Nolan Lawson

PSA: if you see a remote toot and think "wow that is an amazing toot, why does it have 0 favs/boosts/replies"? It probably doesn't. It's just that nobody from this instance follows someone who fav'ed/boosted/replied to it.

One thing I found useful is to just eagerly follow people you see in the Federated timeline saying stuff you like. You can always unfollow/block later.

The Masto experience gets fleshed out the more you use an instance. Keep in mind toot.cafe is 4 days old. 😄

Apr 8, 2017 at 2:31pmWeb
Show threadNolan LawsonApr 8, 2017

And yes, this means you might not be seeing the "full" data on a toot from across the whole Fediverse. My justification for this is:

1. Masto UI doesn't put emphasis on boosts/favs; you don't even see it in the list view. So no more prejudging a post based on how many of your friends approve/disapprove of it.

2. Every instance has its own culture, and some cultures are shockingly different. Maybe we don't need to know what the Nazi instances had to say in response to that toot. Just sayin'.

Show threadRam LmnApr 8, 2017
@nolan Is there any feature to just have whitelist connections to just a set of known instances?
Show threadNolan LawsonApr 8, 2017
@ramlmn Yes, admins can either blacklist or whitelist entire instances. I believe Eugen has said this feature will eventually come to user accounts as well.
Show threadRazApr 8, 2017
@nolan
Mastotip: You can click on the time of the post to open it on the posters instance and thus see everything they see. This also makes you see the whole thread so you don't miss out on replies.
Show threadNolan LawsonApr 8, 2017
@pajn Yes that's a good point; there is always an escape hatch to the "full" view. My point is more that the UI doesn't put it front-and-center. But yes, you can seek it out if you want. 🙂
Show thread(Axel Rauschmayer—OLD)Apr 8, 2017
@pajn @nolan I wish that’s what the UI did…
Show threadNolan LawsonApr 8, 2017

@rauschma @pajn I believe there are technical reasons it doesn't. If my URL bar says toot.cafe, I'm getting data from toot.cafe server, which hasn't started "following" those people yet. Hence the need to switch context.

OTOH this may be fixable presuming CORS is set up on the remote site and the local frontend can just fetch fresh data from the remote server, but I'm not sure.

Show thread(Axel Rauschmayer—OLD)Apr 8, 2017
@nolan @pajn Naively, I’d assume that this should be easy to fix, given that there is a single source of information that you can check for a timestamp or similar.
Show threadmalokiApr 8, 2017
@nolan also it doesn't show in the timelines, toot have to look at the individual posts.
Show threadphireApr 9, 2017
Okay so this excellent toot from @nolan has been making me think a lot about how much social proof amplifies echo chambers and how damaging that is, but also how to balance that with a need to signal to people that something is really popular so if you reply/engage with it maybe consider that the person on the receiving end has already seen that comment 37 times.
Show threadphireApr 9, 2017
Notwithstanding the network effects of boosting/RT-ing/sharing/whatever, even on a normal comment thread on FB or whatever, once a comment has a couple of likes it'll just keep getting more likes even if it's not that much better than any other comment. And people who disagree may feel too intimidated to actually speak up.
Show threadphireApr 9, 2017
And Masto could mitigate that to some extent since you only see engagement from your federated network BUT I could also see that making potential pile-ons way worse if you don't see how many other people are already yelling at a toot.
Show threadｓｔｏｌａｓFeb 26, 2018
@nolan I'm very sorry if my bot just sent you some random spam, that's my bad. I told it to reply to a mention instead of a user and I guess this toot just happened to match my ID?