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Simon Frankau

@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.)

5 comments
petros

@sgf @kissane

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!

Simon Frankau

@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.

Simon Frankau

@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

@sgf That is true. What is the ideal? Going to both group of followers? It gets more complicated by block lists etc.

I am not an expert in Mastodon and social media and have no pre Experience on Twitter or Facebook. So I am reluctant to give advice on this :-)

Simon Frankau

@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!

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