So. Three folks I follow are echoing pretty much the same sentiment I've been trying to express and are spending less time here.
I'll preface with a reminder that you may very well feel my opinions are bunk. I am a successful YouTuber, after all, with all the privileges that entails.
But here's the brass tacks: it's harder for me to be here comfortably than it was on the birdsite. And to be honest, I think Mastodon's always gonna be this way.
Whenever I encounter problems, I am inevitably told I should try different instance. Whenever anybody has problems, people say "maybe you should move instances"
I do not know why so many people fail to grasp this, but we are experiencing mastodon between instances far more than we are on our own. I hardly ever look at the home tab for mas.to, I look at who I'm following on the Home feed.
That in-betweeny space is apparently impossible to moderate.
If a post of mine gets a boosted to a broader audience, I am subject to harassment. I'm not going to sugarcoat that, it's harassment.
Sure, of the various kinds of harassment I have not been subject to anything serious. But it is exhausting and personally insulting, with one person telling me in no uncertain terms that they don't believe my job should be a job.
This. Fucking. Sucks.
And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances.
So, I have been trying really hard to live within the space where nobody can reconcile whether they want Mastodon to be more popular or whether they wanted it to remain a bunch of small corners in personal sandboxes. But it's getting really hard some days, and because the stakeholders of this idea are so spread out and so disparate in their opinions, I'm not hopeful anything will get better in this regard.
Mastodon's whole existence feels tortured.
And as much as I would love to be a cheerleader for this idea, well firstly, I'm not sure people even want me to be a cheerleader! This feels like a place full of hipsters that don't want people to find their fun coffee shop.
But even if people wanted me to help spread the idea of mastodon, or Fedi more broadly, to be honest there are just far too many caveats for me to suggest my friends and colleagues come here.
I would hope you'd be concerned by that.
But at this point, it feels like that's what people want. There is no desire to make this platform more usable for people with larger audiences.
Christ, just the fact that notifications aren't stacked makes using this really hard as someone with a sizable following.
If the culture is that anti-growth, if it's to remain that fractured and rudderless, I don't see a fun future here.
Fin
- Continue to improve onboarding, by having a screen to set your profile & main settings (like search discovery) without leaving the onboarding process - Rework notifications, with grouping support (Your post has been boosted by X people, instead of a notification per boost) - Federate link previews to avoid having each instance send a request to the URL, causing a lot of trafic (not an easy problem to solve, may move to 4.4)
I completely agree, and am really frustrated over this exact thing. When mastodon was first blowing up there needed to be a lot of changes and they needed to happen fast (and still do need to happen) - but this place was treated way too much like a baby by gargon who was "my way or the highway" so we all collectively spent months trying to convince him of very basic features that are needed.
I think now he kinda understands now - but by this point the wave passed and these needs are still unaddressed because so much time was spent debating and convincing. Thats not even getting into the absolute mess that is W3 and ActivityPub. Its seems OSS cant actually finish a decent protocol or adapt it to changes as convos around needed features take fucking weeks to advance inches.
Its also why a lot of people are starting to jump ship to misskey or firefish or akkoma or glitch or whatever - vanilla mastodon has taken way too long and people need this stuff now - so everyone else has caught up and are starting to lap mastodon on basic features. Heck if I didnt like my instance so much I would absolutely jump over to firefish or something.
@TechConnectify
Respectfully disagree. The project has been developed for free primarily by volunteers and they've been focused on the small groups of users interested in experimenting with something new for 5-6 years before the Twitter implosion drove a wave of new accounts with different needs to the network, which they have been responding to as quickly as they can given the available resources.
The main guy developing it for years has been earning 30k euros/yr through the nonprofit org building it, versus millions of VC that Bluesky is burning through and however much Twitter and FB/Insta have spent over the years.
I appreciate most of your comments in this thread, but wanted to push back on this one that seemed more rude toward the very small team working hard to bring us the service
@val
@_dmh @val Frankly, it was phrased rudely because this seems like such an obvious pain-point with regards to usability. I cannot believe that it hasn't come up in the last two years. Hell, probably five.
Notifications are pretty much useless to me here when something's going out beyond my audience (like today) and tedious on a good day.
Of course I respect the limited resources, but this particular thing is inexcusable to me.
@val @_dmh I am in fact interesting in seeing those numbers, yes. It's nice to know when things resonate.
Now the choice is between knowing when anybody does any thing or ignoring all that. There's a middle ground that existed for years and years (Ed Barkely and 57 other people liked your post) but it just hasn't been implemented here.
Technology Connections
val
June 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵
Chozo
Dave 🦔