Notices by Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)

@dansup @PixelFed

I no longer want anything universal.

Never understood the attractiveness of having a whole bunch of "fediverse accounts." Seems like a bug not a feature.

Plus, I don't install apps anymore if I can help it.

Finally, whenever I see the word "fedi" I pronounce it as "Fido" (as in FidoNet 2.0).

Good luck. 🤷♂️

@Gargron

Hmm. Kinda like saying eh, this 4K retina screen might be nice and all but my MacSE still has the superior display.

@photomatt

Matt, Matt, Matt: always, always, always record media interviews. Gotta have receipts.

And late in the piece you mention Fast Company: I, like you, loved Inc and Fast Company back in the day. They’ve changed. Fast Company should rename itself Fast And Loose, as their articles can be wildly full of biased narratives and erroneous lazy reporting.

Wow…. end of an era.

Dr. Donald L. Bitzer, creator of the PLATO system, and co-inventor of many key technologies like the AC gas-plasma flat-screen display, passed away yesterday at 90. Don was the main person I wrote about in my book THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW.

No words. RIP, Don.

#plato #computerhistory #techhistory #retrocomputing #bitzer

@Gargron

All good. And deserving of our gratitude and support. But calling anything “the future” means it’s not “now” and leaves open any answer to, “so, when then?”

I’m reminded of that great scene in THE CONTENDER where the President, played by Jeff Bridges, stingingly tells an annoyingly ambitious congressman, “You're the future of the Democratic party. And you always will be.”

I worry Mastodon is the future of social media. And always will be.

@FediFollows

Seems a little hyped, no? How many of these publications have even heard of Flipboard, let alone Mastodon?

Flipboard’s just a middleman platform—it doesn’t bring a publication’s team, and doubtful even their attention, and certainly not their engagement, to Mastodon. It just brings snippets of content to lure you to #Flipboard (if you’re not careful what you click on).

I think I’ll just hold out for the publications and their staff to join #Mastodon in an official capacity.

Translated: “We Found A Few People In Pennsylvania Willing To Say They’re As Uncertain About Kamala Harris As We Are”

#nytimes #uspol #politics #confirmationbias

@countcol

We skipped the Comprehension Age which should always come first so people are trained to effectively observe, analyze, evaluate, verify, question, challenge, organize, absorb, and share Information.

@dansup

On the contrary.

The walled gardens have not gone away with the fediverse. At all.

In fact there are more walled gardens than ever before. Every #Mastodon instance is its OWN walled garden, in terms of discoverability. Search is cordoned off: you can’t find anything for the most part except whatever might have been posted to your own walled garden and only if recent.

Talk of “freedom” is lovely but the reality is Mastodon is like a spy agency with severely compartmentalized info.

@Gargron

Wow, a band that still hauls around stacks and stacks of guitar and bass amps. Very retro.

@Gargron @Sarahp

More accurately, thanks to federation, the posts from not one but myriad social networks float by unnoticed in your feed unless you’re online watching like a hawk 24/7 😉

@Mastodon

who are active

@WarnerCrocker

Hyperbole.

@Gargron @ricmac

Understood. Let’s stipulate that all these facts are accurate.

But I’d postulate that by making search opt-in, search is pretty useless. It has hurt discoverability, and to compensate, put awkward burdens on individual users who stuff their toots with character-count-wasting hashtags in an effort to boost discoverability.

And I’d argue the Network Effect, so crucial to helping social neworks grow and thrive, has been weakened on Mastodon in large part by the search policy.

@Gargron @ricmac

As a user I don't care how search functionality is implemented on the back end. I search, and as a user I get nothing, or very little. All I get is the confidence that Mastodon didn't find what I *know* is out there. And that's because of the policy decisions that were built right into the design and architecture, right into the DNA of Mastodon, decisions which essentially guarantee a disappointing search experience for users, regardless of how beautiful the code is.

@Gargron @ricmac

Put another way:

If I search, I want to search *MASTODON* as in the whole damn thing. Across all instances. With sorting ability--relevance, by date/time, etc.

If there are "blocked" or "hidden" results, I wanna see a count of them as in "Here are 1834 matching results, including 920 redacted results" with an explanation as to why they're redacted, as in, by individual user choice, or by instance policy.

This place needs TRANSPARENCY.

@Gargron @ricmac

Oh, anything? Everything? Like, for example, I see something in the fast-moving river, and ten minutes later I think, I shoulda clicked on that link, and I try to search for it but no, it be gone, gone, gone, down the river and over the digital waterfall.

Search is always the single most consistent, most predictable, disappointment in Mastodon. In fact its lack may be the only disappointment in the overall Mastodon experience since I joined in 2017.

I wish it were not so.

@ricmac

And that is why Mastodon is stuck at 15 million accounts, only a fraction of which are active in any meaningful sense.

The lack of search functionality, blocked by a purist ideology held by another fraction of the user population, may be elegant (in the nerdy Linux sense) but it is an architectural form of pre-crime censorship and control, which has had clear and obvious effects on the “community” and on these so-called “conversations,” turning Mastodon into a fast-moving river.

@WarnerCrocker

I wish Sony had rescued Arclight.

@WarnerCrocker Lol, expected that reply.

It’s fine. Do the math on what 210,000 miles of gas station fillups would cost. About the same as a truckload full of mint retail copies of every Rolling Stone magazine issue ever published, for starters.