Here's an example of a feature request that the fediverse could give me but corporate social media probably never will.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Cory Doctorow AFK TIL MID-SEPT last edited by
@pluralistic sort of. The implementation I'm describing would be different. But it's hard to describe why.
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Yeah lots of people asking about muting. I'm also envisioning something that's different from muting. But I'm not exactly sure how to describe it. Or maybe I'm just describing a different way to implement muting.
So for example, Twitter settled on something I liked for DMs. You have two separate inboxes. One of approved people, and the other is "message requests". People who are trying to reach you, but you can ignore them if you want.
https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/113155129934897924 -
The thing is, I appreciate that there's a set of people who have been following for a long time and seem to get a lot out of what I post. They're free to do so. Some of those people like to argue with me because they disagree with something I said. Also fine. But for some people, I get to a point where I realize we're just not gonna see eye to eye and it's probably best for both of us if we skip it. I don't want to invisibilize them. But I also don't want them to take up so much of my attention.
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This is something twitter never really took seriously. Or more fair to say they only took it seriously for celebrity or "noteworthy" accounts. Once you get to a certain follower count, your needs as a user change quite a bit. You need more tools to manage who gets access to your attention.
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In hindsight, this post was probably weird to a lot of people. I probably should've acknowledged muting, because of course I know it exists. But I literally didn't think about it. It doesn't do what I want, so I mostly don't have a relationship with muting as a feature.
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@polotek So something like a timeline view where you can only see the posts from a person or from people you've muted, but they're otherwise hidden from you?
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@polotek maybe like an "ignore" setting? As opposed to a mute, you'd still be able to see their replies, but you wouldn't be notified when they did. Could even combine this with the DM inbox split you're recalling and have two threads of responses: one regular thread, and a tab to switch to "Other responses" or whatever. People on "ignore" would automatically go in the latter thread.
Hm, I actually really like this idea even though I don't get many responses. It feels elegant.
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@polotek That's possibly not a bad feature to be implemented, it no clients have done it yet: it'd let you reassess the people you've muted to see if they can come off the list, or need outright blocking.
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Kat MarchĂĄn đreplied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek oooooooh I think I see what youâre getting at. I wonder if you can use filters for this: you put in the userâs handle and the Mastodon UI will show that they replied, but itâll just say âfiltered post: from â, and you wonât see the content and are free to skip it
But if for some reason you want to engage, you can always do that, and youâll always know whether theyâre engaging in the first place
But idk if you can filter poster usernames like that. It would be really handy if it could and I wonder if thatâs closer to what youâre looking for?
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@doctorLURK yeah the more I think about it, maybe all I really want is to put people in a different space in the UI. So I can go into it occasionally and just be like "oh, that guy. No thanks."
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@JonnyT the people I'm thinking of never warrant blocking. Their heart is in the right place. They just have a communication style that I personally find to be untenable.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Kat MarchĂĄn đ last edited by
@zkat yeah talking this through is helping to solidify why I feel like what I want is different from muting.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113155245560224812 -
@zkat another thing I want to try out is taking a specific reply and marking it as "don't reply all". Like that person is gonna keep hitting reply, but make it so they are only doing direct responses. Basically when I ask people to drop me from the thread. But they either don't know how to do that or don't want to be bothered because reply all is the default.
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This is probably a better example of a power user feature. Most of the time it's okay the "reply all" is the default. But sometimes it's really not okay and I want it to stop.
Sometimes you can do "mute this conversation". But that feature doesn't really make it clear to me how much I'll be missing. If it's a thread I started (e.g. I'm the OP), I'm not sure what it is I'll be cutting off. I want a more targeted way to prevent a specific person from hitting reply all.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113155283425524521 -
@polotek @pluralistic are you looking to mute only their replies to your posts, but not their initial posts?
Are you looking to avoid seeing the subtree of their replies and then the backscatter of your audience engaging with them?
I'll admit that I was a bit confused by the feature request as well. I could also see you saying "collate all these replies last and don't notify me on them".
The problem sounds interesting, though it's not one that I have. (Or maybe it's a problem that I am!)