So I'm seeing some discussion about why Mastodon isn't necessarily taking off with certain minorities (let's be honest, they mean POCs while trying to dance around the term, this place is super White asides from the apparent Japan contingent).
Here's some thoughts:
1. The whole notion of "instances" is really unintuitive. When you Google "Mastodon", you get an instance like mastodon.social, but it's not immediately apparent that M.S isn't your only option or WHY you'd want a different instance
2. Linked to #1 - there's no meta-Mastodon site that can explain the basics of what Mastodon is, give some suggestions for instances, and explain the whole instances thing.
3. Hell, I'd suggest changing the wording of some of these to make it sound less like you need to have been immersed in Open Source World to understand. "Instance" could be "community". "Federated" could be "across Mastodon". Etc etc. Relate it to terms that laypeople can understand.
4. URGH OMG I've lost what I've written 3-4 times now because I clicked on Extended Information and instead of loading in that 4th sidebar it changed the page, then I pressed Back and my writing is gone, then I wanted to reply to someone and it overwrote this sidebar...etc etc anyway side annoyance
4. "Extended information" hides what should be front and center - the COC and the moderators. I wasn't presented any of this information when I signed up for this instance. Why not? Make it prominent
5. I'm still not confident that anything can be done if someone's impersonating me on another instance. I'm told that I had to rely on people I know to tell the difference, but what if not many people I know are on Mastodon yet? Or they get taken in by the other person?
6. Similarly, I don't see any clear way for me to report harassment. I see links to report *codebase issues* (which involves GitHub which is its own headache for non-techies) but I don't really know what my recourse is otherwise
8 (since I double-counted 4). How on earth does threading work here? Do you get to see a full thread of all that I've said on here? At least on Twitter I can see a thread happening as I write it, here I'm not certain. Many of the people y'all are trying to court rely on long threads and this may be a deal breaker even with the longer text limit.
@creatrixtiara It looks like if I click on a message it shows the whole thread in the right-hand column. Not bad.
@hypatian ok cool good to know!
@creatrixtiara Kind of what I expected--more like the older way twitter used to do it. Shows up only if the selected message precedes the threaded one. (So clicking on 5/6 doesn't show the reply to 4, but shows everything in the chain up to 5/6 and after 5/6.)
@creatrixtiara yep this thread is showing properly in the tusky app on Android as well
also thank you for taking the time!
@creatrixtiara @b Ok. now that you have the hang of threads. I agree that a better overview page would be nice. I'm not a fan of git web interfaces, that's what we're such with for now.
Geeks (not using this as a perjorative, sometimes I am one) just don't think the same way honestly. I mean they sometimes have to be reminded to put comments in code so it's understandable.
Perhaps you can help write the main web page?
@b @creatrixtiara I know that is such a stereotypical response to critiques of code. But it still hold true. I'm not really a great coder, I can contribute bug reports, etc. You see a failing in the public face of this new "frontier". Your contributions above and other potential contributions can help to make it better.
@Patrickme yeah but the ways contributions are solicited and handled are super not intuitive. I've been using tech since the late 80s (Pascal!!!) and I still find GitHub counter to what I'd expect from, say, writing or media-making.
@creatrixtiara #welcome ! Here is a FAQ, including information on how instances generally work: http://www.mastoguide.info/Pages/instanceFAQ.html
You can report individual posts. Here is an example of how it is handled on one instance: https://toot.cat/users/polymerwitch/updates/7807
Generally you can see the whole thread. Federation may cause some problems, such as excluding comments that were made on remote instances, or making them more difficult to find (have to go to web view etc.)
@creatrixtiara The Local and Federated Timelines can go by quickly on high-population instances and well-federated instances, respectively. Sometimes scrolling down (but not too far!) can keep them in place: https://mastodon.social/@vertigo/1536127
@creatrixtiara click the ... on a toot, there's a report option
@creatrixtiara this sends the toot (perhaps a bundle of several) to the instance operator, with an optional note
If yours is unresponsive, you might be happier on a smaller instance, though currently it's inconvenient to move.
@creatrixtiara we're trying to get https://keybase.io on here for the impersonation angle, you can sort of fake it already
@creatrixtiara Alas, anti-impersonation/authentication is somewhat antithetical to federated services (“single truth” implies centralized). There could be some kind of central registry where people check if someone is you. Such a service could be automatically consulted by Mastodon (to display checkmarks or similar in profiles). But, at most, you could prove your identity to the service via another account or a domain.
@creatrixtiara I wonder what happens if I reply to something mid-thread...
@creatrixtiara Federated is been long before mastadon, it is thing I believe immerse from gnu/Linux which is kinda like mastodon as they share the same techniques behind
@teozard and therein lies the problem - the word "federated" comes from a VERY techie thing. Non-techies aren't gonna know this history or context. They'll probably think "federated as in countries???"
@creatrixtiara this is actually very true, federated is like countries your server connected to so you can interact with people from other "country"
@teozard this is raising some questions for me about the nature of federation as far as tech is concerned
@creatrixtiara here is the article to make clear what's the federated timeline is, how things work, about some technical stuff and a little bit of history. https://robek.world/featured/what-is-gnu-social-and-is-mastodon-social-a-twitter-clone/
@creatrixtiara didn't the main mastodon.social page (that you see if you log out) get rewritten to address both problems recently?
@andlabs looking at it now in incognito mode and eh...it still sounds very in-group-techy
@creatrixtiara I don't know if the server overloading is out of the way or not but I do know the "other instances" stuff was mentioned when creating a new account was disabled, at least
I personally don't know enough about the problem to suggest anything specific, sorry
@creatrixtiara I just referred to it as "maddeningly opaque" in my writing Slack. I think that's a serious obstacle.