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Turns out Donald Trump isn't the only world leader with a tech billionaire "first buddy" who gets to serve as an unaccountable, self-interested de facto business regulator. UK PM Keir Starmer has just handed the keys to the British economy over to Jeff Bezos.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
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While intuitively it seems like this is how "unlisted" works, I assure you, that is not how it works, You've been given misinformation so pervasive that it constitutes the fediverse's first urban legend.
Here's an explanation of how unlisted works, how threading works, and how to manage threads in your timeline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
@pluralistic @Difficile Since I believed the legend until just now, I'm gonna screenshot the relevant paragraph from that post:
@jef @pluralistic @Difficile thanks for this! I also got the wrong idea. In my case from the (otherwise fantastic) guide on mastodon threads by @FediTips - maybe it could be corrected there?
#feditps
@skatan @jef @pluralistic @Difficile
I didn't write that it hid it from people who followed you, I wrote that it hides it from public timelines like Local and Federated and hides it from searches and followed hashtags:
https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon/
The reason it's polite to use unlisted for replies in a thread is to stop filling Local, Federated and search results with massive numbers of posts from the same thread, especially as search results are shown in chronological order.
@pluralistic @FediTips @skatan @jef @Difficile
"Remember, by design Mastodon doesn't have a search function"
That's...not entirely true. Mastodon does, but requires you to enable ElasticSearch (or OpenSearch) on your instance for it to work.
Full-text search of your own posts is enabled for all of your posts when this is turned on for the instance. In addition, you can also full-text search any post from anyone so long as you've marked it in some way: bookmark, favorite, boost.
Lastly, Mastodon added a feature where you can opt-in your Public posts to full-text search as well. This will let people full-text search your Public posts, if you've opted in, whether they've interacted with the post or not.
Just to flesh out the picture there a bit.
@pluralistic @FediTips @skatan @jef @Difficile Incidentally, Unlisted hashtags serve a different purpose, I find:
It becomes a directory to those hashtags, rather than included in searches as part of the directory itself.
@pluralistic @skatan @jef @Difficile
It's your call what you want to do, I'm just trying to keep people aware of how this place works.
If you use public for all your posts, your posts will all show up in search results. Because search results appear in chronological order, lots of public posts back to back with similar search terms and/or hashtags could swamp results.
There is a search function on Mastodon, it requires opt-in to be indexed but not to see results:
https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-opt-into-or-out-of-full-text-search-on-mastodon
@FediTips @pluralistic @jef @Difficile sorry for misquoting you!
I guess there are good arguments for both practices then and it's pretty much up to taste then...