Alcun Atirutan BBS

“The problem is, there’s a certain type of pedantry that has followed the internet through its various forms, especially in more technical channels, and it often creates a negative experience because it seems to be driven by ideology or disdain for people who don’t think the same way.” https://tedium.co/2023/11/21/mastodon-reply-guy-problem/

Curious to hear if others on here are experiencing what’s described in this piece. I enjoy most of the replies I get on here (though I never have time to respond to most of them, I like reading them)

I do think Mastodon could use more safety/audience limiting tools though, like what Ernie describes. Esp for larger-ish accounts on here who get a lot of replies, it would be nice to limit conversations on some posts. I would also love a real DM inbox on Mastodon! but that might be a pipe dream 😅

@taylorlorenz Yes, unfortunately.

I run up against a fair number of FOSS zealots from time to time. And a lot of folks who generally just... don't know when to hold their tongues.

Some of this is structural - replies listed in-order with no ability to signal affirmation and sort accordingly means a lot of the same things get said/asked again and again. That's annoying but easy to dismiss as clunkiness.

The zealots, though - especially when stuff gets boosted to a wider audience - are rough.

@TechConnectify @taylorlorenz but this is basically a client side problem, right? so Mastodon is open source software, ActivityPub is an open protocol. if there is enough (monetary) interest in filtering tools, i'm sure some developers can be found who would implement client-side filtering (be it AI or keyword-based, mastodon instance, ...) tools, e.g. as a browser extension, android/ios app, ... integration into the server code would be better, but is not strictly necessary.

@nanobot248 A client-side solution doesn't necessarily fix the other half of the problem, though. It would solve my problem, sure, if I didn't have to see so many notifications or so much... drivel, but to be honest I think we need some mechanisms for *the crowd* to help moderate discussion and signal good vs. bad behavior.

The decentralized nature here makes that difficult, obviously - but even just showing that 20 people found a question interesting might help it not get asked so many times.

@nanobot248 Main problem there, though, is that that would be introducing

*thunderclap*

AN ALGORITHM

and folks within/who believe in this project are so allergic to that word that even something so simple as "display replies in order of popularity" is deemed antithetical to the very nature of Mastodon.

Little do they realize they don't speak for all - they're just very loud about it.

@johnny @nanobot248 Right - my worry there, though, is that keeping everything so hyper-customizable is going to dig the "everything here works differently depending on instance/client/software/version" hole even deeper.

Some core features need to be implemented across the board, and imo reply sorting/filtering is going to HAVE to happen unilaterally if this platform is to attract larger users.

Otherwise it's just some loosely-tied-together mailing lists and not social at all.

@johnny @nanobot248 (but then we're back to the whole "what does this place even want to be?" conundrum that tortures me somewhat so... let's not go there)