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.
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.
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 💗