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Is it wrong for people to clog up the federated timeline with uninteresting posts?

#Poll #EvanPoll

  • Strong yes (6%, 36 votes)
  • Qualified yes (12%, 65 votes)
  • Qualified no (26%, 141 votes)
  • Strong no (55%, 301 votes)
543 voters. Poll end: 1 year ago

Evan Prodromou reshared this.

This will be an interesting poll response.

Oops, what a boring post.
Maybe with better tagging (or other types of keyword-based filtering) it would become easier to filter the timeline towards what people are interested of.

Current filtering UI of the Mastodon settings still has a lot of limitations. It would benefit if there would be machine-readable category tags for posts (in addition to hashtags) that would enable filtering without having to broadcast messages with hashtags.
@autiomaa the easy way to filter the timeline is to follow people and groups you are interested in.

The federated timeline is for discovery.
For sure, but if technology lacks ability of only displaying photos from the followed feed, for example, it stays as a copy of early Twitter. More advanced (non-permanent) filters would enable new kinds of UIs.

And don't even get started about how useless federated timeline is on larger instances, as even local timeline on those is unusable.
it seems like this post proves your point.
@VisualStuart which post? Also, I'm asking a question, not making a point.
I was being snarky. I was referring to the post that begins, "Is it wrong for people to clog..."
If you actually do "clog it up" then I guess you're doing a DDOS attack, which is indeed strongly discouraged.

But if you're just being a normal boring person then there is no clogging up going on.

Plenty of room in the timeline, it'll all fit.
If “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, then interesting or un-interesting is up to the reader. Plus not everything posted can be “good”. That would be exhausting..
I don't have enough experience to know, but my impression so far is that the UIs offer too little help dealing with the variety of "bandwidth" emitted by various people. I currently wish my UI (fedilab) could group numerous posts by the same person (especially if they're part of the same thread, but not only) so they don't drown out posts by others
"clog up" ... never biased, are we... 😂

Jeze, it's hard to be neutral.
I think it depends on what you mean by "uninteresting."

I am quite happy to follow @GovTrack that publishes notices throughout the day about the progress of bills in Congress, etc. Others would think such posts are insanely boring.

If I had a bot that posted dozens of earthquake reports each day, that would be uninteresting for most people, but terribly interesting for a small number of folk.

What is boring for one is often considered essential by another.
@bobwyman agreed! De gustibus non est disputandum.

I think the question is more about whether people making personal updates of limited interest, or bots like GovTrack, are obligated to use "followers only" or "unlisted" for their posts, which would keep the posts out of the federated (and local?) timelines on Mastodon instances.
The desire to have useful Local and Federated feeds should not impose constraints on users. Both of those feeds are "algorithmic" even if their algorithms are simple. But, their algorithms could be made more complex. For instance, one might throttle or sample publishing from frequent posters or bots rather than require that frequent posters explicitly tag their posts for the benefit of just two special feeds.
heh. Relevance is a thorny problem in search and social. It's easy to overwhelm a feed. It's hard to sort and filter it for each consumer.
By defn, in Federation we do our own thing. The beauty of it is the sum total of all these vectors is positive. So who am I say what is uninteresting
Please define "uninteresting." It might matter 😀
@shoq it's clearly a subjective definition.

If I were to define all the terms in these polls precisely, then it wouldn't be a poll; it would be a quiz.
@Shoq
Fair point. But maybe we could have "Subjectively yes/no," too? 😀
uninteresting to whom? why would it be wrong for people to post whatever the hell they want?
i ate a homemade frozen burrito for lunch (sorry no picture i ate it)
"uninteresting" is a very subjective metric!
WTF? Are we supposed to ration our shitposts!? What kind of weak sauce Commie website is this!?

I just post whenever I feel like. Not sure if I have been over federating or anything.
I think it's worth considering both intent and quantity here.

If a poster genuinely thinks they are being interesting then they should post. If they are intentionally broadcasting uninteresting posts then I think they should think about why they are doing that.

And as others have said, if you're producing enough quantity to actually clog the timeline and make it unusable for others, then that's a problem no matter how interesting you are.
@skyfaller I agree. Especially automated posts like weather updates or server monitoring should probably be flagged for exclusion from public timelines.
It was timely poll. I was wondering just today what happens when the resources needed to carry the "uninteresting" part of the Fediverse become burdensome or prohibitive. It seems inefficient to federate vast amounts of content that only a tiny audience might ever be interested in. Can users be relied on to delist their own secondary or background content?
Honestly, what that means in consequence to define an interesting or boring post and how to flag it for a federated timeline?

Depending on the sender, the receiver, the time and attention, any post is maybe (un)interesting. And like in quantum physics, at the same time.
@beandev there are some addressing options that let you flag a post as "followers only" or "unlisted" so they won't end up on the federated or local timelines.
Yes, but is an option for the sender, not for the reader/receiver.

I suspect that many authors are convinced not to write anything boring.

However, I follow a lot of accounts with a lock and/or default visibility set to "Unlisted" or "Only followers" and it's ok.

I like the options in our Fediverse. 😊
Hell no, bore me more
interesting is subjective and individual interpretation varies very greatly so no...
I said "qualified no", because what is dreary for one may be fascinating for another, and because muting accounts one finds boring is so easy.
define “uninteresting”

To you? To them? To a majority? To a minority?
@kbsez yes, that's a key question
I saw someone complaining that they had signed up for an instance and that people were posting things unrelated to what the instance was primarily about.

My response was that it is similar to creating a list of people that like a TV show you like. You realize they're not going to exclusively post about it and you either deal or only follow hashtags so you can ignore anything else.

I guess an instance could demand users only speak about one thing but people aren't built that way
@kbsez the federated timeline is, I think, mostly people from *other* timelines, so instance rules wouldn't apply to them anyway.
There you go... it's community and while you can have a #DoctorWho group by searching by Hashtag and that, you have a community that might be made up of folks who love Who but also love other things and have other interests......
The only way that one cd filter out “uninteresting” posts wd be to put a filter on the full Mastodon feed, so one wd only see posts that received X number of likes or boosts.

What I’d rather see is a way to capture just a cupful of that stream. For example, tell my app/browser to show me only the most recent 25 posts from the Fediverse. Then I can actually see a sample of what people post & not struggling to read 1 or 2 posts before hundreds of other posts wash them away.
oh shit, I misread the poll and voted "Strong yes" when I really meant "Strong no". 🤣

Let boredom sing!
@nogweii OK I will correct the mistake when I register these results with The Grand Council of the Fediverse.
Bardzo ciekawe wyniki tej sondy wyżej 👆

Takie, hmm... miłe?🤔

Zagłosujecie?
The "federated" feed is the cloaca of content -- only desperate hate junkies would complain about the taste of the shit they eat there.
If anything, I think it's an opportunity to learn how to use post visibility options more effectively.
By whose definition is a post uninteresting?:*
Some instances do actually have rules or guidelines about threaded posts, such that the first part of what is to be a thread can be public, but the remaining thread should be unlisted, or follower-only. But this isn't universal, it's not a rule on this instance for example.

So, ultimately I'd say it's up to the individual or group who runs an instance to decide what is acceptable on their part of the Fediverse, & thus what makes it onto the federated firehouse (;*
no, it's not wrong, because the mute button on Mastodon comes with a bunch of options. If you get too much of something, you can mute the offender for an hour or so
@blotosmetek I don't even attempt to define uninteresting. Signal-to-noise ratio, on the other hand, has a few at least plausibly objective definitions (Shannon, eg), and is I think fair game.
@sellitman I also hesitated (but participated) for the same lack-of-an-objective-standard reason. Are you asking if I think it's wrong for others to create posts that don't interest me - an arrogant position to take - or posts that are objectively uninteresting - where there is no objective standard? Do I want to read what somebody had for lunch, like everybody used to do in the early days of the bird site? No. But somebody else conceivably could, particularly if close to the poster. Who am I to judge that?
Very interesting! I am a qualified no.

First there's no single "federated timeline". It's a Mastodon feature that lets you eavesdrop on the conversations of other people on your instance.

As such, it's a place for discovery. It's explicitly stuff that you personally haven't subscribed to (yet). It's the feed of posts that aren't interesting to you.
All that said, it is nice for people to be able to explore there, and bulk automated posts probably fill it up and make discovery difficult. So it's probably polite for bots with a lot of repetitive posts to use "follower only" or "unlisted".
Telling human posters that their posts are ruining the federated timeline for you is rude, though. Especially if they are using content warnings so you don't get surprised.

Let people live their lives and post what they want. If you're not interested, scroll past it. If it's really bad, block or mute.

And let's be grateful that people post things about themselves and make it public so we can all learn about it and the world.
Last night, a woman told me she thought you were a "know-it-all" about all things Fediverse. So I asked if she was aware that you co-invented the ActivityPub protocol and probably did know a few things she might want to know about. An hour later, after no response, I discovered that she had blocked me.

::Sigh:: The more things change…
@shoq I don't pretend to know everything. I think we are all making and remaking this place for ourselves again and again. I do like to think about how it could and should work, and I do have some strong opinions on certain parts of the architecture.
@Shoq
I don't think you even come close to that class of person. It never ceases to surprise me how some folks just cannot pass up a chance to take a swipe at any target of opportunity. It was your turn. Not surprised she blocked me. Strappo here nailed it.
@shoq naïve question: I use Toot! I have no idea what the federated timeline is. Should I?
@Shoq
@gretared@shoq it's not that important. Toot! is a single-user server, right? So not really pertinent.
Toot! is an iOS app.

Not 100% on the UI as I have multiple instances set up in it, but in the lower right is a bubble for my instance and once there I can choose between its local and federated timeline:
my indieweb.social instance’s “bubble” in the lowe right of my Toot! interface
my federated timeline via Toot!
switcher showing choice of default local timeline (all posted on this server) or federated timeline (all received by this server)
@shoq Well at least she modified her feed and didn’t ask you to change.
@Shoq
Hm, this poll reached me in a "closed" state, but must confess I'm pulled toward "strong yes," based mostly on my recent test driving of #Friendica. The Friendica space does seem to me high in spam accounts, seotext blablabla accounts, media-outlet-unofficial mirrors, and other low-effort accounts. Finding conversation there (esp. in languages that are not German) is like finding a needle in a haystack.
@n8chz that's too bad. I am on a family instance of Mastodon where I am the primary user, so I don't ever check the public timelines here.

I'm not a big believer in them anyway. They were a major pain in the ass for GNU Social and I left them out of pump.io entirely.
I occasionally visit federated timeline, but I don't find it particularly useful -on average-, but there are a few people I've found that way I probably other wise wouldn't have, so I'll probably keep peeking at it from time to time. As for Friendica, I don't think there is as strong an antispam culture there.
I've been told for years that my posts on other platforms are uninteresting, useless, and unwanted. No wonder I have problems.
When you said "uninteresting" it never even occurred to me that you might mean bots. I still would rather not restrict that. I choose to follow a number of bots that post useful information. And I use that mute button lavishly on both people and bots that I don't enjoy.
when I was on a larger instance I found it not very interesting at all. On the smaller ones I use I find it much more interesting and useful but it can also be very slow. I wonder if there’s a sort of medium sized server sweet spot.
a federated timeline is like looking at the matrix
I did not see that you're a qualified no on clogging people's timelines because I filtered the semantically well labeled clogging you do 😅

So keep on clogging and tell people to learn filters ....
@rose@sellitman so, clearly you've taken the spirit of the poll to heart by thinking through the question in its different aspect.

I'm sorry the fun of the game isn't working for you. Deciding how to vote based on how you answer those tough questions is the last step.
irrelevant to the post but i’m curious why your poll results are never fetched to my instance, so it always looks like either only I voted or no one voted at all
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
Darnit. I'm going to have to start paying closer attention. I gave this a lot of thought and then after the poll closed I noticed the word "federated". Both my vote and my earlier comment were based on whether it's wrong for people to clog up my home timeline.

I should have been a Strong No but I voted Qualified No.

I'm sorry. I keep on changing my mind or realizing I misunderstood the question after your polls close.
@markusl I'm pretty much in agreement with you, but I called it a Qualified No. By default, people shouldn't have to worry about the purity of the public timeline.
I don't watch the federated timeline b/c it's too fast for my taste but I def watch the local timeline and it's great for discovery. Sometimes those discoveries are not-so-great but that's called "the internet"
@jph you're not alone; a couple of other people said they didn't like "clog".

I was trying to capture the feeling of a feed that has too much stuff that I don't want to read.

I thought about "pollute" but that made me think about graphic violence or other really terrible things.

"Fill up" doesn't work very well, since a feed can't get full. It's always moving!

Any suggestions?
@jph
yeah I get the sentiment and it’s definitely hard to come up with something that doesn’t feel overly negative. I probably would have gone with “fill up” myself but you have a good point there. Flood maybe? 🤔 Tricky one for sure.
@jph "flood" is really good!
@jph
hard nope and i had to read several times to understand if this was even a real question. Like... Complaining about spam and marketing i understand but other than that, just what? Scroll on, friend.
@schock yes, I've seen comments to this effect, and I've had people tell me that my boring posts were making their federated timeline experience less enjoyable 😞