"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.”

  • @petunia
    19•1 year ago

    a twitter-like platform needs a big central algorithm that can associate posts with certain topics and interests to be able to serve up an interesting feed

    I grew up on Tumblr and it thrived for the longest time with a chronological timeline.

    most people are just kind of shouting into the void and that endless storm of posts has to be filtered and organized somehow

    Yes, it was done through tagging. Notably, tags in Tumblr didn’t have to be inline.

    Tagging died on Twitter because the inscrutable blackbox of the algorithm made people unsure if tags actually improved the visibility of their posts or not, there’s some folk-wisdom that suggests excessive tagging leads to deboosting of your profile, since it could have been considered spammy. Also, there’s only so many characters in a Twitter post and sometimes there’s just not enough left for relevant tags.