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+++ title = "mastodon as a twitter do-over" summary = "it would probably behoove us all to consider what mistakes twitter did and how we can avoid them." date = "2018-01-12T06:20:00-06:00" source = "https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/99336824877757248" +++
i wonder if it would be a good idea or a bad idea for mastodon to adopt a way to view popular hashtags
pros: better discovery cons: going down the same road twitter did
actually it's kind of interesting to think of mastodon as a twitter do-over, because it would probably behoove us all to consider what mistakes twitter did and how we can avoid them.
hashtags
we're obviously past the age of posting toots via sms, so let's start with hashtags.
- aug 2007: hashtags proposed by users as irc-channel metaphor
- july 2009: twitter starts hyperlinking hashtags
- 2010: twitter starts tracking "trending topics"
but of course the mistakes that twitter did were to attempt to apply an algorithm to trends, meaning words and phrases could trend, and some hashtags could be filtered out or censored.
external media
i think we're also past the point of external media hosting on twitpic/yfrog/etc, since internal media hosting has become far more widespread.
replying
so the next thing is to look at replying and boosting statuses. starting with replies, because boosting is a bit more involved in analysis.
- nov 2006: @ reply first used
- may 2007: @replies adopted by twitter
not much to say here. i guess i'd note that it makes a service more conversation than status-oriented, but that's about it? conversation is good
boosting
now, about boosts...
- apr 2007: "ReTweet" first used
- jan 2008: "RT @user" first used
- nov 2009: twitter adds retweet button
so far so good. no need to clog up feeds with multiples of the same stuff. now here's the problem:
- ~2009: people add comments to manual RTs
- apr 2015: twitter adds quote tweets
the biggest problems with quotes? they break context, and they lead to dogpiling. mastodon hasn't adopted quote toots, and probably never should.
conversation vs content
just about the last thing to add at this point is twitter's attempt to transition from a conversational platform to a curated content provider, especially since 2015. that's bad.
further discussion
replying to boosts
who replying to boosts mentions (on twitter, the reply tags both the person who retweeted and the person who posted, whereas on masto only the person who posted it gets the reply)
the 2nd is more nebulous on how it should work and i go back and forth on it tbh. like there's a lot of confusion on who someone is replying to on twitter
but also i have had someone point out that by automatically tagging in the person who boosted it, it takes some responsibility off of the original poster to reply, which helps when you have posts getting more attention than you can handle
when someone boosts a status, and you reply to that boosted status: are you replying to the original poster, or to the person who boosted it? that's the primary consideration there.
twitter steamrolls everyone into the conversation, mastodon doesn't. i like the current behavior. if it's relevant to the person who boosted, i'll manually tag them in, perhaps as a sort of cc.
replies in home feeds
how replies to multiple people show up in your feed (generally this has worked by "if you follow one person who is mentioned in the reply it shows up")
i think the 1st is annoying as fuck personally since i'm missing pieces of conversations, especially on mastodon with private posts (and this in turn can affect social ettiquette as people go "my friends are talking, i'll join in" without acknowledging the extra party privately posting)
maybe break it down to decide who's relevant to each new status?
if it's two people you both follow, then i guess it's not too bad to show you their conversation. but social etiquette might mean you shouldn't butt in, if it doesn't involve you. so there's a potential argument to be made to NOT show other people's conversations.
on the other hand, it's generally more useful to follow your friend's conversations, because there is a high chance you'll be interested in them. this is what both twitter and mastodon do right now, and it's kind of taken for granted.
when multiple people get involved, it gets a bit more tricky.
possibility 1: only show the conversation if you follow everyone mentioned
- still shows you friends, and allows friends to join in
- if an external person joins the convo, the convo will continue in their mentions, but will not reach your timeline? it's debatable whether you would want to see ALL of the posts in the convo, or just the ones with your friends. could lead to abrupt disappearance of convos from your timeline.
twitter's behavior is to show you the conversation if you follow the poster + the first mention. the assumption is that the post is targeted primarily at the first person mentioned. this may or may not be actually true, though. for completeness, it's assumed to be true.
the only possible extension is to show ANY post from people you follow that mention ANYONE you also follow, which balloons pretty fast.
i don't really have any thoughts about private accounts, because this isn't really an issue on mastodon. mastodon's idea of a locked account revolves around approving followers, but locked users can still post publicly. it's just impossible to see their followers-only toots without them approving you. so, post-level privacy sidesteps this issue; private accounts can still post publicly. much better than twitter's all-or-nothing approach.
private posts on mastodon
where private post issues arise is like: A posts privately, B replies, C replies to B
I follow B and C so I see C's reply to B in my timeline, despite not being able to see the original context AT ALL because it's private
so does C follow A? I would say that ideally, if the original post is privated to A-followers, then all replies are also privated to A-followers. I'm not entirely sure if this is indeed the case; I assume not, since you're asking about it.
It seems easier to handle this for post-comment systems rather than post-reply systems, though the distinction between the two is rather arbitrary. Privacy in the first is encompassing; the second cascades.
Due to specifics of how post-reply systems are implemented differently than post-comment systems (namely, in treating follow-ups as linked nodes rather than as children), I don't really know how best to propagate privacy attributes. It seems a bit strange, protocol-wise, to say that D's reply to C should be limited to A's followers. Perhaps this meshes back with the "multiple reply" issue above.
So I guess the two-birds-one-stone solution is to only show you toots where you follow EVERYONE mentioned. But this has downsides, again as mentioned above... it stifles expansion of social circles. You'd have to go to someone's profile to see all their toots.
Tweetdeck, before being bought out, used to have an option to show ALL replies from people you followed. Maybe bad for social etiquette to jump in with strangers, but it had a use case.