- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
I wish ppl would realize the solution to Mastodon problems is to stop focusing on Mastodon. It’s not the fediverse. Fediverse services need to focus on interoperability so that the entire network is the platform instead of depending on Mastodon to fix its built-in shortcomings. These are the same issues that mastodon has had since the beginning and are working as designed. Instead of fighting upstream against mastodon, we could improve the fediverse as a whole.
Kbin and Lemmy bring a huge discoverability boost to the fediverse and microblogging services. Non threadiverse services could better emphasize
Group
posts to lead users to finding groups that match their interests. Right now they show up as normal boosts on other platforms and there’s no indication that it’s aGroup
instead of a single user. Real search features could be built in; the lack of it is a philosophical decision by mastodon that doesn’t have to apply to the rest of the fediverse. To fix the CW arguments, services could build in better user based filtering. If you can auto CW other users posts, there’s no need to yell at ppl about CWs.There’s plenty of other ways the rest of the fediverse could improve without mastodon; Mastodon is intent on just being a better twitter but the rest of the fediverse could be a platform that’s more cohesive and feature rich than any other solical network. And if the non-masto fediverse gains enough traction, mastodon can keep holding back the fediverse and masto users can’t keep bullying users into trying to fit into their various disparate rules.