1/2 I have deactivated my account on Twitter (X), which began in 2007. Under Elon Musk, Twitter has not only decided to stop blocking bigots and liars and pro-insurrectionists, it has actively welcomed them, with apparent support from Mr. Musk.
@waltmossberg This speaks volumes, Walt. X is indeed a cesspool and your leadership here will have a big impact.
This is an existential moment for the web and the concept of open standards like #ActivityPub
Thankfully @Gargron has labored for years to create a viable approach that could form the foundation for an open social web. And many here are working to make the user experience simpler and more approachable for mainstream users.
Your presence on @Mastodon is incredibly important now.
@mike@Gargron@Mastodon Thanks, Mike. I’ve been on Mastodon quite awhile, as you know. But I rarely used it, because (a) it can be confounding to use (yes, I can figure it all out, but you know I favor things average folks can grok quickly) and (b) content moderation matters hugely to me and I need to know what the policies are for multiple servers and who is responsible….
@mike@Gargron@Mastodon …here’s an example of the complexity here: I just tried to react to a post about my leaving Twitter, and was met with a big notice saying I couldn’t do that because I wasn’t logged into the server where it lived. I thought all the posts and replies were interchangeable among servers.
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon I appreciate the feedback. The notice doesn't say you can't, it tells you how to do it. That notice has been reworked in the latest beta, as visible on mastodon.social—curious to know if you'd consider that an improvement.
@Gargron@mike@Mastodon I’ll let you know what I think when I see it. I don’t use betas. But, just by your description, it sounds like a chore. Please understand I’m not denigrating all your hard work here, but after 27 years of reviewing tech products for average people, I react poorly to requiring instructions for simple tasks. Are conversations and reactions here between people on different servers interchangeable or not?
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon Yes. Your account is on mastodon.world. You are conversing with me, whose account is on mastodon.social, and Mike, whose is on flipboard.social. Totally separate infrastructure, but your post just pops up in my notifications.
@Gargron@mike@Mastodon So then why did I get that big ugly notice before? I can’t recall to whom I was trying to respond or what server they were on. As you can imagine, I’m getting a lot of traffic from people I don’t know or follow because of my decision to ditch Twitter. I assume I can easily respond to any of them.
@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon Presumably you opened a post on its original website, which was not the same website where your account is. That website has no idea who you are. The notice gives you a pointer how to open the same post in your own website where you are logged in. You can navigate to mastodon.social and try interacting with any post to see what the new notice looks like.
@Gargron@waltmossberg@mike@Mastodon there really needs to be a better solution here than ‘type your URL’. I don’t know what that is - some sort of identity cookie that does a redirect?
It’s much better in ‘apps’, like ivory, when you have it bounce into the app using universal links / extension.
@waltmossberg@Gargron
Having used Mastodon for several months, my experience: It lacks the Twitter rush of virality & feel of all being in one "place." By far the biggest bump was what Eugen said: I'd follow someone from my "federated" timeline to their account on another instance, reply to a post & get bonked. After a few times, the steps to follow them on my instance & reply there became second nature. It does have a bit of a 1992-Usenet feel to it. People will respond differently to that.
@nnscott@waltmossberg How does it happen for you? You have to deliberately click on "Open original page" in the dropdown of a post to land on another website from any part of the app. I would have imagined that most people land on the wrong website through links shared on other channels like Telegram or Discord, not their Mastodon interface.
@Gargron@nnscott@waltmossberg It happened to me multiple times when someone add a link to another post on another instance inside his own post (as a workaround to quote someone else toot). when you click the link (or the preview) you are sent to the original poster website that can be another instance. There you get the banner if you want to interact with him. I have to admit I was a bit surprised by that at the begining.
@Gargron@nnscott@waltmossberg That’s not exactly right. If a user posts a link to a mastodon post and you click the link, you end up on the website (just like if they’d posted a link to a non-Mastodon website). This is true even if the link is to a post from your own server. It’s really confusing to people. You won’t notice same-site links if you use the web client, but in the iOS app, it’s super annoying. The app should recognise Masto links and use app nav.
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