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Hashtags didn't start out as a software feature on Twitter.

@chrismessina proposed their use, and for a long time, they were just a cultural norm.

It was months later that Twitter engineers turned them into links that went to a search result screen.

Same thing with @-addressing. It was a practice for blog comments that came over to Twitter, but there was a long time that there were no affordances in the UI to support them.

Same with retweets. People starting using "RT", and it took off.
@Chris Messina
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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You and I and everyone here are part of the first 10 million people on the fediverse.

We are setting the cultural and technical norms for the next few decades.

So if there's something you wish Mastodon did, or ActivityPub did, just start acting like it already exists.

If enough people want it or need it, it will get added by the software and protocols later.

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Bob Kopp
Bob Kopp  
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One thing I see missing (having only been here a couple weeks) is governance guidance for instances on par with the technical instructions for setting up an instance. I’m sure there are others, but other than social.coop, I haven’t seen instances with clear bylaws and governance structures — implicitly, I assume most instances are run as benevolent dictatorships by their admins. It’d be good for transparent governance structures to become a norm.
MEMEXIKON
MEMEXIKON  
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I want someway to interact with affinity groups, the hashtags just isn’t functional to use that way. But how to act like it already exists…
MidgePhoto
MidgePhoto  
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act as if these are the early days of a better country.
ebalder
ebalder  
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manifesting federated live streaming support 🧘‍♀️
wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂  
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while I agree with your underlying message there are issues that really really need to get addressed at a level that you can't just act like they exist, and thats safety tools for people who are just joining here for the first time and don't already have a support structure. I have been looking through the posts of many black and indigenous people and its pretty damming what this place looks like for them when they first come in.
vruz
vruz  
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@liaizon
I've seen a lot of complaints about the inconvenience of the federated architecture and how its design philosophy doesn't match the aspirations of certain specific African American groups, but I have not seen a shred of evidence that anyone is being deliberately or unwittingly marginalised, rejected, segregated, or disrespected by the Fediverse at large. Sure disgusting racists exist everywhere in the world, and we do our best to kick them out.

@evan
@wakest ⁂ @Evan Prodromou
vruz
vruz  
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That's really bad, and I have talked with Tom before and at the time he seemed to be happy. It's very unfortunate that some people haven't done their best. I wasn't referring to Tom when I posted that above.

Have these offending instances been defederated by the most popular instances, or is there a project to exchange red alerts?

@liaizon
@wakest ⁂
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@vruz@liaizon That's several questions.

I made myself go through those photos once and I don't want to do it again.

I will say, that I've had 4 racist, homophobic, or transphobic attacks show up in my replies, from 3 domains.

All 3 were on the Rapidblock blocklist.

So, using that blocklist out of the box would have kept me from having to read some pretty nasty stuff.

Rapidblock seems like a good project. There may be others.

https://rapidblock.org/

The RapidBlock Project — Home

Home of the RapidBlock Project for sharing blocklists of bad actors on the Fediverse.
The RapidBlock Project
@wakest ⁂ @vruz
vruz
vruz  
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Something like Rapidblock should be in the Mastodon Admin Intro before starting an instance. You can't be policing every new instance that is started, but there should be a mechanism for already-existing and already-federated instances to ensure that a newly started instance is observing some minimal recommendations before it is allowed to federate.

@liaizon
@wakest ⁂
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@liaizon this post is more about textual practices like QTs and boosting than about user safety.
@wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂
wakest ⁂  
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I understand the intent and I mostly agree. But you also have an elevated voice here being the grandfather of this place, a lot of people look up to you and if you go out of your way to promote marginalized voices in your calls to action it will have way more impact then most...
vruz
vruz  
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The Fediverse is a playground and everyone is invited to play and build their own thing.

For battlegrounds, other places exist.
Dave Winer ☕️
Dave Winer ☕️  
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I was Mastodon to push the envelope in what a Document means, not only here and federated sites, but everywhere people write on the web.

http://this.how/whatIsADocument/

What is a document?

A plea for interop at the document level.
this.how
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@davew that's an important one! I'll review for the ActivityPub network to see how well we match the requirements.
@Dave Winer ☕️
Josh Gay
Josh Gay  
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@davew i think from a standardization POV, it would be good to reach out to Adam Hyde and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation as well as @metasj and the Knowledge Futures Group to see if they might participate, give feedback, or suggestions.

Either way, fun thread! Thanks
@Dave Winer ☕️ @metasj
Shoq
Shoq  
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For today .I just want people to stop focusing it all on"Mastodon." It's misleading. It's sorta like saying "I love Pizza Hut" when they just mean pizza :)
katejjeffery
katejjeffery  
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Quote tweets 😂 (or whatever we’d call them). Unpopular opinion I know
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@katejjeffery right. The trick here is, if you really want quote tweets, start using them here.

Just copy a link to what you want to QT and include that link. That's how QTs are implemented on Twitter!
@katejjeffery
Olm-e
Olm-e  
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and hopefully this will be true for the future, with the network adapting to usages in a continuous matter ;)

long live the #fediverse 😁
#fediverse
Lien Rag
Lien Rag  
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Well, it's a tad problematic the way you say it, actually.
On twitter things came to be because twitter wanted to make money out of it, so basically they were throwing crumbs to the golden goose.
This is certainly a good model for the Fediverse (nor for anything, actually).

Yes everybody's equal in FOSS (well, at least theoritically), but saying "wish something and it will magically appear" is probably not the right vibe.

1/2
ChuffMeister
ChuffMeister  
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dictation of visual discriptions
🏔️ ꜱᴇᴀɴ ᴡ.
🏔️ ꜱᴇᴀɴ ᴡ.  
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If we really wanted to do some interesting things, someone should ping Ted Nelson.
Emmanuel Revah
Emmanuel Revah  
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One thing that really bugs me, is the fact that I will not see most of the replies or likes.

I can click on "original page" and read all the replies, copy the link back to my instance to interact with a toot-reply. Also, sometimes I want to check the thread to avoid replying something that has already been said.

I'm at the point where I think about migrating my account from my personal instance to a bigger one - which defeats the philosophy.

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@manu I agree. One way to make do is for the OP to boost replies.
@Emmanuel Revah
Paul Jacobson
Paul Jacobson  
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@manu is this where relays could be helpful? I'm curious if that is a possible solution even though relays seem to dramatically increase resource requirements.
@Emmanuel Revah

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸  
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@manu this sounds like something a client could do for you, making that nav to original server and back and connected that state much easier. I already see some mastidon web uis have improved means to do this, perhaps tracking your initial referrer to construct the links back to your instance
@Emmanuel Revah
Brian Hawthorne
Brian Hawthorne  
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@craigbro @manu
I use mobile apps on iOS (Currently, Mammoth) to interact with Mastodon. The only time I have ever used (or seen) the Mastodon web UI is when someone pastes in a link to a post, and following that link feels just as foreign as following a link to TikTok or Facebook. Suddenly, my beautiful Mastodon experience looks horrible. So, I don’t follow those links.
I won’t get into my personal feelings about the idea of forking conversations.
@Emmanuel Revah @Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
Aswath Rao 🪷
Aswath Rao 🪷  
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@craigbro @manu why not do this for all the posts? This has the added benefit of freeing the burden of moderating externally published posts?
@Emmanuel Revah @Craig Brozefsky 🇵🇸
jph
jph  
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@manu most things seem to work better on a small instance but this is a pretty significant source of friction. I think some clients handle it better but it’s hard to tell.
@Emmanuel Revah
Extinction
Extinction  
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can we manifest a dev culture that seeks out user feedback, makes their choices transparent, and puts dev progress, timelines and results in places everyone has access to, including admins fielding questions and wishes from their instance?
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@aka_quant_noir I don't think you're understanding the point. Don't depend on the devs. Make what you need yourself. Devs will follow.
@Extinction
Martin Vermeer FCD
Martin Vermeer FCD  
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One thing I would like, is a way to not forget to add hashtags. It's one of the few ways to make a post discoverable, and I - like, I think, almost everyone - always forget them. It should be possible the have an AI routine scan a post and propose a few plausible hashtags, right? Optional, of course, and the proposed list should be editable.

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@martinvermeer sure, or you could write a Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey script to check your post before sending.
@Martin Vermeer FCD
Martin Vermeer FCD
Martin Vermeer FCD  
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That would be a start. There is already an account that checks for missing alt texts.
acroll
acroll  
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paving the cowpaths is the way.

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

coldclimate
coldclimate  
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"be the change you want to see" is such a powerful thing in so many different contexts
John Manoogian III
John Manoogian III  
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well said! I love this about open source / open culture
(((o))) Acoustic Mirror
(((o))) Acoustic Mirror  
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I want a feature that

a) Locates anyone posting images without alt text description in your TL/scope on Mastodon.

b) Blocks them for you

c) Closes down their Mastodon accounts.

d) Opens an Instagram account for them, and signs them up for a business account with Meta.

e) Skins the app to make it look like they're still on Mastodon.

I'll be lobbying for this feature.
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@johnefrancis I don't know what you're talking about, and it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm saying.
@John Francis
Natya Bouman
Natya Bouman  
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I remember with RT that is was polite to not use all the letters of a tweet so there would be enough space for the letters "RT".
Simon Lucy
Simon Lucy  
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Same with QT it was a user affordance because links just work. You don't have to label it QT or anything and it doesn't need UI.
Mark Gardner
Mark Gardner  
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That’s what I’m doing with quoted retweets like this one: linking to posts until it becomes a normal thing. Of course, this is a quoted retweet of the post I’m replying to, so it’s a bit of a loop 😊 https://prodromou.pub/@evan/109406030513239085

Evan Prodromou (@evan@prodromou.pub)

Hashtags didn't start out as a software feature on Twitter. @chrismessina@mastodon.xyz proposed their use, and for a long time, they were just a cultural norm.
Mastodon
Bobby
Bobby  
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Fascinating how user behaviours so often drive the features of a product.
Bert
Bert  
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how quickly we forget.
Tane Piper
Tane Piper  
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if I remember there was even a discussion around $ Vs #? I certainly remember starting to use them along with Twitpic
Shane Joseph 🐘
Shane Joseph 🐘  
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those bottom-up style of feature development is definitely what's been missing lately

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou  
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@gmc I respect the conclusion even if your premise is counterfactual.

One starting point people give for the fediverse is the first post I made on identi.ca in 2008.
@Koen Martens
lori
lori  
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people who weren't on Twitter in the first few years have no idea how many features they see as basic weren't there. I definitely remember the days of manual RTs
Les Orchard
Les Orchard  
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heck, you used to not be able to attach images or videos to tweets. A few dozen services for that sprung up to accept uploads and offer paste-in links, before twitter formalized it as a feature

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Karen E. Lund 💙💛
Karen E. Lund 💙💛  
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Hashtags and @-mentions were already a thing when I joined Twitter (2010), but I remember copy-pasting the content of a tweet and adding "RT" at the beginning with the original tweeter's name to "retweet."

We also had MT, for modified tweet, which was an edited RT--usually to shorten it a bit because the character limit was still only 140.

Ah! The good old days! When we handcrafted our RTs and everybody agreed that Nazis were bad.
Chris Messina
Chris Messina  
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actually, Twitter resisted hashtags for a long time. It was only when they acquired Summize that, like a Trojan Horse, hashtags found native support from the first party platform.

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

Kingsley Uyi Idehen
Kingsley Uyi Idehen  
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The degree to which #Web20 companies sought to colonize the #Web never seizes to amaze me.

A hashtag is the fundamental unit of Web Magic, once understood. Basically, name things using hyperlinks (ideally, #HTTP variety) and connectivity magic happens, at Web-scale.

The #Fediverse itself is the latest demonstration of said magic, courtesy of #ActivityStreams 😀

#Web30 #SocialMedia #LinkedData #SemanticWeb
#fediverse #socialmedia #web #activitystreams #linkeddata #web20 #http #web30 #semanticweb
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