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

@kissane

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.

@kissane

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)...

@kissane

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)...

@kissane

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)...

@kissane

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 @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

@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