Evan Prodromou
Hashtags didn't start out as a software feature on Twitter.
@chrismessina proposed their use, and for a long time, they were just a cultural norm.
It was months later that Twitter engineers turned them into links that went to a search result screen.
Same thing with @-addressing. It was a practice for blog comments that came over to Twitter, but there was a long time that there were no affordances in the UI to support them.
Same with retweets. People starting using "RT", and it took off.
Evan Prodromou
You and I and everyone here are part of the first 10 million people on the fediverse.
We are setting the cultural and technical norms for the next few decades.
So if there's something you wish Mastodon did, or ActivityPub did, just start acting like it already exists.
If enough people want it or need it, it will get added by the software and protocols later.
Evan Prodromou
@johnefrancis I don't know what you're talking about, and it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm saying.
John Francis
@evan something something let the trolls starve something something
Evan Prodromou
Read this and come back.
vruz
@liaizon
I've seen a lot of complaints about the inconvenience of the federated architecture and how its design philosophy doesn't match the aspirations of certain specific African American groups, but I have not seen a shred of evidence that anyone is being deliberately or unwittingly marginalised, rejected, segregated, or disrespected by the Fediverse at large. Sure disgusting racists exist everywhere in the world, and we do our best to kick them out.
wakest ⁂
@evan while I agree with your underlying message there are issues that really really need to get addressed at a level that you can't just act like they exist, and thats safety tools for people who are just joining here for the first time and don't already have a support structure. I have been looking through the posts of many black and indigenous people and its pretty damming what this place looks like for them when they first come in.
Evan Prodromou
@liaizon this post is more about textual practices like QTs and boosting than about user safety.
Evan Prodromou
@vruz @liaizon That's several questions.
I made myself go through those photos once and I don't want to do it again.
I will say, that I've had 4 racist, homophobic, or transphobic attacks show up in my replies, from 3 domains.
All 3 were on the Rapidblock blocklist.
So, using that blocklist out of the box would have kept me from having to read some pretty nasty stuff.
Rapidblock seems like a good project. There may be others.
vruz
@evan That's really bad, and I have talked with Tom before and at the time he seemed to be happy. It's very unfortunate that some people haven't done their best. I wasn't referring to Tom when I posted that above.
Have these offending instances been defederated by the most popular instances, or is there a project to exchange red alerts?
Evan Prodromou
@davew that's an important one! I'll review for the ActivityPub network to see how well we match the requirements.
Dave Winer ☕️
I was Mastodon to push the envelope in what a Document means, not only here and federated sites, but everywhere people write on the web.
Evan Prodromou
@katejjeffery right. The trick here is, if you really want quote tweets, start using them here.
Just copy a link to what you want to QT and include that link. That's how QTs are implemented on Twitter!
katejjeffery
@evan Quote tweets ? (or whatever we’d call them). Unpopular opinion I know
Dr. Matt Lee ?:verified:
@shoq People will call it that because the software and the servers most people are using have Mastodon in the name
Shoq
@evan For today .I just want people to stop focusing it all on"Mastodon." It's misleading. It's sorta like saying "I love Pizza Hut" when they just mean pizza :)
Evan Prodromou
@aka_quant_noir I don't think you're understanding the point. Don't depend on the devs. Make what you need yourself. Devs will follow.
Extinction (our fate)
@evan can we manifest a dev culture that seeks out user feedback, makes their choices transparent, and puts dev progress, timelines and results in places everyone has access to, including admins fielding questions and wishes from their instance?
Evan Prodromou
@manu I agree. One way to make do is for the OP to boost replies.
Emmanuel Revah
One thing that really bugs me, is the fact that I will not see most of the replies or likes.
I can click on "original page" and read all the replies, copy the link back to my instance to interact with a toot-reply. Also, sometimes I want to check the thread to avoid replying something that has already been said.
I'm at the point where I think about migrating my account from my personal instance to a bigger one - which defeats the philosophy.
Shane Joseph ?
@evan @chrismessina those bottom-up style of feature development is definitely what's been missing lately
Paul Jacobson
@evan @manu is this where relays could be helpful? I'm curious if that is a possible solution even though relays seem to dramatically increase resource requirements.
Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
@manu @evan this sounds like something a client could do for you, making that nav to original server and back and connected that state much easier. I already see some mastidon web uis have improved means to do this, perhaps tracking your initial referrer to construct the links back to your instance
Brian Hawthorne
@craigbro @manu @evan
I use mobile apps on iOS (Currently, Mammoth) to interact with Mastodon. The only time I have ever used (or seen) the Mastodon web UI is when someone pastes in a link to a post, and following that link feels just as foreign as following a link to TikTok or Facebook. Suddenly, my beautiful Mastodon experience looks horrible. So, I don’t follow those links.
I won’t get into my personal feelings about the idea of forking conversations.
Martin Vermeer FCD
@evan One thing I would like, is a way to not forget to add hashtags. It's one of the few ways to make a post discoverable, and I - like, I think, almost everyone - always forget them. It should be possible the have an AI routine scan a post and propose a few plausible hashtags, right? Optional, of course, and the proposed list should be editable.
Evan Prodromou
@martinvermeer sure, or you could write a Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script to check your post before sending.
Aswath Rao
@craigbro @manu @evan why not do this for all the posts? This has the added benefit of freeing the burden of moderating externally published posts?
jph
@manu @evan most things seem to work better on a small instance but this is a pretty significant source of friction. I think some clients handle it better but it’s hard to tell.
Evan Prodromou
@martinvermeer there you go, then.
Martin Vermeer FCD
@evan That would be a start. There is already an account that checks for missing alt texts.
acroll
@evan paving the cowpaths is the way.
Les Orchard
@evan heck, you used to not be able to attach images or videos to tweets. A few dozen services for that sprung up to accept uploads and offer paste-in links, before twitter formalized it as a feature
Chris Messina
@evan actually, Twitter resisted hashtags for a long time. It was only when they acquired Summize that, like a Trojan Horse, hashtags found native support from the first party platform.
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