@TechConnectify beautifully put. I wonder if this may also be a Mastodon UX issue. I don’t use other social networks so I don’t know if it’s a feature elsewhere, but I was surprised that I could follow hashtags. I remember on Twitter you could have a cursory look at a hashtag, but that was it. Here it becomes part of your timeline. So any time someone shits on a topic I love, I see it, and it’s right there.
@teotwaki Oh I strongly believe there's a UX issue but it's not from hastags:
I believe it's from Mastodon's almost total lack of tools for the wider audience to signal bad behavior.
There are technical ways this manifests (cross-instance weirdness), but even when all things are working as intended, new replies end up in the bottom. Which means people can be assholes to posters with nobody else seeing that occur to push back on it.
That seems to have gotten better but it's not gone.
@TechConnectify To be very honest sometimes I wonder how you stay sane. I get maybe 15-20 notifications a day on my phone, total, and that’s in periods where I’m socially active.
I had to mute a YouTube comment that was getting a few likes every few days.
How many do you get, and how do you handle the cognitive load? Do you have an army of interns handling your socials as your persona slowly gets digested by internet famedom?
@teotwaki Oh. Oh ho ho. This will be rich if you were following along when I was talking about the need for a filter.
Because YouTube has a filter and turns that sucker on once your channel starts getting big. With no action on my part, I went from getting pinged for every comment, then pinged just for replies, then pinged only when other large YouTube creators comment on my videos.
And that's just the notifications side. The comment algorithm also does a great job of keeping me sane.
@teotwaki There is only one place where YouTube sometimes forces me to see inane, awful comments: The main screen on the dashboard where the three most-recent comments on YOUR ENTIRE CHANNEL are always visible.
That can be particularly nasty when I'm between uploads. Because on those days, the main people commenting are new to my channel. And boy are they unkind.
@teotwaki And, not to put too fine a point on it, but when you approach the scale of a 2-million sub YouTube channel - algorithms simply are a must.
Mastodon leadership needs to engage with that fact if they want the platform to be usable for folks like me.
It's still alright for me at the moment, but I think that's purely down to how small Fedi remains at this point. I've got something of a reputation here when across all of YT the vast majority don't know who I am.
@TechConnectify@teotwaki I personally don't think Mastodon will ever offer this functionality as Mr. Rochko seems very deeply invested in this idea of early Twitter being the perfect social network.
But I also believe that as the ActivityPub itself is gaining a momentum, these options will sooner than later become available either via third-party services or natively by other fedi networks.