πππ«ππ¦π²
Scott MatterElectronic mail is so confusing. Why do I need to choose a provider and how do I even decide? And once I have an address, how do I find my friendsβ addresses and send them letters? Will I only be able to send letters to people using the same provider?
ahistorical immaterialist@scottmatter sounds dangerous too, I've heard the email server owner can read your emails. This will never take off.
Dr Dan Marshall@jimbob @scottmatter would have helped adoption if the NSA hadn't nuked end-to-end encryption when the protocol was first taking off...
Cassandrich@jimbob @scottmatter TBF that's a huge issue for email where it's between private parties and you want to convey ideas that aren't supposed to be seen by anyone else. It works for a Twitter style social media because the whole idea is that everything's public.
Josh McKinnon@scottmatter this is good content
hugo roy@scottmatter oh god and how do you choose which email to read and what order??
Vilhelm Rothe@scottmatter I just learned that even if someone uses a particular hashtag, I can only see their toot, if someone from my instance follows that person, otherwise it will never appear to me. That at least makes the choice of instance more important, even if it's relatively painfree to move instance.
lazysupper ππ salguod, man@vilhelmr @scottmatter I see hashtags from all over the fediverse when I click on them. You only see toots on your instance?
pillarist@lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter I believe hashtags work the same way all posts work: it's contingent on what your local server knows about, which is determined by the union of accounts followed by the local instance's population, and then if there are any relays being added in.
"Also, it only shows posts that are visible to your server anyway, it is not pulling posts in purely on the basis of the hashtag."
https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-advanced-tips/#FollowingHashtags
@pillarist Ah, I see. Thanks!
(That's a great faq. Somebody shared it a few days ago and I've passed it on many times since.)
(That's a great faq. Somebody shared it a few days ago and I've passed it on many times since.)
Steve Yelvington@pillarist @lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter
This tells me that a group bot is a more effective way of building a focused community discussion than a hashtag.
@steve @lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter I think...maybe? Mostly yes? Some of the group bots I have seen come with a lot of "reply-all" posts, as well as outright spam that may disincentivize followers. For communities that prefer more anonymity, group bots have large lists in ways that individual subscriptions to hashtags don't?
John Danskin@pillarist
If you care about hashtags, big servers are better than little ones.
@lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter
If you care about hashtags, big servers are better than little ones.
@lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter
Laure-Katrine@pillarist @lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter I think of it like how gossip spreadsβ¦ If Mrs. H. hadnβt leaned over the garden wallβ¦..
lamp@pillarist @lazysupper @vilhelmr @scottmatter Yeah you'll only see posts from people that are followed by one or more members on your server, or from servers that share a relay.
Sometimes you might see follow bots trying to follow everyone they can find so they can see as much of the fediverse as possible. But this annoys some people and they get blocked
@lamp @pillarist @vilhelmr @scottmatter I wondered when I saw a bot boost my (rather mundane) post. That must be what it was it was doing!
Matt@vilhelmr This is an important point. It's very difficult for people to find niche/emerging communities here relying on hashtags alone if no one on your server has already made a connection to those communities. Even then, they'll never see the full breadth of the community unless they examine social graphs. @scottmatter
Blackheath Weather
Curt Sawyer 
@scottmatter Bwahahahahahaha!
Bogdan@scottmatter π π π well said!
Christian@christian my try to turn this thing off and then on again
Rik@scottmatter
Thankfully there will be an alternative. I think it's called Google Wave.
Thankfully there will be an alternative. I think it's called Google Wave.
Neil Johnson@kdvr @scottmatter we actually used Google Wave and it didnβt suck. But if we had stopped using Wave, that would have cut their user base in half
Patrick LaForge@kdvr @stratofax @scottmatter I was there haha β never quite figured out what I was doingβ forgot about that one
@palafo @kdvr @scottmatter Google Wave was not exactly βuser friendly.β It was clearly cooked up by some geeks who were on some caffeine-fueled vision quest to replace email and chat
Lord MalmstenI'm still waiting for google+ to take off. It'll do it... Any day now...
Brian Grinter@kdvr @scottmatter I had completely forgotten about that! I even went to a meet up at their Sydney office to get on the beta
tamouse__ π Free Palestine π@kdvr @scottmatter πππππ
madcap 
@scottmatter electronic mail will never be able to stand up against centralized alternatives, for sure.
zeitverschreib β@scottmatter Yeah, I get the feeling that this e-mail-thingy is just a fad and will be dead and gone in a few months.
Way too complicated.
John Samuel@scottmatter I like this analogy.
Made in DNA@scottmatter @cliffcheney stop stop, I can only handle so much. π my sides hurt now. see what you did?
Massaging the Medium@scottmatter π€―so trueβ¦ but why does it still βfeelβ different and more complicated??
@santim habit, I think.
Natacha S
alternative_beβ
ππ»@scottmatter What a wonderful metaphor! The same goes for phone providers!
JeffLiterally stuff people said back in the day. Blame the UX for bad conveyance.
People like to say that the instance you choose doesn't matter, but it does.
Your local instance affects discoverabilityβthis isn't a big issue with email because we don't _want_ discoverabilityβand it affects the type of content you'll see in your local and federated timelines.
Those factors will play a big part in your initial period of exploration of the fediverse. Social media is only _partially_ following people who you already know. That's not so much the part that is throwing people off.
The federated timeline isn't "everything on the fediverse", it's "posts from people who locals follow". If you join a biology community server and look at the federated timeline it's going to look very different to the federated timeline of community server for classical music, or breadmaking, or general interest.
When you don't yet know _who_ to follow, you rely on your local and federated timelines and both of these can be very from one server to the next.
@scottmatter @jeffalyanak This is why i am telling my fellow Twitter refugees to follow and boost generously, especially people and things they like on other servers. I have also been using Toot! on iOS to browse the local and federated feeds of other instances
MrCopilot@jeffalyanak @scottmatter Sort of, in that each instance admin controls whom they federate, but your description fits the Local tab not the federated tab, not all clients expose both.
Johann-Tobias SchΓ€g@jeffalyanak @scottmatter and that's a feature.
Cyper Bunk@jeffalyanak @scottmatter I had a discovery journey on birdapp too. And when I made new alts or bots the network that surfaced was usually quite different.
Joseph Zitt@scottmatter I'm old enough to remember getting precisely these questions. We weren't all born with email accounts.
Derek Powazek π@jzitt @scottmatter I came here to say exactly this.
Reuben BinnsβοΈ
Reuben Binns is on #UCUstrike (@[email protected])
this email thing is neat and all but ordinary users just wont get it. Try explaining to them that its not a website but its actually a protocol, and you have to choose from one of millions of different email servers, and then there are different email clients on different platforms. It will never catch on!
Grow In Peace
Jigen Daisuke, Jr@scottmatter Google has covered you already ! (sarcasm)
obywatelle@scottmatter Hmmm, hard to guess why the mail discussion groups gave way to the forums, and the forums gave way to social media. If we only knew...
Bruno J. Navarro@scottmatter i remember having these questions about my first compuserve account in the mid-1980s π
tswan@scottmatter we will hit peak comparison when we see the first passive-aggressive βper my last tootβ message
ntang@scottmatter in all fairness, it also took two or three *decades* for email to become mainstream. So hopefully this isn't actually a good metaphor.
Jonathan Deamer (he/him)@scottmatter Reminds me of asking, circa 1995, "if someone sends me an email and my modem is unplugged because I'm using the phone, will it be there when I plug back in?" π
Stephanie Gregoles@jonathan @scottmatter Getting used to mastodon totally feels like that. I do love that it feels much like the internet used to feel back in the day.
@stefgregoles It feels like it over-indexes for a certain kind of curious, early adopter nerd that I encountered (/was one of) on Usenet, too.
Capo@scottmatter let's be real though, if email was launching for the very first time today these would be the exact questions and confusion we'd be seeing from non-technical early adopters.
And to be perfectly fair I do think efforts to make Mastodon easier to understand in a "That info is over here but if you just wanna see your friends toots you don't need to worry about it, just do this." kinda way would help with adoption.
Jason Weill@scottmatter This would be funnier if 4 companies didn't dominate the general-purpose email market, at least in the US. I hope we don't go down the same road from "every provider also runs its communications" to "screw it, let Google do itβ with Mastodon.
@JasonW concentration of ownership is bad.