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Mastodon is about to launch its take on Bluesky’s starter packs (www.theverge.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 7 months ago (13 children)

My issue with starter packs is I don’t want to commit. What if I pick the wrong one? What if I pick the wrong one instance!?

The anxiety of picking the wrong instance is a design failure. Content discovery shouldn’t depend on getting that choice right.

The fediverse needs a better content discovery/curation infrastructure.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (9 children)

    It's actually a messaging failure, because picking "the wrong instance" is practically impossible. It really doesn't matter what instance you're in, since that's not what limits or expands your available content.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Mastodon servers can have different character limits and other customizations, but migrating is supposedly easy so you got that quite right. In Lemmy though there is a ”local” feature where you can easily browse content in your own server. I never use it but I guess it could be useful for some communities.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    There's a "local" feed on Mastodon, too, but it's not very well signposted.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Gargron (the Masto lead dev)'s been trying to kill it because he doesn't want us to have nice things.

    -- Frost

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Wow was that really it?

    My understanding is he's the Potterying of the Fediverse. Trying to enshittify things in advance and somesuch, presumably to launch some sort of IPO? Heard a lot of drama re stuff like quote posts, or the suppression of "toot".

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago*

    Yeah, that sounds about right. I doubt there's any sort of IPO involved, and I don't think he's malicious, he just looks at the big tech stuff and goes "I want Mastodon to be like that!" without really giving much thought to why it's not.

    "he doesn't want us to have nice things" was kinda facetious, a "this is why we can't have nice things" type thing. :3

    -- Frost

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I am just saying some of the things I have heard. People don’t want the cognitive overhead of having to make decisions before trying a thing. They just wanna sign up and look around get a feel for something before deciding to dive in.

    Mastodon in particular has a steep onboarding process. In order to get it useful you have too

    • Sign up for an instance (which they have to find)
    • search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.

    There isn’t an easy way to stumble into new things. I found it tedious and others I have spoken with have said the same. I suppose Mastodon isn’t for me (hence why I am here).

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago*

    I think there is a misunderstanding on what a starter pack means here because it literally tries to help with this point:

    search for people to follow when people are thinking in topics.

    There is no way to pick a wrong starter pack because you can pick whatever you want, one pack, two packs, cero packs.

    It's just a list of accounts that you can follow in bulk

    edit: well looks like you won't be able to have a 'follow all' button on mastodon but its the same idea

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Aren't most instances connected and can't you search all those instances for accounts you'd want to follow?

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    I don’t already know who I want to follow though. What do I search for?

    BTW these are things I have actually discussed with people when they are trying to look into fediverse stuff. They don’t want to know how it works. They just want to open up their devices and turn their brains off.

    Which is probably a good thing for federated services as it filters out a bunch of people we probably don’t want here. It’s like a test to join.

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