This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.
https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
Rather than trying to head off the unusual unpleasantness about clout-chasers and the ritually/technologically impure, I will just say this:
I wrote this up for fedi people who are actively curious and interested in other people, and I'm not going to worry too much about how it lands for those who aren't.
The tl;dr (because TL! it's TL) is that, for this group:
- people feel stressed and anxious when they get yelled at for breaking rules and norms they didn't know about
- it's hard to find people and conversations, and specifically hard to follow people across instances
- people want better organic and algorithmic ways to connect with each other
- instance-picking stresses people out, and a lot of the sign-up and settling-in processes are confusing and/or too much work for unknown returns
Lastly! I squeaked this post in under a rapidly dropping door—I'm going to be really busy for a day or so and then offline for awhile. If you ask questions after today and don't hear back, that's probably why!
Please be cool with each other and don't make me come back to screaming fights in my replies. <3
Reading through now.
In case I forget (I always forget):
"building cultural norms into the tooling is much more effective and less alienating than chiding"
One of the best encapsulations of this idea, born of the challenges of managing the StackOverflow community norms (which tend towards scolding like lava) and Discourse (which aims to be the opposite), is Jeff Atwood's "Just In Time" Theory of User Behaviour:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-just-in-time-theory/
I return to this a lot - it's useful.
I’ve long believed that the design of your software has a profound impact on how users behave within your software. But there are two sides to this story: * Encouraging the “right” things by making those things intentionally easy to do. * Discouraging the “wrong” things by making those things intentionally
Re. the second "couldn’t find people or interests" group, I viscerally feel this.
I set up an alt-account to indulge in therapeutic socialising around the (big) football (soccer) team I follow.
The experience has been excruciatingly difficult in many ways. It's been a job. I'm two week into relentless *work* to drum up even a little consistent sociability. It's been almost zero fun. If I were normal, I'd have given up on day two.
Two idea I think would make it easier (cont)...
1. Hashtags are indeed essential in the absence of an algorithm. But people either forget to use them, or just don't because they've been conditioned not to. It would help enormously to have a mechanism by which we could auto-tag posts; i.e. insert one of more tags quickly based on what I'm posting about. In addition, it would help if tags copied into replies, like handles do.
(cont)...
2. I'd like to be able to search a hashtag and get back a list of accounts that have used that hashtag within x days or have that tag in their profile. Ordered by "frecency". I'd then like to drill in to see their tagged posts.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty I've found on my alt-account is that even though I've been through the pain of finding and following around 200 people who have used a relevant tag, my timeline is frustratingly irrelevant to the point of being chaotic. (cont)...
So I have to resort to clicking about to manually search for my hashtags. Which yields better results. But then I'm missing the stuff people don't tag (which is a lot).
So yeah, it's very difficult.
I'd also say it's all very time bound. Posting stuff while America sleeps means you're posting into the void, because those posts aren't surfaced by an algo in the morning. A tactic I've often used there is to boost my own posts to give them a second wind.
@charlesroper @BrettCoulstock @kissane
connecting from SEA here, in general there is a language barrier and more than half of the countries either dont speak english or only passably and general difficulty with English means English language media is not a regular part of the information diet. I'm not a local but have only moved back recently but was originally born in the region. Grew up and worked in Australia, NA etc.
@charlesroper @kissane
I was never on Twitter but, so using Hashtags as keywords to search and follow appears totally natural to me
Unfortunately there are all the limiting, muting, defederating things going on so searching for a hashtag often just can not found them when on other instances
So i feel very much here in a bubble that limits my diversity, not in a self choosen bubble, but between walls that others have set up around their bubbles
@crazy_pony @charlesroper @kissane Spitting the truth. But we have to account for the fact that Mastodon was, mainly, built as an opposition to post-Musk Twitter. I know it was around before that, but my understanding is that's when it really found its identity.
So we have a lot of formative early adopters that by default have strong, shared views. And since the only way to get something off the ground here is through followers, there's never enough critical mass for real diversity to flourish
@crazy_pony @charlesroper @kissane But it's getting there. Slowly, but surely. I am seeing many more different perspectives than I did a month ago, or a month before that.
My guess is that if Twitter keeps playing around with the everything-app idea, which it seems like it will, Mastodon may very well start climbing an exponential curve. We just need for people with truly different perspectives to feel like they have a platform here.
@alantrapulionis @crazy_pony @charlesroper @kissane
Mastodon has been around since 2016, and Musk's ownership of Twitter is pretty recent, its identity is not about opposition to that guy.
@sebulon @alantrapulionis @charlesroper @kissane
Myself, im on Mastodon since must be 2018 or so, the early years when it was dead silent here
For me it was always my home
There had been things, the corporate way how Twitter was run, why i never from the beginning felt a desire to join Twitter
So i was glad that Mastodon had the option to be an alternative
@skyeye @alantrapulionis @charlesroper @kissane
Unfortunately (for most people) Mastodon is designed to not easily find people :( i took years to follow so many thousands until i got a pretty alive timeline, but its still less than 50% matching my interests
@alantrapulionis @skyeye @charlesroper @kissane
Not sure if this translates to the right button (i use the native german translation) but not every instance has an "Explore" Button (as far as i know i would serve popular content?)
Myself i am following many Hashtags, but this also works only if someone uses them
@crazy_pony @skyeye @charlesroper @kissane Seriously? Wow.
Yes, it's the thing that ranks posts by engagement basically. Across servers. Not sure if it's, like, fully global or not, but definitely more of a public square than the Home tab.
Sounds like a tragedy to me, not having this tab. Weird. Very weird.
@alantrapulionis @skyeye @charlesroper @kissane
I do not miss it, because i am not interested in whats trending (for the same reasons i do not check the global timeline)
For me the wish was always to find a community with people to talk and event information
@crazy_pony @skyeye @charlesroper @kissane Sure. That's fine too. But I feel like the brains behind Mastodon have a strong perception that that's the *only* valid way to use the internet. Which, it. is. not.
Edit: I would even add, this is particularly important for professionals, who do not want a community. They want an audience. I can see at least somewhat why journalists are so pissed at this platform.
@skyeye @crazy_pony @charlesroper @kissane When I first joined here, that's all I saw people talking about. How Mastodon is this much better than Twitter. Boring.
Nowadays? Kinda lively, ngl. Still a bit same-y, but livelier. Not a fan of current Twitter, so this is good.
But yes, it could definitely use a healthy dose of open-mindness. This puritan stance against algorithms and sinners is just some deep-rooted desire for control in my eyes. Nothing is worse than boring.
@skyeye @alantrapulionis @crazy_pony @kissane
I suspect deep down the issue with the content warning gripes is that people want other people to show consideration. To be mindful rather than careless, as I think it is often perceived. I'm reminded of the Robustness Principle for some reason. Perhaps a riff on that as a community norm could be something like: be mindful in what you post; be generous with what you receive.
@skyeye @charlesroper @crazy_pony @kissane Never thought I'd say this, but that's one thing that Facebook actually got very right: to separate friends from followers. You have your private community, and then you have the rest of the world.
Not saying it's a great idea to do it in the same app - (how do you optimize for both??) - but that distinction is definitely on point.
@charlesroper @skyeye @alantrapulionis @crazy_pony @kissane
But some people want a *LOT* of consideration. There are people here who are the sort who will go to a party and when someone starts talking about football they'll just say "CAN WE NOT TALK ABOUT FOOTBALL I'M SO SICK OF HEARING ABOUT SPORTS."
So yes, I understand people want consideration in terms of not having to hear about certain things. But those people should also *give* consideration in terms of not being pills.
@crazy_pony
> Unfortunately there are all the limiting, muting, defederating things going on so searching for a hashtag often just can not found them when on other instances
That's not usually the reason. Hashtags searches only cover posts from accounts your server knows about, because someone using your servers follows them.
> i feel very much here in a bubble that limits my diversity
I sympathize. Mastodon's design choices about search do create that outcome.
@crazy_pony
> Unfortunately there are all the limiting, muting, defederating things going on so searching for a hashtag often just can not found them when on other instances
That's not usually the reason. Hashtags searches only cover posts from accounts your server knows about, because someone using your servers follows them.
> i feel very much here in a bubble that limits my diversity
I sympathize. Mastodon's design choices about search do create that outcome.
@strypey @charlesroper @kissane
> That's not usually the reason. Hashtags searches only cover posts from accounts your server knows about, because someone using your servers follows them.
I think it follows an (inverted) "bathtub curve"
In the beginning there is very little found, until federation grows
But after some years there is a decline when you see less things from the same hashtag
At least this can happen when you are on a niche server with topics that other servers might disagree
@crazy_pony
> In the beginning there is very little found, until federation grows
Basically. When a new server first goes online, the only posts it knows about are the ones made by its own accounts. Then, when they start following accounts on other servers, it learns about their posts. At least on Mastodon. Other software might import all posts from every server it knows about, but that's a *lot* of stuff for it to download and store.
@crazy_pony
> after some years there is a decline when you see less things from the same hashtag
That happens because of servers going down, or people deleting old posts. A lot of people use an auto-delete that wipes out all their old posts after X days, unless they're pinned.
Yes, I do, and have advised others to within the community I'm talking about. But people forget to tag, or don't realise they need to, or don't like tagging.
But part of the problem with following tags is that the posts get jumbled up with everything else your followees are posting, and spotting those posts end up a matter of luck more than intention. But I do follow them. 👍
@mwt
> If I'm interested in a topic, I follow the hashtags about that topic
One limitation of this is that following a hashtag doesn't give you every post in the verse that includes that hashtag. Only the ones your server knows about, which are the ones from accounts someone on your server is following.
@charlesroper @staidwinnow @paninid @naught101 @stephengentle @kissane
@strypey @mwt @charlesroper @staidwinnow @paninid @naught101 @stephengentle @kissane
You think you get them all on Twitter? Absolutely not. You follow hashtags as a continuous search that's fine. Lists also work. If you want to widen the results then follow someone from as many instances as you can.
I haven't done the latter because the total volume I get is sufficient at the moment. But I could.
@mwt @charlesroper @kissane With the current way federation is done (targeted non-gossip spreading) in most implementations that only works so long as a minority of users do this.
I consider that a design flaw, of course.
@youronlyone @naught101 @kissane
Yes! I've got a calckey now firefish account and I like Antennas but it seems to be buggy. I need to explore firefish some more.
I was thinking too, that maybe a sort of "hot" sorting system like some sites like Reddit do it, for either your (custom) feeds or hashtags, might help as well to find prominent people around a specific hashtag.
Exactly that, 100%. It's partly why I did it and it has indeed been illuminating.
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