Mastodawn

@conradhackett to the extent that hashtags are effective in connecting marginalized communities, bad actors will already be able to exploit them to identify targets. Without effective discovery, most new users are unable to find conversations and people to follow that align with their specific interests and aren’t staying active and building the platform. This latter issue should be considered more important if this is to form a new gathering place for ex twitter folks

@thornbill9 @conradhackett I don't understand why the networks of communication can't grow over time without search. Eventually you grow a network that you have complex relationships with and discover new people and content through that network sharing it with you. Search might make that faster but if it's also a source of harm then I'd rather stick with getting to know people and figuring out ways to connect/discover outside of leveraging a large central index.

@danwchan @conradhackett A platform with and without rapid discovery serve different goals. What I would like to rebuild is twofold: ability to quickly connect with experts *outside of my social graph* and to find the rare people around the world who share my niche interests. The irony is that the proposed compromise, hashtags, could just as easily attract abusers to the effect they work. Meanwhile a lot of people won’t put effort to grow roots here if they don’t find those people to begin with

Thornbill9

@danwchan @conradhackett It’s the difference between Facebook and Twitter. I’m less interested in just meeting the people who happen to live on my digital block (same server or shared connection). I want to leverage the internet’s scale to learn from an expert or a person with direct experience on a rare disease or a natural disaster halfway across the world. And I want to ensure that new users quickly find a reason to stay because the more users, the more of them will be those voices

@thornbill9 I understand a little better what you are thinking now. Did you have a lot of valuable interaction from folks outside your followers on Twitter? I did not so I'm unsure of what that experience is like. Did you also provide valuable interaction via search? My impression is that twitter's algorithm may have served some folk needs over others and of course at the cost of requiring that users submit to their terms and surveillance.

@danwchan I was never a big account focused on broadcast. I’m focused on curation. The algorithm of course helps with discovery - and some have theorized a solution of offering users the chance to choose their algos but for me it’s about the ability to, if I want to better understand a civil war in Ethiopia or an earthquake in NZ be able to immediately find first hand accounts from citizens and journalists on the ground. That’s unparalleled in human history. No gatekeepers

@danwchan to give another example, during COVID there were dominant neoliberal narratives perpetuated by authorities that dominated traditional broadcast media from print to cable. The only place I could learn from fellow social democratic perspectives and access the academic community which uncovered uncomfortable truths about long COVID was on twitter. But this doesn’t mean that community wasn’t part of the experience. Nba twitter, black twitter and election twitter were examples of that

@thornbill9 yes i just finished reading an article by @ct_bergstrom now which seems to elaborate on the value of Twitter during the 2020-2021 period of the pandemic.

They shared a link to it here https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/109371298889565968

Carl T. Bergstrom (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image I wrote a piece for the New York Times about how scientists used Twitter during the Covid pandemic and about what comes next. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/opinion/pandemic-twitter.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

FediScience.org

@danwchan @ct_bergstrom I think this tweet said it best. The key aspect to twitter is not the community you build with your followers but the ones you have access to listen to and learn from even if you never speak

@thornbill9
I see there is value from the wide-reaching network that T may represent (who gets access to this network is an eternal struggle), but i'm still failing to understand how adding a central search to mastodon would somehow begin a process to build that network from the fedi.

The way i see it, T had a large userbase because more users and digital interactions are valuable to the advertisers, this aligned with many users finding value in a large central network too.

@thornbill9 On fedi the network is distributed so instances have to consent to search if it's built, thus I see the barrier to a wide reaching network as dependant on the ability to gather consent for opt-in search *first* rather than advocating for feature addition. This will ensure the communities that instances represent understand and consent to having their toots indexed and why this may be important. If you are advocating for such a network here consider this perspective.

@thornbill9 It's still possible to have insights from a wide range of instances accross fedi (which may be in distant localities and thus aggregate reports and sentiments from those places as you desire) if you add them to your social graph. But, this takes time which as you rightly point out is not always something a user wants to spend. So perhaps you are beginning to define a need where a business or other organisation could provide a service.

@danwchan one of my biggest priorities is people (who like me are interested in a discussion group news engine hybrid) building their original social graph and becoming active daily users. To overcome both the technical and social challenges you raise, I would suggest the possibility that people could opt in between a more open and protected experience from the beginning in a form of sorting hat which could help them choose an instance (or network of instances) which matches their use case