Relaxing treatment of non-notes by Mastodon
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@julian I recently got interested in building topic-first discovery of content/conversations (Slack/Discord-like groupchat rather than "microblogging" which emphasizes recency and user identity). I ended up relying on Mastodon's hashtags (which users can already subscribe/follow), and elevating them in the user interface (a Slack-like sidebar which lists user's followed hashtags). But this bakes in certain expectations about topics/hashtags - how permanent and universal they are. Forking out a subset of the conversations into a new "topic" raises so many questions. "Topics" really is a big can of worms.
Another frustration I ran into with Zulip requiring a "topic" for every new thread was, how much user friction it introduces. Discord solved it by automatically inferring a topic or thread title whenever a thread is created. Would like to see more of this (more organized content, without burdening the user but still allowing them to re-organize).
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@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle Our primary view for longform content (articles) is an inbox/reader list of posts - where it makes sense to show a preview (as inboxes and readers do) before opening. Preview requires an object, so as:Note felt like the most logical object to fit there. We're mainly using this for Ghost<>Ghost atm.
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John O'Nolanreplied to John O'Nolan on last edited by
@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle Separately, Mastodon are doing great work and have a non-stop barrage of feature requests (often: demands) from all sides, and everyone is convinced theirs is the most critical (ofc).
We've chatted to them about long-form, and they're well aware
They don't need importance impressed upon them, but they certainly do need funding and PRs — so I think you're very much on the right track there!
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Matthias Pfefferlereplied to Renaud Chaput on last edited by
@julian I totally agree with @renchap that it is important to keep the user on the platform of his/her choice! I like the idea of having a better "read more" UX or maybe the lightbox idea.
But to have the best possible experience and to improve the engagement, you should not force the user to leave the platform.
Otherwise it feels very much like subscribing to an RSS-Feed with only excerpts, where you always have to leave the reader for reading the whole text!
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Matthias Pfefferlereplied to julian on last edited by
@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @johnonolan but that's no longer completely true. You can send a `summary` if `as:sensitive` is false
only if `as:sensitive` is set to true, the `summary` will be used as content warning.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Matthias Pfefferle on last edited by
@pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan
And if as:sensitive isn't set..?
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Matthias Pfefferlereplied to Emelia 👸🏻 on last edited by
@thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan then Mastodon uses the `summary` as summary.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Matthias Pfefferle on last edited by
@pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan
Hmm.. I wonder what @samsethi was hitting into the other day then? He said something about summary marking posts as sensitive incorrectly
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@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi did this change in a recent Mastodon version? Have client apps caught up with it?
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Matthias Pfefferlereplied to Kevin Marks on last edited by
@KevinMarks @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi that is a good point! Maybe it is a client app thingy!
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@johnonolan @julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @pfefferle except the maintainers have made it clear they do not want PRs unless you get pre-approval from them for your implementation plan or whatever.
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@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle for big stuff, yeah, talk to the maintainers before implementing — that is consistent for any open source project.
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@thisismissem @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle yup, 100% — You can't just walk into someone's house and start re-arranging the furniture and expect them to be pleased.
Always good to start with bugfixes & smaller things to learn the codebase, and for maintainers to get to know+trust you.
Once you've showed that you're going to stick around, you generally get more freedom and approval to take on larger things.
Source: Years of contributing to WordPress, long before Ghost
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@johnonolan @lkanies @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle I can also attest that that's the case with Mastodon — I did a heap of small contributions before being able to drive bigger changes.
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@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle that’s good to hear. Because… that’s not the way I see them talk about it. Literally every time someone talks about doing a PR, there’s a request for consultation beforehand. I’ve never seen that in any other community.
(It’s true that my OSS contributions were mostly quite a while ago. And a lot of them were to the project I started, which I absolutely did not run that way.)
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Luke Kaniesreplied to John O'Nolan on last edited by
@johnonolan @thisismissem @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle it’s only rearranging the furniture if they accept the PR, as you know.
OSS is supposed to be about permissionless innovation, so it’s weird to have to get permission first.
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@[email protected] well, if we're going to beat this analogy to death, then it's more like you're free to copy my house and everything in it, and re-arrange it (now your furniture) as you see fit.
I'd prefer if you didn't re-arrange my furniture though.
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@lkanies @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle
tbh, no open source maintainer likes suddenly receiving a sizable pull request out of the blue, it tends to be disruptive or require additional time input to review/correct/review, hence nudging folks towards discussing with the team first.
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@thisismissem @johnonolan @julian @hongminhee @pfefferle totally. These just don’t feel like nudges.
And sometimes, those big pull requests are the only way someone can work. It doesn’t mean the maintainers owe the author anything. But there are a *lot* of people whose first step cannot be “have sizable organization and permission meeting with stranger”.
All of my major pre-puppet contributions started with experimenting with code.
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@julian I agree, you have beaten that analogy to death
You are welcome to do whatever the hell you want with code I post for free on the internet. And I am welcome to ignore all of that work, or not.
Nothing you do to my code intrinsically affects anything in my life.
