Gregory's Serversomething I didn't have room for in the post itself is that a non-tiny group of people have had instances blow up on them over the years, leaving them starting over again and again—this is especially destructive for newer folks, who don't always understand what's happening
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54 comments
Re. the second "couldn’t find people or interests" group, I viscerally feel this. I set up an alt-account to indulge in therapeutic socialising around the (big) football (soccer) team I follow. The experience has been excruciatingly difficult in many ways. It's been a job. I'm two week into relentless *work* to drum up even a little consistent sociability. It's been almost zero fun. If I were normal, I'd have given up on day two. Two idea I think would make it easier (cont)... 1. Hashtags are indeed essential in the absence of an algorithm. But people either forget to use them, or just don't because they've been conditioned not to. It would help enormously to have a mechanism by which we could auto-tag posts; i.e. insert one of more tags quickly based on what I'm posting about. In addition, it would help if tags copied into replies, like handles do. (cont)... 2. I'd like to be able to search a hashtag and get back a list of accounts that have used that hashtag within x days or have that tag in their profile. Ordered by "frecency". I'd then like to drill in to see their tagged posts. Perhaps the biggest difficulty I've found on my alt-account is that even though I've been through the pain of finding and following around 200 people who have used a relevant tag, my timeline is frustratingly irrelevant to the point of being chaotic. (cont)... So I have to resort to clicking about to manually search for my hashtags. Which yields better results. But then I'm missing the stuff people don't tag (which is a lot). So yeah, it's very difficult. I'd also say it's all very time bound. Posting stuff while America sleeps means you're posting into the void, because those posts aren't surfaced by an algo in the morning. A tactic I've often used there is to boost my own posts to give them a second wind. @charlesroper @kissane The world is a big place, and not a "void". If the US is important to you, certainly, time your posts, but there are other timezones with interesting people in them.  @charlesroper @kissane  @charlesroper @kissane also an "explore"-like function that let's you see recent popular posts limited to specific hashtags, or any of the hashtags you follow. @naught101@mastodon.social @charlesroper@indieweb.social @kissane@mas.to #Firefish (f. #Calckey), #Misskey, have that, it's called antenna(s). @charlesroper @kissane My problem has been figuring out what hashtag to use because not everyone agrees. And I feel like the suggested hashtags aren't very usable until you're almost done typing the whole word. Without including the actual "#" , is it SuperBowl2024 or SuperBowlLVIII? SuperBowlAds or SuperBowlCommercials? Oscars or AcademyAwards? TheMandalorian or Mandalorian? Sometimes, my posts end up a parade of hashtags to cover alternate versions, and that's no fun and takes space.  @cstephens2 @charlesroper @kissane To be fair, that's a problem with all Social Media. The most unified hashtags are the ones promoted by the companies involved. Like Disney might post about #MandalorianSeason3 while you might have posted about #TheMandalorianS3 Disney's will be more popular, most likely. @kinyutaka @charlesroper @kissane Of the social media I use, I've found Instagram to be the easiest because they tell me what I've used before and also come up with the most popular ones as suggestions, so I can choose. That almost never worked for me on Twitter. And it's not working for me on here, even hashtags I've used. @cstephens2 @charlesroper @kissane I have had mixed reactions on my hashtags. System will sometimes capitalize them, and sometimes not. Sometimes they don't fill in when I start typing. @cstephens2 @charlesroper @kissane It's possible to figure out which ones to use if you go to the Explore section and then put various hashtags into the search to find out which version is the most popular. Sometimes I do that after I've posted something, and then I edit them in. Not a perfect solution by any means, it definitely should be streamlined into the actual posting interface. @charlesroper @kissane Interesting post, but it relies heavily on a book by Dan Ariely. And Ariely's research has recently been found to be...unreliable to say the least.  I said "lastly" but then my replies become almost immediately overwhelming. It's great that a lot of people like this/want to argue about it/are thinking about it! But I am just one brain so I'm going to miss a lot of things, apologies. @kissane Thank you for your work on this. Like many Bluesky/former Mastodon users I had a really tough time with the sign up and paralysis over which instance to choose. The first one I chose (mastodon.social) was huge and overwhelming. I didn’t even understand the fediverse AT ALL at that point. Fast-forward to late last year, when Twitter changed hands. I changed my instance to a regional one (made much more sense) and have been pleased with it. /1 @kissane That being said, there are definite steps one can follow to make Mastodon a better experience. I’m still no good with hashtags (trying). Also, I try to be more in the moment about social media. I’ve learned to let it all go. If I can’t move or save my posts when I leave an instance or deactivate/delete a social media account, that’s fine. It simply isn’t important to me. I understand that isn’t the case for many others. /2  @kissane this is really great and interesting work - some of it was stuff that I felt and feel around Fediverse, other bits made no sense to me (people really think you can't be silly? On here!?), but it's so valuable to actually listen to people who aren't here and to at least think about why @derwinmcgeary @kissane The "you can't be silly" really surprised me too. I wonder why they thought that? Maybe their instance?  @cjordahl @derwinmcgeary @kissane that might be related to the first few encounters they had on here, and if they had backing-up community at the time. i can very well imagine how alienating it could be if the first encounter were an annoying reply human reciting rules that exist only in their mind, but doing it with great conviction. @derwinmcgeary I totally think the shitposters just can't find each other, it's a tragedy @kissane One of my most boosted posts was a thoughtful take on CWs and in/out group distinctions. It was overtaken today by something which barely qualifies as a spoonerism. Land of contrasts, I tell ya @kissane @derwinmcgeary yes, they can. It's just they coalesce into smaller, cliqueier groups who knew each other BT (Before Twitter). @kissane @derwinmcgeary Well if that’s the case, they can stay over on other platforms! @derwinmcgeary @kissane I think it's also a perception thing as well, because there's no algorithm pushing memes and what not, the atmosphere has become something like you talking with your professional peers more than kicking back and talking shit with your friends.  @kissane thank you again for your humane and human approach to qualitative research, and your lucidity. The fediverse needs this, though I'm not sure it has earned it.   @kissane I think I lucked out in being successful with the automated migration script effectively recreating my follows, and in choosing a pretty good server that was successful in dealing with growing pains. I got mildly chided once for too much CW on inoffensive image content.  @kissane re: feature to prompt for alt text: perhaps some use for image recognition ML to generate an initial description as default text? Could be a complete hash, and plenty of considerations for implementation , but IMO it’d reduce friction for alt text considerably. @kissane I’m confused that people wouldn’t research how it works. Twitter used to work entirely by hashtags and that’s what you need to do here. Instagram does still, although Facebook no longer does. And you can follow people on different instances if you learned how that works. Social Media apps aren’t all the same. Why would they be? That said, there are always going to be lazy folks who don’t like being able to customize their sm experiences. @schoolingdiana @kissane Thing is that a lot of people didn't jump on to Twitter until it reached "critical mass" when even more people jumped in. By then Twitter already had their algorithms in place. Only the most die hard Twitter user from early Twitter days would know the days when it didn't have any algorithms like the fediverse today...  @kissane@mas.to thank you for this and enjoy your time offline! Hopefully we’ll have this all sorted out by the time you’re back, but there may still be one or two small open issues for you to chime in on.  @kissane this would never happen with one of the established big players like say twitter @lritter did you, by any chance, read what the op wrote before you posted your reply, leonard ritter? @kissane Yeah, this. Over the years I have had a couple of instances just disappear, and it has taken a few tries to find an appropriate instance. At this stage I think it works better for me than twitter ever did, but I can see why folks find getting established and sticking round a non straightforward experience. @kissane yep, and this is why I tell friends to avoid servers where the admin is also the sole moderator. Amusingly, I've been accused of being "against" small servers for this stance - thus demonstrating your first point about being yelled at. Anyhow, thanks for putting the work into this. Hopefully seeing it all gathered in one place will result in some self-reflection in certain quarters. Do you think that the ability to transfer an account to a new instance would at least help the "fedugee" problem? That was it for me, even though I haven't left Mastodon, and I don't intend to leave. I'm only trying Bluesky because someone gave me an invite code. That person also tried Mastodon, but they couldn't stand the HOA vibe/etiquette policing. It's nice to have a place not named Twitter that (hopefully) won't be shutdown over some admin or moderation drama [mastodon.lol], or be the target of a defederation campaign [mastodon.social]. I'm damn tired of moving instances over bullshit. @dulcedemon Hello, sorry to poke you randomly like this! Is there somewhere I could read or learn more about basic Mastodon things like this? I'm a newish user and haven't heard of things like what you mentioned about Mastodon.social before. Part of the reason I chose .social is because I saw it was the default server now, and I wanted a basic place to reside while I learn more about this platform. Hearing the default instance was a target of defederation is piquing my curiosity lol I didn't participate in the campaign, so I can't really speak to its specifics. I have had a mastodon.social account since 2018. I created this other one, when people started blocking that instance. As for user tips... @dulcedemon Thanks for the info, I appreciate it and will look it up! Similar to the theme of the original thread, it's a little confusing to hear that the default instance is one of the ones blocked by people, haha (why??). At least for me, I thought the default instance would be a neutral one to join. I was hoping I could stay on this one, but it's sounding like I should consider eventually switching if I remain on this platform? :( I've had no problems on there. There are a lot of people who are angry that it was made the default at sign-up. I'm not one of them. It seemed unnecessary to me, but if it helps people who find choosing an instance overwhelming, then so be it. It's kind of crowded, and it can be spammy, but I have a great enthusiasm for blocking such accounts. @dulcedemon Thanks for your insight! It's really helpful to hear about your experiences. I had no idea people were upset about it being the default, or that it was known for spam. D: I haven't seen it used that way yet (but maybe I'm not using/following things properly) A sizable portion of everyone I know who tried Mastodon left, and I've felt a little like I'm roaming around in the dark knocking into things while figuring out how it works. I appreciate you shedding some light into it! :)  @kissane The only solution for this is #NomadicIdentity (a.k.a. #AccountPortability) which #Streams and #Hubzilla have for years. Streams is #PublicDomain, other projects can probably take the code and implement it. (I'm not saying it is easy, but at last they probably don't have to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch.) Streams and Hubzilla are #fediverse software too. @kissane Do we know what caused the instances to blow up? I'm pretty new to Mastodon and can't remember hearing about something like that. |
Lastly! I squeaked this post in under a rapidly dropping door—I'm going to be really busy for a day or so and then offline for awhile. If you ask questions after today and don't hear back, that's probably why!
Please be cool with each other and don't make me come back to screaming fights in my replies. <3