"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.
“My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.”
This is a really good blog post, with a lot of lessons to learn. I like how technical solutions are proposed to problems of platform culture.
At least some of the obsession over unwritten rules - especially content warnings - seems to me to have been a thing only around the time of the first Twitter exodus, and I never really saw too much fuzz about it before or after. Thank God, or I would probably have left too. People still make a deal about alt texts, but that’s generally less alienating.
When it comes to serendipity and finding content, I think maybe the solution should lie in alternatives to Mastodon - while I prefer Mastodon for curating my own feed, the microblogging integration on kbin is nigh better for discovering interesting content around the fediverse more generally. It does, however, give rise to a Matthews effect that’s intentionally absent from Mastodon.
It will be interesting to see how different federated microblogging platforms will deal with discoverability as they mature. And, not least, how Mastodon users will feel about their content suddenly being promoted by algorithms on services that are completely foreign to them.