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Top-level
3 angles from my side: 1. The technician (sysadmin for many years) - There is certainly room for improvements but some "simple things" aren't simple to implement. 2. The open source enthusiast: The requests come from all sides and some might be iffy. What's good for, let's say, Meta, isn't good for me. 3. The user: I compare it to a pub. It's fleeting by nature. Best bits end up in a "notebook" elsewhere. I have 50+ followers, I can tell them where to find me when I move. 6 comments
I am not sure what you are referring to. I see 2 categories: Sometimes something may surprise you in a way that should be fixed. I get that. Sometimes it is only surprising because people used abother platforms and expects it to work like what one used before. One can try to emulate the "before". That is quite exhausting. Or one does it differently and hope that people adapt. I am using a Linux desktop which will make Windows users frustrated. But Windows frustrates me a lot!  @petros Well, the example from the OP is about account migration, which doesn't even exist on other platforms, so it's clearly in the first category. There are a good number of things that just don't make sense for normal social media use. e.g. If I reply to a followers-only post, only *my* followers (and named people) can see my reply. Anyone trying to follow the wider conversation with limited follows can't. This exposes the internal model at the cost of usefulness. @petros Having said all that, emulating the before is... complicated. There's value there - e.g. we've got posts, boosts, likes and bookmarks. Copying's not all bad - many features are the result of built-up experience that we shouldn't ignore. Just understand the feature first. The other side is that if you build something that looks suspiciously like a feature that exists on another platform *but behaves subtly differently* you're going to break expectations and make people sad. @petros My personal feeling is that these things should be thread-based - that whoever posts the original entry should kind-of own that space (although maybe it would be better to have clearer tools to separate sub-threads than just dropping the original owner). Given that, I'd default to "followers of original poster". Private block and follower lists complicate things. I think it would be possible with a layer of indirection, but messy. Much of this is effectively on an honour code anyway! |
Gregory's Server
@petros @kissane Re the first item, it annoys me that Masto devs favour simplicity over the unsurprising.
Ideally, you architect your system to have unsurprising behaviour.
Failing that, you add some kind of adaptor layer to look unsurprising to users.
Failing that, your docs (and UI!) should make it clear how the thing will surprise you.
I know *so* much software doesn't do this, but every surprise sends such a message to Masto users...
(You got me on a pet whinge, not targeted at you.)