The general (and relentlessly repeated) advice here, that I am the one who needs to take control over my experience here to have a good time, is honestly really really irritating.

I'm gonna lay this out on the line right now: if I have to put this kind of work in to exist here peacefully, it's more likely that I'll just bow out and stop trying altogether.

My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.

@TechConnectify I am always surprised at the amount of feedback you get on this topic that amounts mostly to “how is your personal experience not mine?”

@TechConnectify It does suck there’s no way to filter out the obvious trolls and abusive comments by default.

If you notice them coming from a particular instance, you can also do a full-instance block as a user to stop anyone from that instance interacting, though the fact you have to is awful.

@TechConnectify
I'm not sure why this is, but fedi definitely fosters a busybody culture.

This feels like something that should be solved at the home-server level, especially on smaller instances. Just do a bit of sentiment analysis on anything that would generate a notification, and suppress it if it doesn't meet some per-user criteria.

As-is, the service generates way too many nuisance notifications in general.

@TechConnectify sound like a great product from some one to write and develop, but it is not nothing in cost, time and emotional energy, to have to deal with your self.

@TechConnectify unfortunately mastodon still does not have good tools for Big Accounts to manage their experience. I hope they rectify this soon or else they will lose their most valuable contributors.

@TechConnectify fairly certain @Gargron said some sort of quality filter was being tested on the Android app. Not sure if it’s something that can/will eventually get implemented server side…

@TechConnectify As someone with less than 1% the number of followers as you, allow me to explain to you how I understand your use case better than you do.

@TechConnectify For a platform with so many technologists, we sure seem to have a problem wrapping our heads around "this solution does not scale" 🤦🏻

@TechConnectify And then any time filtering is brought up some guy is always like "b-but muh freedom of speech" like everyone else is required to look at every toot they make.

@TechConnectify Thank you for making this clear - I missed the earlier conversations you had on this, and had no idea about the quality filter. I added my voice to this Github issue requesting it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12181

@TechConnectify Mastodon is Linux: the social network, for better and worse (and worse still)

Edit: “Linux” not “Twitter”

@TechConnectify what if you mute the word mute? :blobcatderpy:

@TechConnectify

I don't know how Twitter accomplished it, but oh how I wish I could subscribe to other users' individual block lists on Mastodon.

@TechConnectify the challenge here is that Twitter's quality filter and moderation required creepy algorithms and armies of 3rd world moderators to maintain.

Mastodon is explicitly against those approaches.

Which means that while they must solve the notification problem, they've prohibited themselves from doing it using the same solutions that Twitter did, which is a big challenge.

I'm surprised Gargron isn't pushing harder on this; his own notifications must be awful.

@TechConnectify this.is.not.a.
Twitter.replacement. This place is not made by a single not-so benevolent dictator, it is what you make of it.

@TechConnectify I understand now what you're saying about Twitter. I would have thought that platform would be far worse, but you're saying they're giving you some filtering that Mastodon isn't giving you. And I can understand how that would suck. I hope you're giving that feedback to the people that can change that in this platform.

@TechConnectify Having large numbers of followers on Mastodon causes one's experience to degrade, it seems. I made a post a couple of weeks ago that got so many boosts and likes that I had to mute it.

There is also the case where people generally want to be helpful, but Mastodon hides the number of replies a post got unless one looks at it directly, as "1+," so if someone thinks "maybe I should reply," they have little indication of how many other people have replied already.

@TechConnectify I wouldn't call Twitter's filter "quality".. they blocked people based on follower count. You never would've seen my response on twitter.

@TechConnectify That's an interesting point but unfortunately not easy to replicate in a federated system mostly run by volunteers.

The twitter "quality filter", at least AFAICT from the little documentation there is about it, hid all the replies from you except from people you followed or with blue checkmarks. Those checkmarks (at that time) were given out only to select people and in a manual process involving an identity check by a twitter employee.

@TechConnectify The "quality filter" was nothing of the sort. It was a simple flamewar detector based on the ratio of likes to comments. That downranks flamewars and makes them harder to find, depriving them of participants. Every large site has them, from reddit to hacker news to twitter to facebook.

How to make that work on something distributed like the fediverse, where servers would need to algorithmically cooperate on flamewar detection? no idea.

@TechConnectify Sorry your experience is less than stellar in these regards.

This is a good time to encourage people to donate to Mastodon and other Fediverse projects. Yes, you didn't have to pay for Twitter (until recently) but "when a service is free, you're the product". https://opencollective.com/mastodon

Additionally, Mastodon is open source, so encouraging people with dev skills to contribute to it or, build fediverse tools, is also helpful.

@TechConnectify That must have been quite a magic filter because I was harassed by literal Nazis every time I replied to something political. I had to block daily, and there aren't that many people in Sweden. I'm guessing the filter didn't work in other languages? Twitter was/is horrible, always been (except for the good first 5 years)

@TechConnectify I feel like everyone makes the analogy that Mastodon (with its multiple servers and accounts) is like email vs Facebook or Twitter or whatever. But we’ve benefitted from years of client- and server-side spam filters for email, which just haven’t yet materialized for Mastodon.

@TechConnectify Apologies if this has been recommended a million times but have you tried elk.zone? It’s a web interface for Mastodon which is much nicer than the default and has stacked notifications. The @elk team really did an amazing job

@TechConnectify serious question: what do you think about the YouTube‘s ability to „quality filter“ the comment sections in comparison to, say, fedi? Being a „creator“ myself, I definitely get a lot of obnoxious comments that don’t technically cross the moderation line.

Does it bother you more on mastodon, because you treat it is a more personal communication method? Or do you perhaps not engage with/read the YT comments at all?

@TechConnectify I hear what you’re saying. I guess on Twitter the criteria for being classed as “low quality” was age of account, followers, and some bio information. That was handled as part of a centralised platform. We could replicate that via a personal or instance-level automated filter? But I don’t think there’s any modular plugin for Mastoson that allows that. Ironically implementing such a thing depends on the centralised will of @Gargron :(

@TechConnectify they working on something similar

"Twitter has a quality filter for accounts of your size - this means that many nonsensical comments are filtered out. We will try to implement something similar in Mastodon optionally, just needs some time ^ ^"

https://mastodon.social/@ErikUden@mastodon.de/111515743226941625

@TechConnectify I'm surprised no one has yet suggested that you code your own client with a custom bayesian filter… Please nerds have a bit of self respect and suggest more automated solutions!

(end of joke)

I enjoy your videos, please keep at it

@TechConnectify quality filter is algorithm.
Legit replies got caught up in the twitter Read More all the time. That is NOT a solution, couldn’t stand that “feature” on twitter and thankfully tweetdeck+tweetbot always showed all replies.
Keep it the heck away from masto (algorithms).
I feel bad for the issue you’re experiencing though. Maybe there are other solutions. Some people go the defederation route but I think that’s typically too heavy handed. Fedi is still tackling this.