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Top-level
 Now @mammoth is coaxing me to follow accounts. There’s categories like “Celebrities & Pop Culture” and “Journalists & Public Figures” I don’t like that this is set up as a cloud instead of a list. And it pre-selects official Mammoth profiles for following. Good for discoverability but I’m seeing dark patterns. 23 comments
After selecting people to follow, it @mammoth takes me to the “Following” feed. Not “Home” feed, but “Following”. This is yet another change in lingo. Here’s @mammoth’s compose screen. It’s very simple. All the typical functions are there: 1. Picture I feel as though if they were aiming for simplicity, picture and camera could be one button. I do like that visibility is more prominent. There’s more options, but that’s hidden by a “…” button. And @mammoth gives you a nice ring and an indicator for when your message is posted. It feels very rewarding. Let’s look at more of those compose options in @mammoth. What does “Collaborate by SharePlay” mean? I’m curious about this and wish they would explain. Scheduling is nice, so is language, drawing, and GIF. But ASCII faces seems very geeky. What’s missing is archiving of messages—which seems obvious if you’re going to offer scheduling. I just sent myself a DM through @mammoth. Nice that they have a privacy warning. But here’s yet another usability bug. The number obscures the message. I highlighted it. My next bone to pick with @mammoth: This is not a private message. Yes, you warned users that it’s not encrypted, but everyone needs to know that Mastodon does not do private messages. See screenshot. Again, @mammoth says this is a private message. This is not true. See screenshot. If that message is private, why does @mammoth seem to give me so many options to make it not private? If it’s private, I shouldn’t be able to share a link to the private message. Yet it generated a link for me. For science, here it is: https://moth.social/@atomicpoet/109928665423032607 It will 404, but the point stands. Why is it offering to share as image? Why is it offering to copy text? Seems like the opposite of private. By the way, @IceCubesApp was able to generate a quote from the link to that so-called “private message” in @mammoth. See screenshot. This is a HUGE security issue! Here’s @mammoth’s Explore page. I don’t like it. There’s very little content. It hides the content behind options. Here’s @mammoth’s feed of Trending posts. There’s not many of them. I rand out of things to read within minutes because the feed stopped. On official Mastodon app, there’s way more posts. I’m looking at @mammoth’s options after posts are sent. Some of this is okay. I like translate, of course. But AR is a gimmick. And picture-in-picture gets to be annoying since I don’t know how to get rid off it without forcing the app to close. In @mammoth, boosting and liking work about as well as anything else. So that’s good. Another @mammoth gimmick gone wrong. It does sentiment analysis of posts. It interprets a humorous post as “negative”. This is why you don’t automate everything through A.I., folks. Someone asked me to screenshot @mammoth’s AR function. And there’s nothing. It loads my camera, and nothing else is to be seen. Sorry to disappoint you all. See screenshot. On @mammoth, long pressing buttons brings up a submenu with additional buttons. There’s no explanation of what these buttons do. And pressing them does nothing. This is a big usability bug. Lots of options in the settings. That’s one thing I will give @mammoth. Probably more options than most clients. It perhaps there’s too many options in @mammoth. Chess and number swipe are cute. But it makes me feel that there’s too much cruft in this app. And after witnessing the AR, I tend to believ this is the case. Final thing I’m reviewing for @mammoth is search. It’s awful. I did a search for “Mastodon” and there’s not posts. I know the technical reason why, but why not explain to new users how search works on Mastodon? Otherwise they’re going to think it’s broken. You can all be assured that hashtags work in @mammoth, but you can only see this if you select a hashtag first. To bad posts with a hashtag don’t immediately show up. Again, huge usability problem here. My opinion on @mammoth: A buggy, confusing app with too many features that are implemented poorly. There's too many dark patterns. And there's legit security issues pertaining to so-called "private" messages. I do not recommend this app. |
Gregory's Server
The problem with @mammoth’s approach to “getting started” is that it seems very intent on pushing celebrities first. That’s the first concern, I’d say.
And it seems like this is very much about replicating the “lost” pre-Elon Twitter experience.
Which I guess has appeal to some, but not to me.