how the fuck do fedi people work with this shit dude. every single frontend out there is just Fundamentally Fucked in so many ways that make it impossible to understand the context of any conversation. this is not conducive to Reading Posts at all. is this why the fediverse is so dysfunctional? i'd believe it

@ruby it's SO BAD, this is exactly the sort of shitty ux that got me to leave twitter lmao

@ruby im biased because ive been there so long but like... im gaining a new appreciation for the mastodon/glitch-soc frontend right now lolsob

@ruby i’m always sad that opentween never ended up supporting mastodon. just want my client to look like a fuckin’ mail/NNTP client from 1996

@ruby are you interested in hearing about this, or is it a rhetorical question?

@nora if you have particular thoughts, i'd love to hear them. i imagine a large part of what i'm experiencing is culture shock, coming from someone who never used twitter or fedi, but spent the past almost 2 years on cohost

@ruby I have a few. First of all, I think some people really do like the Twitter-style "little snippets of thought" mode; I've seen enough of that as a preferred mode of interaction to not be able to dismiss it immediately.

Beyond that, though, there are some factors that make the WL uniquely bad for these tools, because they're not designed for island networks like this.

• We have manually updated allowlists. This means that any new participant is guaranteed to be missing a lot of posts and replies (and user profiles!) until their node is widely federated. This will be resolved, eventually, but it's a sore spot for now.
• We have many and small instances. This is the worst case scenario for tag discoverability; if there was one big instance, we could all mooch from its tag lists a la FediBuzz, and if all of our instances were a bit bigger, we'd have a lot more posts organically federating around. This is something we can solve technically; see the various conversations in Discord about relays.
• People don't boost much. I'm not sure why, but I'm noticing that I don't see many boosts on my TL; this hurts the experience a lot.

And then there are the things I see as genuine failures of the frontends we're using.

• The "CW" field is actually just called "subject" and some frontends treat it that way (thinking here about toot, which looks like an e-mail client), while others treat it as a content warning like Mastodon does. I prefer the former, and I think it destigmatizes the practice of giving people a short general summary of what the post is about, which I like.
• Out of band tags, like on Cohost or Tumblr, aren't really a thing anywhere. This is just something most people on the big Fediverse don't care much about, so it rarely gets implemented, though it is supported in the underlying protocol.
• Formatting options are limited. This is done partly to make it easier for clients like toot and Tusky to exist without running a whole web browser to render every post.

All of these things were done (or not done) with intention, but that doesn't mean we have to agree with those intentions, especially for a network like this.

@nora @ruby …wait, out of band tags are in the spec? I somehow did not know that, and now I’m wondering if we could do something with that (though it probably would require some integration effort)

@adam @ruby All metadata that we normally use microsyntacies for, including @mentions and #tags, are represented alongside the post body in ActivityPub: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/trying-to-understand-mention-handling/3816/2

So in a sense, all tags are out of band; the server just parses the text, sees your #tag, and makes a real tag from it.

Most of the work around this would be in the frontends, tbh.

@nora

• yeah, the lack of boosting here is a little odd. certainly was not an issue on cohost. i suspect with how young the network is, we’re all in the bootstrapping phase of discovery, and hence we aren’t coming across a lot of things to boost. bit of a chicken and egg problem, that one. maybe relays will help
• interesting on the cw/subject distinction. cohost had both of these implemented as first class citizens on a post - you could add content warnings to a post, and all posts had an (optional) title, which i imagine maps neatly onto the subject usecase. unfortunate that we don’t have 2 distinct places for both of those here
• i did not know that out-of-band tags were even in the AP spec. that may be useful if we can get existing software to make use of those, chucking tags in the middle of a post is a little jarring for readability imo, and putting them at the end of the post feels like a workaround in some ways

@nora @ruby that actually makes sense. I’d still check if the instance software doesn’t do additional Weird Things with the text tho

@elena @ruby the more i poke around at anything that isn’t cohost the more i think you’re right. we should just go back to nntp. it’s peak communication ux.

@exerian @ruby this is what peak performance truly looks like