Notices by Derek Powazek 🐐 (fraying@xoxo.zone), page 2

I remember when I was working at Technorati, the first and best blog search engine, and Google announced it was going to do blog search. We said something very similar to this:

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/110001525647048508

"We don't do that here" is one of the best community management phrases and it's even more powerful when used by a fellow community member.

#Community #CommunityManagement

A core problem with Mastodon is that we tell new users "choose your instance wisely" but there's absolutely no way a user could have foreseen that their instance would get too big for the owner to manage and he'd just shut it down one day.

It's just very bad design to ask a user to do something that they literally cannot do, and this is the first thing we ask of new users. "Choose wisely!" Okay, what does that mean? How do I do that? "Choose wisely!"

When people talk about how alienating getting started on Mastodon is, this is a big part of it.

Huh. Progress.

Mastodon's (Eugen's) opposition to quote posts made sense in response to Twitter's toxicity in 2018, but it was always frankly naive to blame social problems on a user interface. Every problem you can blame on QTs you can say just as easily about any social tool. That's why we have admins, moderators, and guidelines. Social content is always first and foremost a social problem that we build supporting tools around, but the tools don't create behavior - observed behavior begets behavior.

For one thing, if we had quote posts, I could have said that without resorting to a screenshot, which would be a lot better for accessibility.

Before anyone gets all up in my mentions (too late), there's a WORLD of options besides "everybody can quote anything" and "nobody can quote nothing" and you're already soaking in it. Mastodon ALREADY has a global user opt-out for search and several per-post privacy settings. We could do the same for quote privileges. Or maybe only mutuals could quote you? Or maybe you could withdraw consent to be quoted when it happens. There are SO MANY OPTIONS. Don't assume how it would go based on Twitter.