so mastodon apparently did a survey back in may. some of the results are Quite Predictable

things i haven't written about and can't point to but otherwise agree:
- people want reply controls
- search sucks. you can't find anyone
- people blame this fully on federation limits and opt-in discoverability
- i personally would also add hashtag-spam making it taboo to post with tags (this part i did write about), so even if there is a community you can reach it's not as visible
- followers-only sucks and people surveyed would prefer the visibility to be coherent even if it's something simple like sharing the root post's visibility
- people want circles
- people want groups but not necesarily something separate like subreddits
- people don't like mentioned-only as a visibility and want "proper" DMs

extra context. idk yet if mastodon themselves has a post i can boost or something i got these pdfs from the sharkey discord lmao

ah there it is

mastodon.social/@Mastodon/117043346514398510

i do also wonder if a big part of "search sucks" is that there just flat out isn't anyone here (in relative terms) that doesn't post the same 10 topics

would be quite difficult to search through something that doesn't exist

@kopper

• followers-only sucks and people surveyed would prefer the visibility to be coherent even if it’s something simple like sharing the root post’s visibility

the activitypub spec mentions this problem and provides a solution (replies to follower-only posts should be sent to the followers of the original poster, which requires the original poster’s server to forward such replies). I don’t understand why nobody does this.

• people don’t like mentioned-only as a visibility and want “proper” DMs

what’s the difference between “proper” DMs and mentioned-only visibility? the only thing I can think if is that “proper” DMs are actually p2p (like DCC on IRC), but hardly any protocol has this

the people on the appendix yearn for the emoji reactions. except the one weirdo who calls them "meta/linkedin data collection vibes". what the percentage this guy calls it gnu/linux

why a re you here bro go back to irc

@noisytoot

what’s the difference between “proper” DMs and mentioned-only visibility?

the user experience, which is the whole point of this survey

@kopper I think this comes from a good place but mastodon probably isn't the place to teach this

@noisytoot @kopper the point isn't the spec, the survey was a UX survey and "proper" DMs refers to direct messages with a chat interface, instead of a post one

doesn't mean mention-only posts aren't useful sometimes, but it's not what people expect when they press "Direct Message" in the sidebar.

@alexia @kopper I'm not sure what mastodon's interface for DMs looks like but akkoma's new-ish "conversations" interface (which contains a list of all DM conversations grouped by thread) is certainly better than the old DM timeline that just includes all DMs in chronological order

@noisytoot @kopper Yeah, all DMs in chronological order is AFAIK what Mastodon (and most fedi software) currently does. Some might try to make it a bit better by grouping it per-thread, but in the end all of them are just...posts. They're not "Messages" as they've been traditionally understood for the past 25 years, they're posts. And that is what people are saying they don't like about Mastodon's current interface in the survey.

I for one am very much in support of improving "Direct Message" functionality, or perhaps making new functionality that is tailor-made for messaging that can live alongside mentioned-only posts.

@alexia @kopper pleroma has "chats", which I think are something like that (although I've never used them), and which akkoma for some reason removed