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Proposed: it is completely, utterly, gobsmackingly horrible that Mastodon users - even smart, highly engaged ones that read documentation and understand federation - *cannot tell* just who is going to be shown what they post or what the various privacy settings mean in practice.
There is an animated conversation going on in the comments of the poll I just posted where we're trying to reverse engineer under what circumstances a comment reply will show up in the commenter's followers' timelines.
That this conversation even exists is, I'm sorry, completely horrifying. The fact that this is even a matter of discussion, to say nothing of needing to be a matter of speculation and investigation, is appalling.
How can anybody make informed decisions about participating on a platform, the behavior which they do not understand and cannot predict?
For instance,
I wonder how many Mastodon users out there think the comments they are leaving on other people's posts are populating their timeline.
From time to time when people follow me, I check them out to see if they're someone I want to follow back. It's not uncommon for me to see an account that has, like, all of three top level posts, all of which have been made more than a month ago; their replies tab may show that they're quite active recently.
I generally regard those accounts pretty much the same as somebody who has no posts at all. I don't follow back ciphers. Most people don't.
At least I know to check the replies tab; pretty sure a lot of people it doesn't occur to them to see if an account that doesn't seem to have any activity might have an active replies tab.
Unless somebody looking at your profile knows to click through to your replies, if you only reply and don't top post, your account looks like a ghost account, because there's nothing in your timeline.
@siderea This is, fwiw, very interface-dependent. The phone app I use absolutely shows both top-posts and replies when I look at someone’s profile. The web interface I use (elk.zone) doesn’t.
@thatandromeda As separate tabs or one?
Edit: I'm looking at profiles at elk.zone, though I am not logged in, and it looks the same as profiles on every other interface that I've seen:
@thatandromeda That's a reply *to you*. You see anything that mentions you.
@thatandromeda like scroll down, do you see any of my replies to any of the other people in this discussion?
@siderea @thatandromeda To clarify, it's worth distinguishing between behaviors on two timelines:
home feed
- replies between you + other accounts I follow
your profile (posts + replies tab)
- same replies as home feed
- plus replies to others on my instance
The only time I see other replies on my home feed is if they got explicitly boosted there by someone I follow.
> - plus replies to others on my instance
Dang, that was not remotely on my radar.
@siderea @thatandromeda Yeah, the biggest hidden secret when using Mastodon, etc. is that you're never browsing the Fediverse directly.
Once your mental model shifts to accommodate the reality that your client is always browsing an instance-local cache (blending content from both "here" + "elsewhere"), then you can more accurately reason about what you are (+ aren't) seeing.
No that's not it. I'm already down with that. The thing that caught me by surprise is the idea that anybody would use the membership of the instance as a criterion for whether or not to display a reply.
Mastodon (and for all I know it's clones) has such an incredibly inconsistent conceptualization of what an instance is, and is for.
Like sometimes it's just the server, no different than an email server, where you have no particularly greater social connection with the other people on your email server than any other people with email accounts out there in the universe. Other times it's imagined as a kind of community or digital neighborhood, where you have some sort of presumed relationship with the other people on the server with you, if only a demographic in common or a common basis for affiliation.
@siderea @thatandromeda Honestly, I think the "it's like an email server" narrative has never actually been a good analogy, because it's totally not how the underlying architecture has been built out.
Under the hood, a Mastodon instance is very much a shared, collectively-assembled JIT (just-in-time) cache. This makes it much easier to implement content-distribution features which work better when there happen to be community/neighborhood overlaps.
@siderea @thatandromeda My hunch is that better analogies + terminology might help here.
https://hachyderm.io/@pevohr/110846288754835042
I'm not in love with the socioverse/idioverse terminology I introduced there, but without some sort of placeholders for these distinctions, it'll continue to be bafflingly hard to explain why things currently work the way they do.
@siderea @pevohr @thatandromeda
There's at least one mastodon fork -- Hometown, IIRC -- that has local-only posts as an option (never distributed off-server). That seems a reasonable case for using instance membership to decide what to display.
@siderea here is another screenshot from my phone app of your profile, scrolled down a bit. There are not separate tabs; this is what I see when i tap on your icon to go to your profile, and scroll down. It appears to be exclusively replies to others in this discussion. (To people I do not know, even.)
@siderea yes, I was contrasting elk.zone, which does it this way, with my phone app, which is like the screenshot I sent you (which includes replies to everyone and does not have a separate tab).
@siderea I did not know this. Thank you for posting it.
@siderea similarly some accounts that primarily boost others may seem to be inactive if you don’t look at their boosts (I rarely follow someone who only boosts - but there are some exceptions who are worth following as good curators of content. But I try to be very selective as all boosts usually just ends up with content I’m less interested in seeing.
@ShadSterling @siderea It is odd - some times when I click thru to someone's profile (on my iPhone using Ivory usually) I see a Posts, Posts & Replies and Boosts tab - but not for everyone. So either it is variable by their instance or there is some other factor that I'm not sure about. I'll see if I can narrow it down - but I have seen it (just saw it earlier today) - when I click thru to see "All Posts" then I do see boosts & posts mixed together. So perhaps it is an Ivory app specific thing?
@ShadSterling @siderea attached is a screenshot from my phone just now. (I used my own profile as I’m ok sharing it)
@ShadSterling @siderea I think it is an Ivory thing. I didn’t realize that when I posted but looking into it the web interface has a Media tab (which is kinda nice for some types of accounts but not usually very useful for me)
@Rycaut @siderea I guess I’ll have to try out Ivory. I hadn’t bought any of the paid apps yet because after trying out about a dozen free apps that don’t quite work how I want I didn’t want to spend ~$100 to try a dozen paid apps that don’t quite work how I want, but maybe it’s try to try just one
(This is one of many reasons I prefer the Patreon model to the pay-before-you-try AppStore model)
@ShadSterling @Rycaut @siderea
Yes, it would be great to have a dedicated profile tab for "all own posts" showing the account's posts and replies without the boosts. Some apps may offer that, it should be part of the standard interface.
@siderea Well now I'm running off to check what shows for me! It's a good reminder not to be complacent with social media-there was a lot to learn about Mastodon and I got overwhelmed and didn't explore everything.
@siderea It's also not great that the "Posts" tab lumps together original posts with boosts. When deciding whether to follow, I'd like to know what they actually have to say.
@misc @jwz @siderea which eats one of your profile metadata slots and/or occupies your profile description. Cohost did this “the right way” with toggles for each kind of non-post on user profiles, see e.g.
https://cohost.org/staff
The fact that a workaround is even needed is the problem.
@siderea @oblomov @misc @jwz Yeah, this is definitely an area where opinionated clients should continue experimenting to find a better UX.
To date, I'd say @trunksapp's approach is the one to beat:
@pevohr @siderea @misc @jwz @trunksapp
Non-official clients can help (like they can do with federation by side-loading unfederated replies, an several other pain points), but ultimately if these changes don't make it upstream the experience remains negative for the vast majority of users.
@oblomov @misc @jwz @siderea For the profile page filters à la Cohost, I think this could be the relevant Github issue that can be upvoted/commented on: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10011 :)
@jwz I very much agree.
And I wish that there was a functionality whereby I could follow a person's own toots on one list and their boosts on another.
It seems to be a pretty common pattern for a person to have different topic spaces for their own posts and for their boosts. Like I have colleagues who boost all sorts of interesting stuff about healthcare or being a medical professional, and their own toots are like 100% cute cat pictures. It's not that I don't want to see their adorable cat pictures and it's not that I don't want to see the interesting boosts about a topic I'm interested in: I just want them to go to two different places.
@siderea I think it's sometimes the case that I only see people's posts that have reached my instance. So if they only just showed up because someone on my instance followed them, I may only see a handful of posts even if they have a long history on their own server.
(Unless I'm misunderstanding.)
@WomanCorn Oh I'm talking about even when you click all the way through to the person's profile on their own server, and you still see only a handful of posts.
Now it's still possible that this person recently migrated to that server, and they've lost their post history because you can't migrate posts (a separate rant).
But it's pretty clear some people just don't top post very much. Or really at all.
@siderea Related question: when you unfollow someone, is the act of unfollowing visible to them? I’ll bet the answers would fall about 50/50 yes vs no :-).
FWIW, I believe the answer is “yes, it’s visible to them”, but that’s based entirely on reading https://github.com/dret/activitypub/blob/master/userstories/following-a-person.md – I’m no ActivityPub expert.
In theory, a client could offer an “invisible unfollow” feature, whereby it never actually sends an activity message with type Unfollow to the (un)followee, but rather continues to follow while now silently dropping their posts.
Is that what “blocking” is? I have no idea.
@kfogel This is a nice example of why "visible" can be a slippery and possibly even treacherous concept.
Unfollowing does not send a notification to the party being unfollowed, as far as I can tell: there's no option to filter out or not unfollow notifications, the way there are for all the other different kinds of notifications, in the client I'm using, so I'm guessing there are no such notifications.
Nor does blocking send a notification to the blocked party. I assume that I have been unfollowed, and I'm quite certain I have been blocked, and I've never received any notification about either.
But if I know somebody followed me at one point, I can tell whether or not they're currently following me: I can go to their profile while I'm logged in, and it'll say whether or not they're following me. So it is visible in that sense: if I knew they were following me and I go and check if they're currently following me and they're not, they unfollowed me.
@kfogel
Blocking is less easily checked, but it can be inferred to some extent.
Blocking prevents the person being blocked from seeing any of one's content. So if you could see it but now you can't, that means that they either removed the content or they removed your access to it, by either changing its access level (which I don't know if you can do after a post has been made!) or they've blocked you. So that's one way the fact of having been blocked becomes visible.
Another way is if other people around you are responding to something you can't see. That means the comments to which they are responding are from someone who blocks you. For instance if someone seems to be replying to their own toots - there are no other person's toots between them - but they seem to be referring to something you can't see, that means that the invisible party blocked you. That is another way the fact of blocking can become visible to someone.
@siderea Oh, I just meant that at the protocol level, when you unfollow someone, a notice gets sent to a piece of software that, in principle, serves them not you. If that software chooses not to notify them in their UI, that’s fine. Maybe Mastodon in particular doesn’t do such notification in the UI. But that question is not up to the person – let’s call them the “sender” – who initiated the unfollow. From the sender’s point of view, sending an unfollow request is visible to the account being unfollowed. If that account’s software happens to throw the notice away and never tell the person, that’s entirely the business of the recipient side – it can’t be assumed from the sender side.
This wasn’t an inevitable design. There are ways to do subscription models so that an unsubscription event is purely a subscriber-side phenomenon, and is not visible as an event to the formerly subscribed-to entity. ActivityPub just chose to do things in a bidirectionally visible way.
@siderea Eh, I don't post much because I got pretty much no one following me and I don't have anyone following me because people don't follow people who don't post much.
That doesn't mean I don't want to talk to a lot of people, though.
@siderea Hello! I was just curious. Do you happen to write Star Wars fan fiction?
@EJGilbert Nope, I don't write fanfiction at all. Read it, occasionally.
@siderea Oh... Okay. Sorry to bother you. Thanks for responding.
Most of my posts are replies. Some of these I boost myself, for sharing with my followers (awkard, but it's what John Mastodon.wants us to do ).
Most of my replies though remain within the original conversation. In my profile header, I specifically invite visitors to check out my "posts and replies" tab.
Likewise, in the other direction, when I meet a new account and consider following them, I always look at their "posts and replies" first. It's the natural way to get to know them.
@siderea oh sheesh - staring me right in the face and I have been ignoring the replies tab. You make a very good point. I come here as someone using the bird app since early 2009, before there were "boosts" and "retweets" were strictly manual. People posted and chatted with one another. Now, people take the easy way, and mostly boost/retweet. I'm not as chatty here as I used to be during the period 2009-2013 - some of it due to priorities. But I do understand your point.
@siderea It seems like it's just a different category of social media motivation: some are getting the interactions they desire by going out and replying to others, and don't necessarily desire to be followed and broadcast to followers
@pleaseclap We weren't talking about the motivation. We're talking about people not knowing how the software works, and having incorrect expectations about how their behavior will be represented to others.
@siderea I know that: I'm saying that your assumption - that many people don't understand the software, based on the appearance of their timelines to you - is not the only possible explanation for the appearance of those accounts. It's not even clear that it's the most likely
@siderea
It depends Upon the Platform you Use.
Every platform has a different Interface, but I like to Use Tusky it shows Recent Replies or Post on Top by Default.
It's Great.
For Web : Elk