Mastodon improving the onboard experience is great. The wannabe fedi-police will be out in force against a default instance i’ve no doubt and I’ve already seen numerous complaints about it.
It’s not “growth for the sake of growth” or against the idea of decentralisation. It’s just a small basic change to improve the flow for new people to get people started. Good stuff.
Also quote toots coming, yay!
@gamingonlinux I don't think onboarding is a big problem, but I do think they could have handled it in a better way.
It's also very clear that they're not really paying attention to feedback, what with this Github issue having over 400 upvotes: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/1023
Which I'm not a fan of, regardless of what the decision is. Isn't this supposed to be an open source project? Aren't our voices supposed to mean something?
Is there an existing issue for this? I have searched the existing issues Current Behavior With the current setup, the app strongly implies users should just join mastodon.social, with a harder-to-r...
I do agree with @gamingonlinux that making on onboarding experience better is great! However I share the doubt that this is the right way forward. Resorting to a default mega-instance seems like a lackluster solution that's gonna backfire. I think one should've taken the problems – and I think we all know there are problems with it, just disagree on the degree – more seriously and cooked up something more well thought-through.
We don't need to pretend everything needs some majority vote, if the problems are well-known. A "vote" is a discussion-ender, it's fruitful to move on with something if all agree on voting, but it's a silencer in the face of changes that are needed.
Indeed there are a lot of problems with mastodon.social, ironically even hampering adoption of Fediverse proper because of bad/overwhelmed mods, racism, etc. – which would've been helped by "simply" using another instance. I think there are better solutions than a default instance.
As, btw, I think there are better solutions than simply adding QTs – they were left out for good reason and I think the solution space is actually big enough to find something that's no QT but fulfilling the same needs w/o, hopefully, the downsides. But alas, we gave up on that one as well.
@ljrk @gamingonlinux QT is fine. It's a feature I was sorely missing as a Twitter migrant - it lets me share my thoughts and/or additional context to my followers while boosting a post. Imo, the issue comes with the people that use the feature; a lack of proper moderation was what made QRTs bad on birdsite.
Otherwise yeah everything you say is valid. Improving onboarding is never bad, I just think it could have been done better
@flit @gamingonlinux I had a discussion back a few months with I think @mekkaokereke where there were some ideas floating around, e.g., sub-commenting+combined boosts that both allowed to add context while giving the original author more control/visibility about how/where their toot is framed and displayed.
Well, that idea's dead in the water now I guess :/
It's always daunting when there is a complex problem space and people only argue^Wshout for/against a pre-existing suboptimal solution instead of acknowledging both merits and cons of it and trying to come up with something better.
Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮
Flit 🦊 🔥
lj·rk