Every time I see a question like "Why doesn't Apple build $THIS?" I assume the answer is "because they'll make more money selling 3rd-party $THIS in the app store".
> I assume the answer is "because they'll make more money selling 3rd-party $THIS in the app store"
Apple has a long and storied history of doing almost exactly the opposite - any sufficiently popular third-party utility either gets bought and integrated (eg Workflow, Dark Sky) or Sherlocked (eg f.lux, Watson).
Apple takes a very long-term view of revenue generation, and the App Store commissions from $random_app are way less valuable to Apple than the LTV of a customer who’s locked into buying Macs and iPads because of Apple’s proprietary version of $random_app.
Pixelfed is the droid you're looking for. You can find a server to join at https://pixelfed.org and then support the project via Patreon for $1/month (or more).
On Twitter I've seen a lot of criticism of the whole idea of "choose a server" when joining Mastodon (and the fediverse in general).
Instead of lists of servers, I wonder if a better onboarding workflow would be...
- What username do you want?
- What are your interests? (click, click, click)
- Backend checks availability of username on matching servers
- Pick one of these: @username@abc.social, @username@def.org, @username@xyz.social (with a description of the community associated with each result).
In my opinion this could make the process feel more like choosing an email address which, again in my opinion, could be more familiar than "choose a server".
That's actually a fantastic idea, and I assume that the main barrier to implementing this isn't a technical one, but the coordination problem of getting enough instance admins to opt-in to appearing on this system, and finding some neutral third party to maintain it (potentially the same people as run this instances.social site).
Splitting your user story into smaller tasks, it seems like the technical side could be implemented as follows:
- An agreed API / JSON format / microformat for instances to list the top 3 user interests that distinguish them from other instances (ideally using Wikidata Q identifiers[0], to create a consistent cross-language taxonomy) and maybe a paragraph of text to give a fuller description of the community
- An agreed API for checking whether a username is already taken on an instance (and maybe a standardised query string format supported by each instance, which allows a third party site to send their visitor to that instance in such a way that the visitor is presented with a sign-up page where the username box is already filled)
- A site with a neutral domain name like "join the fediverse . party" (or just re-use instances.social if that's catchy enough), with the UX you describe
- A way for new instance admins to submit their instance for inclusion (which triggers some automated checks like "is this instance online?" and "which parts of the fediverse does it federate with?")
Actually the hard part is probably preventing Sybil-attacks, since some attacker could create millions of dummy instances that have only one user on (though the instances will no doubt lie and claim to have billions of users). Maybe there does need to be some cabal or union of instance admins who can be trusted to give estimates for how many genuine users are probably on the smaller instances they federate with (reporting "0" or "negative infinity" for instances which they block).
https://instances.social/ already has a wizard that does a good chunk of this, though not, I believe, with username availability checking. There are a lot of different entry points and they don't all pursue the same polish, for better or worse.
> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered?
Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.
> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags
I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
Need to have people on your home node following people on the other node for your own node to be aware. Really unfriendly to small nodes / people who run their own personal nodes.
You can always click out to the same hashtag on other instances. It's a network graph. There's no one "perfect" view of a hashtag, but there are a lot of interesting sub-views of one if you've got time to click around.
The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature. Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
> The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature.
They look completely identical, the feature isn't working.
I'm sceptical it's even an intended feature as much as just the overall result of the protocol design not putting too much thought into it.
> Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
I looked into it, that's actually a better solution than the old one I was aware of which involved a bot account automatically subscribing to different accounts across the fediverse. It's my understanding that needs to be explicitly configured by a Mastodon administrator for a subscription though, out of the hands of the user.
This still isn't particularly user friendly and I still think this is a terrible user experience, particularly when comments like these appear:
>>>> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags
>>> I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?
If I look at [1] whilst logged in to that instance, I do get a slightly different (first couple of pages have a few more posts, then it starts diverging) view than from [2] where I am not logged in. Also slight difference from [3] in that posts from, e.g., @infosec_jobs@mastodon.social are not there but are in [1] and [2].
They were just two random examples. As a server's connections build, it'll inevitably reach a point where it sees most/all of the network and it's no longer distinguishable.
I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.
You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site.
Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
Surely you mean tuna.