Notices by Brian Dear (brianstorms@mastodon.social)

@Gargron

All good. And deserving of our gratitude and support. But calling anything “the future” means it’s not “now” and leaves open any answer to, “so, when then?”

I’m reminded of that great scene in THE CONTENDER where the President, played by Jeff Bridges, stingingly tells an annoyingly ambitious congressman, “You're the future of the Democratic party. And you always will be.”

I worry Mastodon is the future of social media. And always will be.

@eff @CrooksandLiars

RULE: Wherever and whenever the media say “AI” replace with “AI companies”

@arstechnica

To help train the AIs no doubt

@eff

But *is* it “even better”?

In the 2010s on social media we saw the rise of cancel culture, where people were made pariahs for somethingorother, whether or not it was fair or even true.

In the 2020s with the growth of new social networking platforms, the new thing is cancelling *functionality* rather than people. By far (imho) the biggest cancellation is #Mastodon’s #search capability, rendering the very idea of finding content largely moot. Like pre-crime: it’s pre-censorship.

@eff @404mediaco

@404mediaco is great and I’m glad they’re getting recognition.

@choong @SDF @icm

PLEASE protect the two PLATO terminals. They are incredibly rare and priceless. Get in touch with Aaron Woolfson, who let LCM set up public displays with them but never thought in a million years LCM would shut down.

@icm @choong @SDF

Tell me you can rescue the LCM’s PLATO terminals from the evil clutches of Christie’s and I’ll send you an army of eager supporters

@Gargron

Wow, a band that still hauls around stacks and stacks of guitar and bass amps. Very retro.

@arstechnica

For even more fun, study the huge trailers full of California’s freshly-picked produce, as it gets covered in billowing diesel smoke and particulates from the exhaust pipes of the semi trucks pulling them.

@Gargron @Sarahp

More accurately, thanks to federation, the posts from not one but myriad social networks float by unnoticed in your feed unless you’re online watching like a hawk 24/7 😉

@Mastodon

who are active

@arstechnica

History repeating itself.

Why, I’m old enough to remember when the RIAA sued my then-employer, MP3•com, in 2000–twenty-four long years ago—for exactly the same thing. $67 billion lawsuit I think it was.

Record labels won in the end. Vivendi Universal wound up owning what was left of MP3 after that debacle.

@Gargron @ricmac

Understood. Let’s stipulate that all these facts are accurate.

But I’d postulate that by making search opt-in, search is pretty useless. It has hurt discoverability, and to compensate, put awkward burdens on individual users who stuff their toots with character-count-wasting hashtags in an effort to boost discoverability.

And I’d argue the Network Effect, so crucial to helping social neworks grow and thrive, has been weakened on Mastodon in large part by the search policy.

@Gargron @ricmac

As a user I don't care how search functionality is implemented on the back end. I search, and as a user I get nothing, or very little. All I get is the confidence that Mastodon didn't find what I *know* is out there. And that's because of the policy decisions that were built right into the design and architecture, right into the DNA of Mastodon, decisions which essentially guarantee a disappointing search experience for users, regardless of how beautiful the code is.

@Gargron @ricmac

Put another way:

If I search, I want to search *MASTODON* as in the whole damn thing. Across all instances. With sorting ability--relevance, by date/time, etc.

If there are "blocked" or "hidden" results, I wanna see a count of them as in "Here are 1834 matching results, including 920 redacted results" with an explanation as to why they're redacted, as in, by individual user choice, or by instance policy.

This place needs TRANSPARENCY.

@Gargron @ricmac

Oh, anything? Everything? Like, for example, I see something in the fast-moving river, and ten minutes later I think, I shoulda clicked on that link, and I try to search for it but no, it be gone, gone, gone, down the river and over the digital waterfall.

Search is always the single most consistent, most predictable, disappointment in Mastodon. In fact its lack may be the only disappointment in the overall Mastodon experience since I joined in 2017.

I wish it were not so.

@ricmac

And that is why Mastodon is stuck at 15 million accounts, only a fraction of which are active in any meaningful sense.

The lack of search functionality, blocked by a purist ideology held by another fraction of the user population, may be elegant (in the nerdy Linux sense) but it is an architectural form of pre-crime censorship and control, which has had clear and obvious effects on the “community” and on these so-called “conversations,” turning Mastodon into a fast-moving river.

@eff

Yes, I loved it as a kid. But in the past 20 years, as attention spans have shrunken to flea-size, I can't stand NOVA and refuse to watch it. The editing is rat-a-tat machine-gun style, as in "ooh! look at this! NO! look at this! NO THIS! ahhh hey this! and what about THIS! and check THIS out! did I mention THIS! and THAT! look at THIS! here's something! and more! more! more!" I mean it's effing nuts, as if the show is scared to death someone might aaaaaaagh flip the channel aaaargh 😱😱😱😱

@arstechnica

That does it.

My next band name is UDM 14.

@arstechnica

I’ve been a Netflix customer for 22 long years. I miss their DVDs and Blu-rays. I will never see an ad on Netflix, and the closer they get to mandatory ads with a paid subscription (you’d have to be insane imho), the sooner I get to quitting their service. Ball is in your court Netflix. Whatcha gonna do.