mastodon would do so much better if they'd just call instances "neighborhoods" and said that you should pick your neighborhood based on your interests, so that if you look out your window you'll see your neighbors doing things you find interesting. and that it's okay if you find out you don't like your neighborhood, because you can just move to another one! and all your followers will move with you
and then, yanno, make it easier to search for people you wanna follow cause that shit just sucks
30.5K Posts, 661 Following, 9.88K Followers · Founded queer gamedev studio Kitsune Games with @[email protected]. Kitsune Tails, Super Bernie World, MidBoss, Ultra Hat Dimension, Lore Finder. Also: Coding History on YouTube. She/her. Dutch, former US greencard holder, now living in Cyprus. Mask wearer You can buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/sharkhugseniko (Hello search engines, this is the Mastodon account of Eniko Fox)
@esdin @eniko search is built as it is intentionally. It limits the ability for trolls and other unsavoury folk from seeking out people they want to attack or conversations they want to “dog-pile” into. It’s a massive benefit of the platform.
Hashtags are a good way to find posts & folk with common interests though.
@wiredfire @esdin i'm not talking about text search i'm referring to finding a profile of someone where you know where their profile lives but you can't add them unless you go to your home instance and search them and then, after waiting sometimes 2 whole minutes, clicking the follow button
that's a dogshit interface
@eniko @esdin oh yeah that’s a little laboured, but pasting a URL into a search box isn’t too bad for me. Could be better, but in the context of what mastodon is and how its technical architecture hangs together it’s a workable solution.
But it’s an open source project - it’s always open for new ideas and code pulls for improvements.
@eniko @jashan @esdin not great but remember these are non-commercial servers. They’re run largely by volunteers, or by a non-profit organisation, funded entirely by donations.
The solution when big servers are under heavy load is patience. They’ll come back up & get fast again & you can encourage folk to spread themselves across more servers which helps everyone share the load.
@eniko @jashan @esdin that’s ok as well, but I also suggest there’s a reasonable expectation for new users to understand that there’s a small learning curve - a small price for the benefits of a non-corporate owned decentralised system IMO.
But others may disagree, that’s also ok. There’s plenty of platforms, we can adopt the ones we feel are right for each of us 😊
@eniko @wiredfire @jashan @esdin
maybe that's a feature too?
@wiredfire @eniko @jashan @esdin
living in this thought space for a decade now, there is one thing I know for sure:
once mainstreams starts to think they can make money out of this, they will code your needs faster than you can see.
so ..
don't worry ..
be happy!
@ryuuka @eniko @wiredfire @jashan The whole point is for them to be non-commercial ;)
We're running with ~3k people right now and are stable with plenty of headroom. Mastodon proliferation is a Very Cool Thing and more folks should run instances.
@eniko @jashan @wiredfire @esdin
you might go to wall street to ask for money so we can invest in infrastructure?
@eniko tbh the fundamental issue is that HOAs exist (i.e. random defederations)
this is an issue as an instance admin because some instances will block for absolutely opaque and seemingly frivolous reasons
@eniko I'm down with this term change.
It makes sense and might stop a lot of people getting "tech block" from hearing weird things like instances or servers.
@eniko That's a great idea.
I think, you can't follow the whole instance, can you? That would be really helpful.
It looks like, that Fedilab it implemented on the client side though.
@berkes yup I am aware of the local tab. The original idea is about being able to follow other servers/instances. So not your local one. I have my private instance for example, so local us just me. But would like to bring posts from other servers, which are topical.
Also TIL that you can easily get rss feeds (append `.rss` to URLs).
@bobek Apparently there isn't, there's an open issue here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17269
While I see the benefit, it also poses a threat to instances being indexed. It would make it even easier for bad actors (states, marketing, cambridgeanalytics) to monitor and index the entire fediverse. So it's a tradeoff.
@eniko there's this twitter artist who always calls twitter users neighbors and it's been a nice vibe (and also prevents some parasocial stuff)
@eniko Seems reasonable. Gives me GeoCities flashbacks.
I’d heard that ActivityPub uses British English spelling, so it would probably be Neighbourhood.
@eniko There are quite a few people out there (including people I respect on Twitter) who have complained about the barrier to entry causing them to not go on Mastodon.
I think doing small things like this that reduce the perception of barrier to entry, and fixing federated login, would go quite far to get more non-technical people to join Mastodon.
@notsidney @eniko And it's conversations like these that get people's creative code juices flowing.
I think it's great y'all have these ideas. What's best about it is that here, they can be heard by real people, and a skilled developer can make it happen.
Saying, "I wish X could do Y," is how innovation starts, and people need not take it as complaining into the void.
people complain because they don't want to change.
we are talking about mono sapiens here.
if he/she/it wants to needs to he/she/it finds out quite fast and even is happy because "it works!".
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