Cory Doctorow: "How To Make the Least-Worst #M…" - Mamot - Le Mastodon de La Quadrature du Net

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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

How To Make the Least-Worst #MastodonThreads: (An opinionated guide) (for the perplexed)

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31

The mastodon mascot tangled in a snarl of thread.

Eugen Rotchko, AGPL, modified Apr 15 2023

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mastodon_Mascot.png

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

Apr 16, 2023, 03:58 PM··Web

87boosts·83favorites

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#Twitter is a malevolent dictatorship, #Mastodon is a protocol, not a product.

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31

Twitter is a neat illustration of the problem with benevolent dictatorships: they work well, but fail badly. Because they are property — not protocols — they can change hands, and overnight, you get a new, malevolent dictator who wants to retool the system for extraction, rather than collaboration.

By contrast, ActivityPub-derived services like Mastodon are open protocols. Users who want new features, or changes to existing ones, can either unilaterally implement them (if they have technical skills or capital to hire technicians); or they can appeal to others to implement them.

This is clearly still a two-tier system. People with skills or capital can make the changes they want, while people lacking both have to appeal to others to take up their cause.

But whatever the defects in this system, it is still vastly superior to the way Twitter works, both pre- and post-Musk. In the pre-Musk era, users could only make changes by appealing to a largely benevolent — but thin-stretched, opaque and inconstant — dictator. In the post-Musk era, users can only make changes by appealing to a dictator who is thin-stretched, inconstant and opaque — and malevolent.

Contrast this with Mastodon and other ActivityPub-derived systems: users have the option of directly implementing the features they desire (by their own hands or by hiring technicians). But they also have a whole constellation of people to appeal to if they desire a change they can’t make on their own — anyone with the technica

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

The problem with #MastodonThreads

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31

If you follow someone who posts long threads, this presents a problem. Threads show up in your timeline out-of-order, crowded amongst the “conversational” posts made or “boosted” (Mastodonese for “retweeted”) by the other people you follow.

This is a direct consequence of the lack of a built-in Mastodon threading system. There are lots of potential ways to handle Mastodon threads that would allow them to more peacefully co-exist with other kinds of Mastodon content — for example, any time a client identifies two or more consecutive replies from a user to themself, it could “collapse” them into a post that has a little arrow to “unroll” the thread.

I am a threader. I’ve been posting threads to Mastodon almost since its inception, and over that half-decade, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing, disputing and experimenting with ways to post threads to make life easier for people who read threads.

I have concluded that the best approach is to use content warnings to tag threads.

Every Mastodon post can be labelled with a “content warning” that causes it to be “collapsed” to a short headline (e.g. “Long thread /3”).

Using content warnings for each post in a thread reduces the amount of vertical space it takes up, and thus the number of other kinds of post it displaces.

This approach also lets readers make use of Mastodon’s built in filters: users can create filters that hide posts that include the phrase “Long thread /”

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

How to read #MastodonThreads:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31

Here are some tips for being a better reader of Mastodon threads:

Put threads in order with one click: Posts from a thread show up out of order in your timeline, which is confusing! But clicking any of those posts will switch to a properly ordered view of the thread.
Expand every post in a thread with one click: A thread that uses content warnings will show up in your timeline as a series of one-line headers (“Long thread /1,” “Long thread /2,” … “Long thread/n”), and any graphics associated with them will be rendered as blank rectangles. This is by design. To expand all of these posts with a single click and unmask their graphics, just click the little “eye” icon in the top right corner of your screen.

Image

Unfollow and switch to another feed: Mastodon doesn’t have algorithmic boosting. The only posts you’ll see in your home timeline are posted or boosted by people you explicitly follow. If you don’t like Mastodon threads, consider unfollowing users who post them. No one is obliged to read anyone else’s feed! This is especially good advice if the person you’ve followed offers their threads in another medium, like a blog with RSS. Just switch from following them on Mastodon to following them via RSS.
Use lists and filters: If you want to follow someone who posts threads, you can filter out those threads (provided they use consistent content warning labels), and follow thread-based accounts via a list.

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic

#Mastodon unlisting doesn't work the way you think it does. Really.

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads-daa33943ac31

Here’s what unlisting doesn’t do: it doesn’t hide the posts you make from the people who follow you. A writer can’t make threads “collapse” for their readers by publishing an initial post and then unlisting the subsequent posts. It would be fantastic if this was the case, but it’s not.

This misunderstanding about how unlisting works is so prevalent among Mastodon users that it might just be the first urban legend of the Fediverse. There are even beginners’ guides for new Mastodon users that repeat this misunderstanding and insist that unlisting your threaded posts is a considerate thing to do.

That’s just wrong. What’s more, it’s counterproductive, because hashtags in unlisted posts are also hidden. Remember, by design, Mastodon doesn’t have a search function — instead the way you include a post in the federated discussion of a topic is by opting in with a hashtag.

Unlisting the posts in a thread won’t make your thread less intrusive for your readers — but it will rip the hashtags you include out of the public discourse, even though you’ve followed the Fediverse’s best practice for making them a part of that discourse.

Perhaps someone with the capital or technical know-how will make the technical changes needed to make unlisting work the way that everyone intuitively assumes it works (maybe this post will even contribute to that decision). But until and unless someone does, unlisting doesn’t work the way you think it does.

Really.

@pluralistic I was wondering why you used content warning. This makes sense !

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