(2023-04-30) Kissane Blue Skies Over Mastodon

Erin Kissane: Blue Skies Over Mastodon. In the early 80s, my mom worked a couple shifts a month at a little small-town food co-op that smelled like nutritional mummy.

the community of scorn for people who were lured into eating junk food when they could be eschewing seasonings until they could properly enjoy the glories of gelled millet or whatever

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few months on Mastodon and especially this week, as I hung out observing the pupal stage of Bluesky.

Lots of people joined the Bluesky beta and posted about why it worked better for them than Mastodon did. A big chunk of Mastodon responded with a social immune response intended to both warn people away from Bluesky for a very long list of reasons

I have a suspicion that a lot of the defensive maneuvering on Mastodon is happening because Mastodon fans know that the network absolutely cannot compete on user friendliness and basic social functionality, so they’re leaning hard into the things it does get right

During the big waves of Twitter-to-Mastodon migrations, tons of people joined little local servers with no defederation policy and were instantly overwhelmed with gore and identity-based hate

For people who lucked out and landed on a well-moderated instance, finding fun people to follow was hard and actually following each of them often involved three separate steps, depending on which link you happened to click.

Over on Bluesky, by contrast, once you’re in the beta, it’s super easy to sign up, find people, follow them, and participate in conversations.

Mastodon developers could have made a project of interviewing people who wanted to leave Twitter and then building their needs as a roadmap. Writers and designers could make a great brief visual + textual guide to a few fun, tightly moderated instances to join. Or the team could have taken any of dozens of other suggestions for steamlining. None of that happened.

I have absolutely zero fortune-telling to offer re: Bluesky

there are absolutely people trying to do the work, but they’re dependent on the choke-point of what Mastodon-the-company decides is valuable. (Almost like something…centralized?)

I know “product design” is super-capitalist phrasing, but I want to invoke the idea of something made explicitly to be appealing, not just nutritious.

great product design is always holistic: Always working in relation to a whole system of interconnected parts, never concerned only with atomic decisions.

This doesn’t mean that I think Mastodon should necessarily implement full-text search or the whole set of interlocking patterns that constitute Twitter-style quote posts. But particularly given the third-party pressure on both search and quote posts, I think it’s way past time to do full-scale user research and design work on ways to integrate some kinds of search and quotation in some places and in ways that preserve privacy, safety, and autonomy.

And to handle the whole nested doll of problems related to sign-up, discovery, and following, for starters.