 mastodon would do so much better if they'd just call instances "neighborhoods" and said that you should pick your neighborhood based on your interests, so that if you look out your window you'll see your neighbors doing things you find interesting. and that it's okay if you find out you don't like your neighborhood, because you can just move to another one! and all your followers will move with you and then, yanno, make it easier to search for people you wanna follow cause that shit just sucks 84 comments | Expand all CWs
 @esdin @eniko search is built as it is intentionally. It limits the ability for trolls and other unsavoury folk from seeking out people they want to attack or conversations they want to “dog-pile” into. It’s a massive benefit of the platform. Hashtags are a good way to find posts & folk with common interests though. @wiredfire @esdin i'm not talking about text search i'm referring to finding a profile of someone where you know where their profile lives but you can't add them unless you go to your home instance and search them and then, after waiting sometimes 2 whole minutes, clicking the follow button that's a dogshit interface @eniko @esdin oh yeah that’s a little laboured, but pasting a URL into a search box isn’t too bad for me. Could be better, but in the context of what mastodon is and how its technical architecture hangs together it’s a workable solution. But it’s an open source project - it’s always open for new ideas and code pulls for improvements. @eniko @wiredfire @esdin My experience is quite different: Almost always I find people I look for from other neighborhoods within seconds. Sometimes I do need to type the full name, like an email address. I’ve had one single case where I couldn’t find a person from a neighborhood that I usually find people from. Not sure, maybe that account was too new? @jashan @wiredfire @esdin i've had like a dozen people i wanted to follow where i had to search their url like 10+ times each because the search kept timing out @eniko @wiredfire @esdin I wonder if that’s maybe an issue in your neighborhood? When I returned to here, mastodon.social timed out all the time even with basic things like just starting the app or logging in. Now it’s all smooth. Or it’s the neighborhoods of the people you try to connect with? Maybe they are too remote ;-) @jashan @wiredfire @esdin pretty sure it was mastodon.social being under heavy load, still not great tho @eniko @jashan @esdin not great but remember these are non-commercial servers. They’re run largely by volunteers, or by a non-profit organisation, funded entirely by donations. The solution when big servers are under heavy load is patience. They’ll come back up & get fast again & you can encourage folk to spread themselves across more servers which helps everyone share the load. @wiredfire @jashan @esdin i'm pointing out that this type of stuff is not acceptable to a mainstream audience and will harm adoption, not complaining about my experiences here for the sake of it @eniko @jashan @esdin that’s ok as well, but I also suggest there’s a reasonable expectation for new users to understand that there’s a small learning curve - a small price for the benefits of a non-corporate owned decentralised system IMO. But others may disagree, that’s also ok. There’s plenty of platforms, we can adopt the ones we feel are right for each of us 😊  @jesuisatire @eniko @jashan @esdin I’d say so, to some degree @wiredfire @eniko @jashan @esdin living in this thought space for a decade now, there is one thing I know for sure: once mainstreams starts to think they can make money out of this, they will code your needs faster than you can see. so .. @wiredfire @eniko @jashan @esdin setting up my own single user instance with #YunoHost was surprisingly easy. Heck you get a 1GB ram vps for 2€ a month add a domain for 5€ per year and you have yourself a place with full control. Might as well add your love interests and friends to it if you feel comfortable with some moderation.
@eniko @jashan @wiredfire @esdin you might go to wall street to ask for money so we can invest in infrastructure?  @eniko tbh the fundamental issue is that HOAs exist (i.e. random defederations) this is an issue as an instance admin because some instances will block for absolutely opaque and seemingly frivolous reasons @kouhai this is for people who are too overwhelmed to join, and worrying about defederation isn't what's keeping them from joining @eniko mhm, fair it's hard to strike a tradeoff in terms of communication, I guess oh no im going viral on mastodon. check out uhh ... my mastodon profile? https://peoplemaking.games/@eniko  @eniko having to put people's URLs into the search bar to follow them, especially when I have great QOL features like importing excel sheets of followers already right there, is probably the thing I hate most about Mastodon, and it absolutely threw me when I first started. It's not that bad, but it's the overwhelming feeling of it being "hacked in" that gets me. @eniko is moving instances really that east? I’m tempted to but thought posts and likes don’t move with you @yuletide you can export/import follows, lists, blocks, mutes, domain blocks, and bookmarks. your old posts stay on your old account (with a forwarding notice to your new one), and your followers are migrated over @eniko can I tweet a screenshot of this on the bird place? I’ve been using telephone providers as my metaphor but this is so much better  @mezzodrinker that's just living in a shack in the woods so it still makes sense  @eniko good point. I know what instance means and I can curate my timeline but I'm a nerd so I don't count. Clearer non-tech language and simpler tools would help adoption. @eniko That's a great idea. I think, you can't follow the whole instance, can you? That would be really helpful. It looks like, that Fedilab it implemented on the client side though. @eniko there's this twitter artist who always calls twitter users neighbors and it's been a nice vibe (and also prevents some parasocial stuff) @eniko Seems reasonable. Gives me GeoCities flashbacks. I’d heard that ActivityPub uses British English spelling, so it would probably be Neighbourhood. @eniko There are quite a few people out there (including people I respect on Twitter) who have complained about the barrier to entry causing them to not go on Mastodon. I think doing small things like this that reduce the perception of barrier to entry, and fixing federated login, would go quite far to get more non-technical people to join Mastodon. @notsidney @eniko And it's conversations like these that get people's creative code juices flowing. I think it's great y'all have these ideas. What's best about it is that here, they can be heard by real people, and a skilled developer can make it happen. Saying, "I wish X could do Y," is how innovation starts, and people need not take it as complaining into the void. people complain because they don't want to change. we are talking about mono sapiens here. if he/she/it wants to needs to he/she/it finds out quite fast and even is happy because "it works!". @eniko @jesuisatire Resistance to change is just a part of how our brains are wired. It’s very homo sapien.  @eniko @filiph "neighborhood", in the physical world, has extent, one neighborhood often flows into the next with no district boundary. And one neighborhood has close proximity to some other neighbors and not others. Are any of these things true for Mastodon instances? Wouldn't this renaming be misleading in these regards? @eniko in isolation that'd be nice, I like the idea of it. But I'm getting Nextdoor vibes and I'm not sure that's good. Also not sure everyone would understand, and many may search for their actual physical neighborhood...  @eniko 👍 I definitely think a less “engineering” based name than “instance” or “sever.” @aalaap @tchambers @eniko @eniko love it! who wouldn't want to toot in their neighborhood? bad idea. people don't understand tec if you try to use cool words.  @eniko This is so straightforwardly brilliant that I can't see it called anything else.  @eniko Strong agreement on this. I was (quietly) advocating calling them "communities", but "neighbourhoods" is even better. @eniko I really like that idea, but I think first we also need some standard ways to describe the differences how these different communities are run. For a given instance, who runs it? How does moderation work? Do admins terminate accounts without warning? How is it funded? Calling them neighbourhoods implies that they’re very similar, so we need a good way to express what the practical differences are. @eniko  @eniko Yeah, I like the neighborhood metaphor- makes me nostalgic for Geocities 😉 @eniko Personally, I would rather see less emphasis on choosing an instance and just make it about following people and hashtags to bring content into your timeline. Every Mastodon explainer seems to start with "look for a server based on your interests" and I think that's off to a bad start. My ISP, e-mail provider, web host, etc., are not neighborhoods. They are part of a network where the service provider is not the focus. @eniko That would be very GeoCities 2.0, which I think would not be a bad move. Instance seems too technical for what these nodes function as - mode like communities.   @eniko isn't it also though that your neighbourhood can close down without warning and all your friends lose your number |
Gregory's Server
@eniko They really need to fix the search for non-federated instances.