@kissane 2) "How do I find all of the people I used...

2) "How do I find all of the people I used to follow on some other platform?" (Presumably Twitter.) This is related to the previous sense of "finding people", but I don't think anybody would consider it really satisfactory to have to manually search on every member of a, say, thousand-person follow list. It's really the question, "How do I auto-populate my follows here based on my follows on Twitter or somewhere else, to reconstitute my Twitter experience here on the fediverse?"

3) "How do I find a particular scene to become a part of it?" One of the valuable emergent phenomena on Twitter (and a different but similar thing is true of Reddit) is the ability to participate in "$thing Twitter": Black Twitter, Librarian Twitter, Fashion Twitter, Epidemiologist Twitter, etc. As I am not really a Twitter user myself, I'm unclear on how that actually happens and how people connect with it. Something something hashtags?

2/?

Like 29 Jul 2023 at 0:44 | Wall-to-wall | Open on universeodon.com

8 comments

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane

As I understand it (admittedly as an outsider looking in, i.e. maybe wrongly!) people can go looking for and engaging with these emergent communities without any intention or need to follow all of the members manually, or even follow them at all because... hashtags maybe? Algorithm? Search terms?

4) "How do I meet new interesting people that I have something in common with and with whom I can start up a friendly acquaintanceship? How can I find new people to socialize with?" Again, if I understand how federation works correctly, on big instances you get exposed far, far more to the breadth of content in the Fediverse. On small instances, the Fediverse can feel shockingly deserted. On a big instance it can be hard *not* to meet people; on small instances, it can feel like where IS everybody?

5) "How do I find new entertaining people to follow to have parasocial relationships with?"

3/?

@kissane

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29 Jul 2023 at 0:51 | Open on universeodon.com

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane

As much as some old school Fediverse denizens don't like it, one of the reasons people enjoy social media is a chance to follow entertainers, educators, activists, and all sorts of people who reliably and frequently post good things to read. In following these accounts, there's not necessarily any intention of being buddies with these posters; their content is consumed as entertainment and/or enrichment.

It's not unreasonable for someone to want to be able to find that sort of appealing content here on the Fediverse. Hence the question, "Who's good to follow?" I think this is the primary thing being referred to when people say it's hard to find people on the Fediverse without an algorithm; I suspect when people say it's hard to discover people on the Fediverse without an algorithm, this is the use case they have in mind, with finding a scene the secondary use case.

4/n

@kissane

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29 Jul 2023 at 1:00 | Open on universeodon.com

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane

So given these five very different meanings of "finding people on the Fediverse", it's not entirely clear which of them your respondents are complaining of difficulty with. Maybe all of them - I honestly think that Mastodon and clones are bad at all five.

It seems obvious to me that these five different senses of "How do you find people here?" refer to very different problems,
requiring very different solutions. An algorithm isn't going to find your friends for you; a Twitter to Federverse user mapping service isn't going to help you to find cool new content; search is probably not actually going to help you surface people you would like to become friends with.

It would be interesting to surface which of these things people are bouncing off of hardest, not least because it reveals what desires people are bringing to the Fediverse, and finding that the Fediverse doesn't support (or doesn't seem to, or does so erratically.)

5/5

@kissane

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29 Jul 2023 at 1:07 | Open on universeodon.com

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane

Oh one more just occurred to me! I don't know if this is what anybody means by "find people" when they're complaining of difficulty doing so on the Fediverse verse, but it seems plausible if unobvious, so:

6) "How do I find people who are talking about a specific topic at a given moment?" Here I'm not talking about finding a standing scene, but rather things like trending hashtags or topics that surface on search. If I hear a loud noise in my city, theoretically I could check Twitter, using it search function, to see if there are people talking about that loud noise they just heard in #$mytown. If I want to know what opinions are about a referendum we're going to vote on, I could search Twitter for the referendum number and state.

The purpose isn't to find people to follow or scene to join. It's totally ad hoc, and the purpose is to find information. But the way you found that information on Twitter was by finding the people who were discussing the information you wanted.

@kissane

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29 Jul 2023 at 2:08 | Open on universeodon.com

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane
This is something it seems, again, may work okay on very large instances (though honestly I've not found it to work very well even on Universeodon), and not at all on smaller instances.

Also now that I think about it, I want to stress sometimes people have problems making the Fediverse work for them because they are trying to do something on the Fediverse that, actually, you can't. For instance, even if the Fediverse technologically supported surfacing discussions like the ones I describe here, that doesn't mean those discussions are happening in the first place! It would be great if I could search the whole Fediverse for recent posts about my town, but that doesn't mean anybody's actually talking about my town on the Fediverse.

This problem also shows up for trying to join a scene. Even if Mastodon et al. supported scenes in their discovery as well as Twitter does, that doesn't mean those scenes exist here.

@kissane
This is something it seems, again, may work okay on very large instances (though honestly I've not found it to work very well even on Universeodon), and not at all on smaller instances.

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29 Jul 2023 at 2:13 | Open on universeodon.com

Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

@kissane It's reasonable enough to want to port your follow list from Twitter to Mastodon, but there's no guarantee that all or even just some of your Twitter buds have a presence on Mastodon in the first place. It's understandable that people want to hot swap Mastodon for Twitter, but insofar as one's personal experience of Twitter consists of one's curated list of follows, one can't just hot swap the Fediverse for Twitter, because the people you followed on Twitter are not necessarily on the Fediverse, and there is very little technology can do about that.

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29 Jul 2023 at 2:14 | Open on universeodon.com

Andromeda Yelton

@siderea @kissane I DID do a lot of librarian twitter, and now you have me thinking about how exactly I did that. I think it's a combination of:

* following a critical mass of people in that discourse community (doesn't need to & can't be all, but enough that if there's a thing Everyone's Talking About, you keep seeing it)

* quote tweets: honestly huge; the reaction/commentary turns things into Discourse (IIUC even bigger in Black twitter where it is also situated in call-&-response norms) 1/

29 Jul 2023 at 1:49 | Open on ohai.social

Andromeda Yelton

@siderea @kissane * hashtags and/or search -- I never followed hashtags and didn't use them much, BUT the ability to find context on The Thing Going Around was pretty critical for making rapid sense of it; not sure if you need both hashtags & search to accomplish that, but you do need at least one, and I found search more useful (people don't always hashtag but they do use the terms they are talking about, you know?) /fin

29 Jul 2023 at 1:52 | Open on ohai.social