I posted some of this in a reply to a user last night but wanted to put it out again. If anyone is an expert in #uBlock Origin #filters or in how a web #browser works, maybe you could help. Whether I can get this to work may make all the difference in whether I stay on #Mastodon or not. As I have written previously, possibly my #1 annoyance with Mastodon is that it shows me duplicate posts, that is, posts I have already read and even ones I have previously boosted. Bluesky has the same problem to a lesser degree, and they will show you your own reposts, BUT someone figured out that if you use the uBlock Origin browser extension you can add a filter to hide them (apparently with a little editing you can also hide reposts from any other specific user). See https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1116 and scroll down to the post by user liamness on Dec 6, 2024 (about halfway down the page as I write this) which shows exactly how to set it up for Bluesky.

My question is whether you can do the same thing when using the Mastodon web client. If you looks at the filter line in that post...

bsky.app##div[data-testid^="feedItem-by-"]:has-text(/Reposted by you/i)

... I would guess that if you changed "bsky.app" to your Mastodon instance URL, and changed "Reposted by you" to "username boosted" (where "username" is replaced with your actual username) you would be 2/3 of the way there. The only thing I don't know is what "feedItem-by-" would need to be changed to (or if there even is a direct equivalent).

I'm not a programmer but I do know there is a way in #Firefox to look at the page source, however when you try that while using the Mastodon web client it doesn't seem to show the individual articles. This same hack MIGHT work with other #Fediverse web clients but again you would need to know how to construct the filter, and right now I don't know how to find the missing piece of the puzzle. Does anyone know?

I'm just going to post this here so you all what know what happened if I pretty much disappear.

I have been using #Mastodon for at least a couple of years now and have been constantly frustrated by the user interface in the web client. When I first came onto Mastodon I read that boosts were encouraged because this help propagate posts to servers. Never understood why that didn't happen automatically but oh, well. So I started boosting and found that everything I boosted showed up again in my timeline. Not only that, I started to notice that I was seeing multiple duplicates of other people's posts, even the ones I had not boosted. Apparently Mastodon has no way to keep track of what you're already seen! Or if it does, it's not filtering those posts from the timeline. And then there is my other frustration, that in many cases as you move around in Mastodon you lose your place in the timeline, and getting back to where you left off reading would not be nearly as hard if you weren't scrolling though multiple messages you've already read.

Please note that I only read Mastodon posts on my #Linux desktop computer. I NEVER use a fucking phone to read anything, I HATE modern phones. I'm fine with computers but every phone I have ever used seems incredibly difficult for some reason, although I know part of it is the text size is usually too small for older people. And I only use the Mastodon web site; I have tried alternatives and just don't like any of them, and none of them solve the problems I mentioned above. So I am NOT looking for suggestions on alternative Mastodon readers (and especially not ones that require a payment). What I want is for the Mastodon developers to fix their damn web client so you don't see duplicate and repetitive posts. But I have been shouting about this for two years and I might as well be the proverbial old man shouting at clouds because they obviously either aren't listening or don't care.

So I decided to give #Bluesky a serious try. What actually put that idea in my head was someone on here wondering why people would use corporate social media with its inevitable enshittification when they could be using the Fediverse. And I had the immediate thought, that at least some people probably don't use the Fediverse because the usability sucks in ways that the corporate social media doesn't. I love the content of Mastodon, if only I could only see any given post just once and once only!!!

Anyway to my surprise I found that a good 80% to 90% of the people I follow on Mastodon are also on Bluesky, and in many cases they are posting the same content there as here. The difference was that I could scroll through the last 12 hours or so of Bluesky, seeing pretty much identical content to what I see here (as far as I could tell) in well under 30 minutes, while doing the same thing here would take considerably longer because of all the duplicate posts. And because MOST Bluesky users are using the same site, you don't find that messages fail to propagate in the way that happens in the #Fediverse. I have NOT got completely into Bluesky, and I have not yet tried to post or boost there (although since boosting, or whatever it is called there, isn't really necessary to help propagate posts among servers I probably won't do as much of that there) but unless the experience there turns out to be much worse than what you get in the Mastodon web client, I may just drift over there. And if I happen to find a free Bluesky client that I like that runs on desktop Linux (Ubuntu/Flatpak, no snaps or paid apps) that would be icing on the cake.

This is not yet a final "goodbye, I am leaving" post, I may never do one because there is always the chance I will get ticked off at something Bluesky does and start using Mastodon again (especially if they fix their usability issues). But I just can't spend sometimes as much as three or four hours of a day scrolling through multiple duplicates of the same damn posts, it's not good for my physical or my mental health. This may be a case of "the grass is always greener" but I guess it is time for me to seriously try Bluesky.