more "opt-in" discovery. The existing user base is strongly in favour of a more organic social graph from exploring tags for shared interests. Browsing tags is a very normal thing to do on the platform.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoHashtags work great on mastodon. I follow a few of them. It's all sorted by time.
- woodduck 4y agoThey did add an off switch to the for you feed. There's a tab for following, albeit not sorted by time.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoBut it's not sticky and it's easy to miss when it forces you back to For You. Less of a problem on desktop because you can write a trivial extension to force Following, but not an option on mobile, unfortunately. Following IS sorted by time, though.
- seydor 4y agoHm it Is sticky for me. On Twitter.com
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoI think, very recently, it was made sticky again on twitter.com, yes. I'm not sure when since I use an extension anyway, but it definitely wasn't sticky about a month or so ago.