I wish I could believe the implication of the article, that the Mastodon UX improves the quality of discourse, but I strongly suspect that there's one much more important Twitter feature that Mastodon lacks that is vastly more important than any mentioned: Twitter just has far more users.
Eliminating classes of problematic behavior and incentives by way of avoiding or altering technical features is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When you get above some threshold—maybe it's some sort of 'relationship distance', or maybe just a raw number of people—then people will always find a way to game the system. I don't think it's a bug or misfeature in the system, though the system can certainly contribute to where the threshold lies. It's a bug in collective human behavior.
So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. That completely breaks some use cases, but it turns out that anything that allows those use cases turns into a cesspool. Maybe somebody can invent something someday, but I'm doubtful that technical measures or UX can ever compete with our rage and other base urges.
Yeah, I would say that features of the software can definitely affect the community but there's a limit.
If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors.
Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter.
Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.
> So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody.
Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding.
In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally.
QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN):
Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members.
In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days.
Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber?
You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends.
(MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.)
I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all.
But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this?
That's the neat part, you don’t.
How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience?
Did anyone else have to read this title several times to parse it? "Twitter features _that_ Mastodon is better for not having" is better, but still seems strange
edit: I think what trips me up is that "features" is used here as a noun but because of it's placement in the sentence I want to read it like a verb
I am not a native speaker and I have always found US news headlines to be weirdly constructed to the point I can't tell if it's a normal headline or if there's a mistake in it. What's worse is that in my native language I also notice a decline in the quality of writing, to the point where sometimes whole sentences are indecipherable.
In this case I only needed to read it once. I often feel like "that" and "and" words are dropped in headlines. I suppose it saves some precious bytes. /s
Even after reading it several times, I could not parse that title, precisely because I kept interpreting "features" as a verb. Viewing the actual article yields the real headline, which makes more sense:
4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
That "4" at the beginning makes all the difference!
Twitter’s problem is that it encourages engagement with the absolute worst and most divisive users. Don’t agree with an antisemitic tweet? Your best option is to leave a reply and ratio the poster.
Twitter desperately needs a public downvote button with a mechanic similar to HN. Flame bait should be pushed to the bottom of everyone’s feed, not the top.
Have to say I wasn’t expecting “antisemitism is fine” as a counter argument to downvotes. Suffice to say this comment isn’t the slam dunk you think it is.
mastodons biggest shortcoming remains the lack of e2e encrypted DM's. Giving volunteer internet janitors access to your private messages is a recipe for disaster
Because of the friction starting a public convo, going to DM, then negotiating which private messaging system to then switch to again. Most people won't bother.
Having person-to-person messages be unencrypted is irresponsible in 2022, the same way offering a web service for public consumption without TLS is. Encryption should be the default and the user should not have to even consider the threat of their messages being read by unauthorized parties.
There are plenty of actual chat apps out there like Signal or Matrix that you should be using for this sort of thing. Neither Twitter or Mastodon are the right tool for this.
As much as twitter, Reddit and Facebook don’t like to admit it, it seems all would tell you that “spirited debate” drives significant engagement and traffic. God knows I’m guilty of it.
I’ve seen “thoughtful” conversation platforms succeed but they tend to be fairly niche and/or heavily moderated. I’m sure the suggestions here would make Twitter something different. But I’m not sure it would be “better”.
Not so sure about quote bit. I really like the quotes because I follow people for perspective on articles and content. Seeing the article summary and the comment as to why it’s good/bad/recommended reading is perfect. It’s basically hundreds of people being unpaid news aggregators and filters for me.
If their tweets were “this is a good article on why X is good [link]” that would be a much worse UX for content aggregation.
I have zero interest in discourse (and most people I followed don’t engage in any, nor do I).
Also, last time I tried mastodon (many years ago) there was a lot of focus on the distributed/federated thing. I found it hard to emulate the global timeline of posts from just people I follow. Maybe it was just me not understanding the UI, but I failed to create a Twitter feed like experience back then.
I hope Mastodon (ActivityPub protocol to be precise) could be statically hosted, like a podcast or rss, yes it's only one-way but hell it will accelerate adoption.
Unfortunately that does not work with Mastodon. When you view a user's profile instead of loading their current list of Activities Mastodon will only show you the ones which have already been propagated and cached on the current instance.
In the case of a static list of activities that won't work.
In my opinion it's a mistake to keep functionality like this, and there is a bug report on their tracker about it but I don't think it gathered enough interest from the devs to make it better.
Readit News
Eliminating classes of problematic behavior and incentives by way of avoiding or altering technical features is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When you get above some threshold—maybe it's some sort of 'relationship distance', or maybe just a raw number of people—then people will always find a way to game the system. I don't think it's a bug or misfeature in the system, though the system can certainly contribute to where the threshold lies. It's a bug in collective human behavior.
So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. That completely breaks some use cases, but it turns out that anything that allows those use cases turns into a cesspool. Maybe somebody can invent something someday, but I'm doubtful that technical measures or UX can ever compete with our rage and other base urges.
If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors.
Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter.
Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.
Deleted Comment
Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding.
In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally.
Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd...
QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN):
Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members.
In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days.
Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber?
You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends.
(MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.)
I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all.
But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this?
That's the neat part, you don’t.
How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience?
You don’t.
edit: I think what trips me up is that "features" is used here as a noun but because of it's placement in the sentence I want to read it like a verb
In this case I only needed to read it once. I often feel like "that" and "and" words are dropped in headlines. I suppose it saves some precious bytes. /s
top 10 features from Twitter that you wouldn't believe Mastodon doesnt have
4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having
That "4" at the beginning makes all the difference!
Twitter desperately needs a public downvote button with a mechanic similar to HN. Flame bait should be pushed to the bottom of everyone’s feed, not the top.
I’ve seen “thoughtful” conversation platforms succeed but they tend to be fairly niche and/or heavily moderated. I’m sure the suggestions here would make Twitter something different. But I’m not sure it would be “better”.
If their tweets were “this is a good article on why X is good [link]” that would be a much worse UX for content aggregation.
I have zero interest in discourse (and most people I followed don’t engage in any, nor do I).
Also, last time I tried mastodon (many years ago) there was a lot of focus on the distributed/federated thing. I found it hard to emulate the global timeline of posts from just people I follow. Maybe it was just me not understanding the UI, but I failed to create a Twitter feed like experience back then.
In the case of a static list of activities that won't work.
In my opinion it's a mistake to keep functionality like this, and there is a bug report on their tracker about it but I don't think it gathered enough interest from the devs to make it better.