Technology Connections
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.
Technology Connections
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.
Technology Connections
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
Technology Connections
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.
Technology Connections
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.
Technology Connections
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.
FediTips has moved!
"And who's accountable for taming that? Nobody! Because it's between instances."
That's not quite true.
Your instance admin is responsible for blocking abusers, and the abuser's instance admin is responsible for punishing such behaviour.
If an instance allows abusers to flourish, it tends to get defederated.
Whether it works perfectly or not is another issue, but there is definitely a line of responsibility there.
FediTips has moved!
When you report abuse it goes to both your admin and (anonymously) to the admin of the other instance, so they can both carry out their responsibilities.
FediTips has moved!
"There is no desire to make this platform more usable for people with larger audiences."
I've got 200k followers on here and the features seem to work okay for me?
If the notifications are overwhelming you, you could customise what is displayed? I just did a post about that topic today:
Børge
@Emi @TechConnectify phanpy.social is also good for this. It is important to stress that neither Elk or Phanpy are instances you have to move to, they are just clients you can use in your browser.
Other than that I'm sorry about the abuse and issues. I, and many with me, really wants this to be a platform for the masses. But we need to find solutions to this.
Emi :godot:
@TechConnectify This sucks... I hope we can find a proper solution :(
For the stacked notifications, I use https://elk.zone which works quite nice, but might be really hard at your scale. The platform is still very green, it needs a few more years to get to where Twitter was when we left.
FediTips has moved!
I'm trying to make the platform more usable, which he asked for?
eblu :neurodiversity: :aroace:
@feditips @TechConnectify I hate to say this but this is the exact kind of behavior that he was saying that he wasn't happy with
Pleroma-tan
Dana Fried
@eniko this is 100% true and I'm sorry I didn't make that distinction in my reply.
What works for an independent artist or small studio is not what applies to someone with 2M YouTube subscribers, and vice versa.
I've also always treated social media as a networking tool; I assume my next job after Google (if/when) will come through places like this and not LinkedIn. So while it's not as immediately pressing, culture and reach are still critical to me.
Dana Fried
@eniko @TechConnectify I think, fundamentally, the *ways* people are allowed to be garbage on each site are different, and the methods available to establish and cultivate shared culture are different as well.
Also, not to sound crass, but for people whose business is being [social] media personalities, a top-down, single-owner platform with a financial interest in brand safety might make for a more pleasant experience.
Eniko Fox
@tess @TechConnectify as someone who's business is being a social media personality, it's only a more pleasant experience if the owners deign you worthy :/
Eniko Fox
@TechConnectify I'm curious, did you not get mean tweets on Twitter when your tweets went wide?
I had 13k followers and I got some nazi or other in my mentions pretty much every time a tweet blew up because I'm a queer woman in gamedev. The main difference here is that the harassment comes from random assholes who think too highly of their own opinions but at least don't want me dead, and that it happens more because my posts reliably get seen by more people than my tweets did because the algorithm tended to bury them
The other big difference is that I haven't had to personally block 500,000 people to keep my feed and my followers safe
Dana Fried
@eniko @TechConnectify I do remember having several million accounts in my Twitter killfile (no that is not an exaggeration) when I deleted my account.
But that's not saying anything about other Twitter alternatives, all of which have a much lower bar for getting banned for bigotry, doxxing, and harassment than Twitter ever did.
I think we do a disservice when we continue to think of Mastodon in comparison with Twitter vs. in comparison with bsky or Threads.
Aris Merquoni
@TechConnectify I've written some similar thoughts, but I agree with most of this. Mastodon was created with "safety in obscurity" as one of its primary goals, which makes un-obscuring for reach and moderation more difficult.
There are some people working on solutions to some of these problems, and some things have improved (search, community moderation,) but there are many issues remaining at present.
Technology Connections
@jefftp Yes, those assumptions are wrong.
For one, it's easy to ignore YouTube comments. They don't show up in notifications anymore for me aside from when large accounts leave comments. But also, the comment algorithm is very good at making sure stupid/mean comments are pushed way way down.
Here? There's nothing like that, and unless I want to turn notifications off completely (which I guess I could) I /will/ see all the comments in order as they happen.
JeffTP
@TechConnectify I don't understand the pain that drives people with large audiences away from mastodon because I've never had a large audience.
I would assume, you having survived YouTube comments, that you could easily deal with whatever dorky criticisms you're getting. But I guess my assumptions are wrong?
I wish you weren't experiencing whatever has you uncomfortable, because I really do appreciate when my feed has some of your posts in it.
Technology Connections
@jefftp I've also gotten many more personal attacks (or, at least, more have made it through to me) here than on Twitter. I'll bet in aggregate there are far more in my YT comments but, again, easy to ignore. There's thousands of them under most of my videos and the bad ones just disappear.
Here, though, there are shockingly few consequences for bad behavior - and it's generally up to the OP to take action against them and hope mods pay attention.
FediTips has moved!
Ah okay, I see what you mean. Sorry for that, wasn't intended that way, I should have phrased it differently. :😳
I was trying to say that it should be possible for it to work with large numbers of followers, and wondered if there was some specific thing they were having an issue with.
eblu :neurodiversity: :aroace:
@feditips I understand this; the fediverse has a learning curve and all, but your initial response essentially boiled down to a fancy "well it works on my machine", which is really not a good response when the OP is explicitly complaining about people that do that. I understand that you want to defend your position, but I personally believe that it might be a better approach to understand the behaviors that are being called out instead of attempting to solve problems for other people.
These are just my two cents though.
Anil Dash
@aris_tgd @metrogn0me_gr @Weirdaholic @TechConnectify it’s also just too hard and too much work for folks who are trying out something new and unfamiliar
Aris Merquoni
@metrogn0me_gr @Weirdaholic @TechConnectify this is why I mentioned that people are working on these problems, but those systems are not in place now, and people's livelihoods depend on having them. If one system doesn't provide them, people will look elsewhere.
The answer to why people are using social media networks other than Mastodon is that their needs aren't getting met here and they don't have time to wait.
Metrognome
@Weirdaholic @aris_tgd @TechConnectify
I am not doubting the existence of the nastiness. After all, all this unpleasantness is just part of the human condition, sadly.
However, I noticed in the filter/moderation part of the settings there are some pretty elaborate options for pretty targeted filtering and flagging.
Which leads me to wonder, couldn't we eventually arrive at publicly available, plug'n'play filters similar to what uBlock Origin is doing?
Your Weirdness
@aris_tgd @metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify I guess people have to learn, that things can exist, even if they can't see them... :/
It's quite interesting, though, how bad we seem to be at handling moderation collectively.
Aris Merquoni
@Weirdaholic @metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify There are things that an instance moderator can do and things that an individual user can do, but they are less effective against a diffuse or persistent campaign of abuse (or both.)
There's also a lot of gaslighting where people talk about abuse and everyone who doesn't see it goes "Really? Are you sure it's that bad?"
Your Weirdness
@aris_tgd @metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify afaik, you still can moderate/ block them away. At least I have an option in my panels... (not sure if this actually works. Didn't have an instance where I had to try it so far)
Aris Merquoni
@metrogn0me_gr @TechConnectify "Abuse worse than twitter" has been the experience of Black users on this site, from the reports I've seen--the problem is that it's diffuse abuse from sources most people can't see (because of federation) and moderators can only do a little about (you can't kick someone off an instance you don't control.)
Metrognome
@TechConnectify Honestly, I find it quite shocking that you get same or worse abuse here than back at the birdsite.
My experience was between indifference and total silence. But abuse worse than Twitter??
Anil Dash
@TechConnectify @xabean yep, have seen this firsthand.
Richard "mtfnpy" Harman (he/him)
@TechConnectify how often are you smashing the block/mute button?
Or are those people making new accounts, and continuing to harass?
Technology Connections
@xabean it is fascinating to me how many people seem to think these buttons are the solution to everything.
Mastodon is so interested in being against the concept of virality that people can't seem to understand when someone with 30,000 followers has a post boosted that randos are going to come out from everywhere. Which is even more fun because, for weird Fedi reasons, you might not even see the harassing behavior!
It's so sooo fun.
Cris
@TechConnectify Part of me wonders if some of mastodon's toxicity comes frm appealing largely to nerds, pedants, & people who want to be "against" whatever the popular take is, or feel smarter than everyone else- in this case, being against/smarter than twitter & broader social media. Those tend to be the same bad actors in the open source space in my exp. :( they bring their practiced behaviors of "my opinion is the right opinion, and if you disagree thats cause you're dumb" to evry interaction
Anil Dash
@CrisColor @TechConnectify that’s a huge part of the cultural challenge.
FediTips has moved!
"block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches"
That doesn't match my experience at all.
I have had abuse occasionally, but my experience is that it was handled well and did not carry on.
1/2
Interpipes 💙
@feditips @TechConnectify IMO the issue with this is that
* merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and
* block/report functions do not scale to the noise created by having thousands of followers boosting you into the feeds of people who didn't want to see it that are apparently incapable of ignoring it - even if they WERE conduct breaches.
FediTips has moved!
"merely being.. "boringly unpleasant" and adding 0 value (e.g. "youtubers out of our fedi, boo") is not going to be a conduct breach on the majority of instances, and"
If it was personal abuse then that would usually breach most instance rules.
But it's difficult to know whether something breaks rules if you can't see it.
2/2
FediTips has moved!
" relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse..."
Again, it's sort of difficult to comment on this without seeing an example, even a hypothetical one.
However, with closed source filters you will never know what they are improperly hiding from you. There might be good stuff there which Twitter etc is preventing you seeing.
Interpipes 💙
@feditips @TechConnectify the point is that there is a world of difference between *abuse* and merely receiving relentless, unimaginative, self-centred, no value gripes about the existence of an account or the things it does that are NOT personal abuse and will not breach most instance rules but nevertheless crowd out meaningful interactions. Twitter has/had a quality filter specifically for preventing those replies turning into notifications.
FediTips has moved!
To add though, Mastodon and the Fedi are open so there's nothing to stop a third party client implementing such filters.
If someone wanted to build such a filter, they are free to do so if there's enough demand to sustain development.
FediTips has moved!
It's not intended to sound like that, sorry.
My account exists to try to help people on here, if there's some way I can help I'd like to?
Technology Connections
@feditips @interpipes Y'know what this sounds like, though? "Well, I don't think this is a big deal. Hopefully somebody else does. Good luck!"
And that attitude isn't great.
FediTips has moved!
What specifically would you like to see happen if someone posts that kind of statement?
(Genuine question, I'm trying to understand the problem.)
Interpipes 💙
@feditips @TechConnectify I imagine the second half of the toot Alec recently boosted;
“eh, I'd prefer if all the YouTubers get out of here anyways. go to bluesky or whatever corpo bullshit.”
is probably a pretty good example of the sorts of comments / sentiments that don’t add value to a conversation, but aren’t abusive and don’t deserve to get equal priority ranking with those from people who actually follow & want to engage with someone.
FediTips has moved!
"(at least, large accounts not about fedi itself), "
What do you think I am not experiencing?
Interpipes 💙
@feditips @TechConnectify you must understand that
“someone could make that”
is not a ringing endorsement of
“what exists today and how what exists today is experienced by accounts with large followings” (at least, large accounts not about fedi itself),
which is the subject of the critical thoughts/observations being made
Technology Connections
@feditips @interpipes I would like to not see it. I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it
If that's too spicy a take, so be it. But that's how Twitter's Quality Filter worked and that's why I could exist there with 90K followers but being here with 30K followers is really starting to suck.
And please don't say this is a problem I need to solve. This is a culture issue the platform needs to work on
FediTips has moved!
"I would, in fact, like it to be shadowbanned - they can think their post is there, but nobody will see it"
So, to be absolutely clear, you are asking for a complete ban on people saying they dislike YouTubers? No one else should be able to see such posts?
FediTips has moved!
Anyone can make a report, it doesn't have to be the OP. I've often reported posts I've seen in other people's threads.
The reporting is so that the admins know to do something.
The ratio of human moderators to users is much higher on here than on Twitter, so the moderation happens through human processes like reports.
The reason Twitter etc use algo is because they don't have enough humans to do anything else.
1/2
Technology Connections
@feditips @interpipes No. Not at all.
This is specifically about replies. There are currently no consequences for bad behavior on Mastodon unless the OP takes action against someone.
That's just not tenable for accounts like myself to engage in. I want a filter *on my replies* - I don't care what people say about YouTubers in their own spaces, but as far as I'm concerned, I should have at least some modicum of agency over discussions that I start.
FediTips has moved!
This is why I was trying to ask if I can help, because quite often the processes here exist but they work differently.
When I've had problems with abuse I've reported it, and the reports have been acted upon.
If someone was telling me in a nasty way to leave the Fediverse, I'd report that as personal abuse, and the process would go from there.
2/2
Technology Connections
@feditips @interpipes I'm afraid you will never understand this.
There is too much for me to report, and much of what I experience that is irritating isn't likely to be deemed abuse anyway.
People are just rude, or mean, or pedantic, or arrogant, or snarky, or insulting. I wouldn't report them for that anyway, but I still don't want to have to see it.
Everyone here is allergic to automated anything but guess what? I think it's needed.
FediTips has moved!
It sounds more like this is more to do with personal tastes than general principles?
I run a large account and I'm happier with a human-based system. I don't want an algo stripping away replies that I might want to see. I would prefer to be deciding on mutes/blocks myself.
But you prefer to have such decisions taken by an algorithm, even if there's a risk it blocks stuff you might want to see.
Is this a fair summary?
Technology Connections
@feditips @interpipes I think it's a fair summary, but I'm not sure you're empathizing with it.
FediTips has moved!
Speaking personally, it doesn't feel healthy for me to have an automatic filter pre-emptively blocking/muting without asking me first.
Sometimes I've had quite unkind replies which nonetheless raised valid points about what I've posted. It's not fun to see criticism, but it's sometimes stuff I need to see, especially if I'm running an account with a lot of reach.
I'm not judging others if they have a different approach, though.
FediTips has moved!
Different people will feel different things when they see unkind stuff, have different things going on in their offline life etc etc so it's difficult to say one way is better.
If you prefer using an automatic filter to make social media work for you, and you think it's a better trade-off for you, that's your decision.
FediTips has moved!
@jztusk @TechConnectify @interpipes
It really varies, no typical amount. But especially after the whole Musk buyout happened I was sometimes getting continual pings for hours at a time as people were asking for help directly.
Some of them were pretty nasty as they seemed to think I was a paid employee, and complained to me about features, but there were relatively few I had to block or report.
jz.tusk
@feditips @TechConnectify @interpipes
How many replies does a typical post you make get?
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