Notices by Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town), page 4

mastodon is not above reproach, it is not perfect software.
but I swear I have no sympathy for those who insist it should add twitter like features to appeal to more “normal people”, like algorithms.

it’s gentrification, you explicitly want to push out the weirdos like me to make it more comfortable for *you*.

fediverse in general and mastodon specifically needs a way to surface posts from people who seldom post.

i think the way to do this is to reorient the interface around profiles, enrich the notes field to have more fields, pictures, bookmarks, bells, whistles.

let’s make this about building relationships not audiences.

an algorithm is antithetical to community- it is a feature aimed squarely at “engagement”, a thoroughly toxic thing to measure.

twitter’s UI design is absolutely soaking in a culture of no respect for consent, forcing toxic features and making opt out difficult or impossible. if you wanna import that culture please consider doing it somewhere else.

this is not elitism, this is not snobbery, it’s you wanting to pave over our garden and me meekly begging you not to.

TIL from a fosstodon guy that if something is “free” it’s implicitly “for everyone” and honestly if we can’t carve out an exception for fascists we shouldn’t be doing free labor for them, and fuck the free software movement.

some people thought it was a bad idea to put a scripting language in a toot.

but the tootapp ecosystem is amazing. sudoku and wordle games? pitfall? zomg

thought: a website where new users write out a resume and servers can make offers.

like, it’s clear that the relationship between new users, and volunteer run servers is a bit more nuanced and complicated than a typical corporate site that just accepts everyone. not every server is going to be a good fit for you, especially if you are a member of a marginal group. so it is not in servers OR users best interest to have a traditional instant sign up process. it’s more like dating.

remember, picking an instance is *at least* as much about picking a mod team that you trust, if not way more, than it is about the theme or topic

but there’s a more basic thing here- before twitter added full historical search, people tweeted with the expectation that older tweets basically became inaccessible eventually- and adding the search violated that expectation without their knowledge or consent.

i thought it through- that’s why i deleted my account, and tweeted (and deleted ) hence with the expectation that personal details that could possibly identify me, and certain jokes were no longer safe

that’s the chilling effect of adding full search: it changes the tone of what you can post because you now must expect hostile randos to dig through your trash and use it to character assassinate you. and it’s galling to see privileged people be super excited for that future

just fyi, the day fedi adds a workibg global full history text search is the day i permanently delete all my accounts. that is what i did when twitter added it in 2013. i told everyone else to delete theirs too but they all thought i was nuts.

now look at all the celebrities brought down by bullshit they tweeted in 2009, and who knows the full human cost of mass keyword bullying

full text search let places like fruit cultivators build dossiers on trans people.

i notice it is cis people advocating hardest for full text search. if you don’t know what it’s like to fear having your whole life upended by some detail you tweeted out 5 years ago that leads to doxxing then don’t.

hello new followers. why are you putting where you work in your bio? this isn’t a networking opportunity

let me get this straight.

all 7000 twitter employees had direct production access, and y’all are worried about a mastodon admin reading your dms?

@fu i prefer ‘color’ myself. it’s colorado not colourado. and color jusf has better symmetry; distracts less from the cock and balls in the middle of the word

i alternate my spelling of “colour” to piss off everyone equally