vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


twitter (inactive)
twitter.com/vogon
bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

not for the first time, I have seen someone complain on the fediverse that they are considering muting mastodon.social because its catch-all nature makes the federated global timeline unusable

[whispering] this is why I think the federated global timeline is a misfeature

edit: to expand a bit, I think both "having one identity on a catch-all network" and "having multiple identities on subject-specific networks" are reasonable usage models1, but not only do both of them have weak points, but building a system that's so general that it allows different communities of people to use different norms creates a bunch of unnecessary strife across the impedance mismatch


  1. though I think only the former can truly be called "like e-mail"; if you send an e-mail about the football game from greg at electronics.chat, majordomo at electronics.chat doesn't generally drop in to complain that you're not using mail.electronics.chat for its intended purpose and you're making everyone else's experience worse.


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in reply to @vogon's post:

absolutely! if you look at twitter, it had the same trajectory, even. back when it was a few thousand people at South By Southwest the global feed was a decent feature, but it stopped being that pretty shortly afterwards!

Yeah, if anything I’m surprised Mastodon has kept it for so long. Twitter didn’t drop it for nefarious purposes, it just dropped it because the site grew to the point where the feature didn’t make sense anymore

that logic doesn't even make sense! like... if you're not on mastodon.social, who cares what a mess it's global timeline is? yours is still whatever it is on your server plus the people that are connected there... so, follow better people? make peace with the fact humans are multifaceted? :shakes head:

it's the federated global timeline that they're complaining about -- the timeline of everyone on your instance and everyone on every other instance that your instance is federated with! this is a feature that doesn't make any sense to exist

like powerllama below there says, it's a bit more complex than that, and people are ridiculous. :P (it's your local timeline plus any toot that touches your server, ie: a person follows that poster, or it was boosted into someone on your server's feed).

you're right, though, once it passes a certain point, it's absolutely pointless.

I think you're wrong about how the federated timeline works actually. On my instance of 7 people our federated timeline is great, and it's definitely not every post from every instance our server has federated with.

i mean if you're on a big instance, the federated and local timelines are absolutely unusable. but over on https://duck.haus my buds follow some fun people that i don't necessarily want to follow so its pretty nice

the whole federated timeline thing is also INCREDIBLY CONFUSING, we've been slowly trying to figure out exactly how it works for months

on the other hand our local timeline is super boring, where i think someone might get more use out of it on a gameplace.dev instance or whatever

i've also seen users on instances that do have a silence on mastodon.social complain about it, because it means trying to look at the profile of anyone on mastodon.social from there puts up a scary warning and requires a click-through

i ended up running a single user instance and i really wish there was a way to turn off the federated timeline. i'm the only user and i don't need to know about second-degree content because if i wanted it i would have just followed that other person instead |3

During the few years I spent on Mastodon (up until my fave instance died hard), my rule of thumb for a good and healthy Mastodon experience was "Never Federated" set to the tune of En Vogue's "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)"