TeddyBeddy
emptywheelHere's a comment for incoming Twitter users: I've found that some are really put off by the way Mastodon requires push and pull to get to information. Rather than Elmo telling you what to read (and steering you to most incendiary content), you have to go look for it and choose to consume it. Most notably, I've come to think of "Content Warnings" as instead subject lines, just like you'd use in an email, so readers can scan whether they want to read further.
Viss@emptywheel 100% of the content warnings ive seen have been for content that i do not find in any way offensive enough to warrant a warning. What I really do appreciate, though, is that on infosec.exchange you can make 11k character posts, so hiding a literal book behind a content warning for length is handy!
titty trickster
david
LRG 
Gamiac (inactive)@Viss Yo, different servers have different maximum post lengths? HELL yes.
Laura Kosloff@Viss @emptywheel I'm hearing more often the words "content wrapper," which I think is more helpful than the words "content warning." People are using labels with the CW icon such as "Twitter crosspost," or "US Politics", etc. It's not a matter necessarily of something being offensive, more like "don't want to read/see? no worries, just scroll along."
You can also set your preferences to automatically expand all CWs, or set filters to not see some topics at all.
Colin Dellow@legallaurak I hadn't even thought to go looking for a preference to auto-expand CW -- thanks, you've made Mastodon much more ergonomical for me!
@cldellow Glad I could help! Been here all of two weeks but feel like I've learned a lot that I can pass on.
Made In Canada@Viss @emptywheel
The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.
Marcel Proust
Giselle's very old account@Viss @emptywheel
CWs aren't intended for only offensive content. Think of them as headline, book spine or Content Wrapper: you give others the opportunity to click thro if the text above 'Read More' appeals to them, and they'll engage more because they already engaged rather than scan past.
CWs can be used for food photos (I really appreciate that! I'll unfollow those w/o CWs), direct eye contact, politics and whenever you want to post a teaser. Useful!
CWs aren't intended for only offensive content. Think of them as headline, book spine or Content Wrapper: you give others the opportunity to click thro if the text above 'Read More' appeals to them, and they'll engage more because they already engaged rather than scan past.
CWs can be used for food photos (I really appreciate that! I'll unfollow those w/o CWs), direct eye contact, politics and whenever you want to post a teaser. Useful!
Jenni Said That@emptywheel a lot of folks are encouraging people to think of CW as "content wrapper".
Warren Terra@emptywheel I have always had my Twitter set to a strictly chronological feed of accounts that I follow, so that might not be so different.
Except, the accounts that I follow won't be getting fed viral-ish tweets by the algorithm, and so won't be retweeting ("boosting") it onto my feed. And definitely won't be quote-tweeting it, as I've repeatedly been told that doesn't exist.
hiss_driver@warren__terra do you know, is my feed automatically chronological here? I don't see a setting for it
@hiss_driver According to what I've read, all feeds on Mastodon are chronological, composed of posts by people you follow and posts that someone you follow boosted. Unless I misunderstood, it doesn't show you posts people you follow favorited, and definitely doesn't show you posts that are being favorited and boosted by a lot of people, whom you don't follow.
But: I'm new to Mastodon, and I could have read bad information, or misunderstood what I read.
@warren__terra lol thanks, I am as new as you are
but it seems there is not a content-pushing algorithm here. not that I want one, I always had my twitter feed set to chronological.
@emptywheel lt just feels like a really high barrier to entry right now even to figure out how to follow people. Working on it, though...
@LauraClawson Hopefully we'll have a few high value Follow Fridays to fix that.
@LauraClawson
You can look through responses to posts you like and followers of interesting accounts to find people you want to follow. Another great way is to search by hashtag (and use them yourself as well). It takes a while. I find it useful to do short sessions but more of them over time. And respond a lot! And post, and boost some. That will let people find you. Good luck!
You can look through responses to posts you like and followers of interesting accounts to find people you want to follow. Another great way is to search by hashtag (and use them yourself as well). It takes a while. I find it useful to do short sessions but more of them over time. And respond a lot! And post, and boost some. That will let people find you. Good luck!
punchilne
Matt Pritchett@emptywheel following hashtags now has improved my feed, keep me entertained & find a few new people to follow too.
Erin Terlson@CrankyCyborg @emptywheel Any hashtags you recommend?
@Erin @emptywheel
Start off general & narrow it down if you find specific ones you like.
I'm a photographer so I follow a few under that sort of umbrella.
Black and white photography & landscape photography # are great so far.
Start off general & narrow it down if you find specific ones you like.
I'm a photographer so I follow a few under that sort of umbrella.
Black and white photography & landscape photography # are great so far.
Luigi de Guzman@emptywheel what is really putting people off right now isn’t so much the push and pull as the how impossible it is to find…anyone. People are trying to reconstitute social networks of mutuals now and the system is designed to make this difficult on purpose.
@emptywheel so many posts trying to be helpful seem to assume people are migrating and starting over from zero. Maybe that’s why I see so many enthusiastic “this is a COMMUNITY we BUILD!” posts. New migrants already had communities they want to re-build. Support for that is…less evident.
AnnDebirdify is a website that scans your Twitter follows and lists for mastodon accounts. Super helpful for finding your network here.
https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/
It's really slow today, but just worked for me.
@AnnIsHere @emptywheel people are now moving over faster than they update their profiles on Twitter, so this is of limited use at best.
In any event it’s been down for me all day.
Eric VeySome of the admins have put together lists of users that can be imported into your account.
So, for example, I like to follow journos and Adam Davidson runs an instance for them. He has a list of people of people that joined his instance which I imported.
The only trouble I've had with this is that most of the time the spreadsheet (in csv format) has way too much info, so I use a spreadsheet program to delete all the columns except the user names.
@vey981 @emptywheel this isn’t really what I’m talking about. It isn’t about finding academics or journalists or content creators. More like finding regular users. Fandoms etc.
Yes I know about hashtags. But I’m looking for individuals.
I can't help you because I never used the bird that way. I used the "other button" and only saw things as they were posted chronologically by people I followed. So this is all very familiar to me.
Too much Kardashian type garbage using the algorithm button.
@vey981 @emptywheel same as me. What’s going to die with the bird are all my mutuals. Even if they do make it on here, it’s nearly impossible for new users to search for people they already know. Most people will quit.
Mastodon locals will say “good riddance” to those folks while simultaneously talking a big game about community/welcoming/whatever
I know that we both have a serious investment in time. I had my TL just right over there. It took years. When I was new to the bird, I had trouble finding the right people to follow, but mentions on other media of the addresses, got me pointed in the right direction.
My TL here is getting better every day, much faster than the bird TL. I am frustrated, too, but eventually, somebody boosts a post from an "old friend" and I am in luck.
As for keeping followers, it's not part of my job and I don't think I have such Important Things to say that I need any.
@emptywheel @vey981 not a question of Important Things To Say as much as “these are actually people I see and hang out with offline, but we never really exchanged contact information in any other way because we were both on the same platform”
For a lot of folks the death of the bird takes a piece of their real lives too.
Bird is not dead yet, but you need to export your data. So start sending out tweets saying how to find you here. If it's as important to them as it is to you, with your username here, they should be able to find you. I use Tuskey and it can search by username.
@emptywheel @vey981 already on the data export. I don’t think anybody’s home over there to handle it, lol.
Also the consistently brutal response I get from users here seems to be: if people don’t make the effort to find you here then your connection wasn’t strong enough. Ah, the welcoming Fediverse community!
Mine took 3 days and it was in my spam folder. Those people are not wrong. If you put your Mastodon username in the bird bio, and add it to tweets and replies, if they care, they will find you.
Rant Ninja@Ouij Lock the doors if you want a purity test ;)
Respectfully.
David J. Atkinson@Ouij @emptywheel I strongly suggest trying #Debirdify to find people you were following on Twitter. If they have made any mention of their instance and user name you can find ad follow them on Mastodon
TheEnquirer@Ouij - well, you can always fork the Mastodon project and maybe make your own version which has an easier on-boarding process for people who held prior communities elsewhere.
An alternative option for people with large followings is hosting their own instances of Mastodon - specifically for their communities they held on another platform. Then everyone will be together on the same #local feed.
That's what I'm gonna test out.
@TheEnquirer it’s a hell of a lot to say “yeah man just fork it” to a guy whose technical skills amount to “maybe wrote one bash script once.”
And the people having the hardest time are the new arrivals.
Don’t worry it’s gonna get a lot quieter here when they figure out they don’t know how to find anyone. I suppose most of the locals prefer it that way
@Ouij - jeez man, I didn't mean you specifically.
Lots of people have been saying they'd like better discoverability features on Mastodon. And recently, many new users have taken it upon themselves to begin learning to fork & develop additional features for Mastodon - the kind you were pining for.
I wasn't telling you to do that specifically; but as encouragement for anybody *with* the technical skill in the community who sees my post to try it out.
We're not the only ones here, ya know :P
@TheEnquirer everyone seems to want to tell me the lack of discoverability is some sort of design feature?
This is a network that seems to be built by & for people that are ambivalent about whether they actually want to be found on a network
@Ouij - I am quite interested in having a discussion about this, as I've been enjoying talking about the design philosophy behind Mastodon/FOSS federation with others but, . . . you seem a little agitated about the topic and I don't care for arguments.
What I will say, is that I apologize if anybody here has left a sour taste in your mouth regarding the platform or your genuine questions. I hope your evening is more pleasant 💗
Brood Tea@emptywheel hashtags are where it's at. You want to be found? You want your posts to be found? Hashtags.
Janis@emptywheel that’ll take getting used to. I find I tend to scroll past most of them. I’d rather see the actual post.
sergio_101 has moved!@emptywheel at first, content warnings sorta puzzled me. but yes, if someone is writing a long post about how great broccoli is, but there is a #CW like "why broccoli is great".. it's quick and easy to keep scrolling..
tom4okstate@emptywheel yep. "Content Warning" isn't great branding but the actual product is really sound.
@tom4okstate If Mastodon split it up to be subject-line and content-warning I’d 100% support. Using CWs as subject-lines is the worst of both worlds.
I have to keep CWs off if I want to read my timeline bc everyone uses them unnecessarily BUT if something really needs a CW I don’t actually get the benefit.
:(
Barry Schwartz 
@emptywheel I read Twitter with a big private list, and Mastodon is like that. The posters I wanted to read, in chronological order, without ads.
(The list was usually a subset of follows, but also included TFG before it was banned.)
Mastodon Migration@emptywheel Another best practice is to add topic hashtags like #USPolitics. This enables interested users to find your post via search and filter your post if they prefer to avoid that subject. Think of CWs and topic hashtags not as requirements, but as courtesies. Either one or the other or both is appreciated.
#twittermigration #mastodonmigration #hashtags #mastodontips #CW
#twittermigration #mastodonmigration #hashtags #mastodontips #CW
@mastodonmigration When I first started moving over it wasn't clear what the hashtags would be. There were almost no #USPol tags then!
And while I like to think I'm using CW appropriately, I often forget to ALSO use the same hashtag.
@emptywheel Don't know what the standard is either. #USPol currently is 320 per week and #USPolitics is 267. #USPol is shorter so it uses less characters. Think you would be in a position to help set the standard.
#Hashtags take a bit of getting used to. Popping them in the body can make the post kind of unreadable, and putting them at the end burns characters. Think the best is a few key ones in the body and overall topic ones at the bottom or top.
#twittermigration #mastodontips
Dennis Jernberg@mastodonmigration @emptywheel Me, I'll probably use the longer #USPolitics in my CWs to support screen readers (I've changed the way I do hashtags from how I did it on Twitter for that reason).
@dennis_jernberg @emptywheel Good point. Another comment concerning screen readers is that putting a lot of hashtags in the body makes the post really hard for screen readers because the reader says "hashtag" for every # symbol. However, several people commented that they don't mind and learn to filter it out.
#twittermigration #mastodontips #hashtags
#twittermigration #mastodontips #hashtags
John Lusk@tarheel @mastodonmigration @emptywheel We're figuring these things out in real time, on the fly, to help other people adapt.
ADHDiabetes (they/them)@mastodonmigration @dennis_jernberg @emptywheel as far as I'm aware, though I don't use a screen reader myself, capitalizing each word in a hashtag also makes them easier to parse
Micah@mastodonmigration @emptywheel would be nice if the backend auto-picked ‘em up