nicole @nicole@myna.social

I think there’s a lot that be done to address the user-facing impact of these issues at the client level through thoughtful UX (especially multi-modal interfaces). Onboarding and discovery, in particular, are so bad out of the box that almost any improvements will be meaningful improvements.

The closest one can get to the benefits of a true nomadic mastodon identity is to spin up a single-user instance. I think this is funny.

@danirabbit the subjective perception of the magnitude of change is a very interesting phenomena.

I look at these photos of you, and the changes seem tremendous—no subtlety at all. When people I’ve known for a long time first see me post-transition: “I wouldn’t have known anything changed if you hadn’t told me.” When I show new friends photos of old me, they can hardly believe it’s the same person.

Familiarity plays a big role, I think. And you look beautiful!

Of course, these are all social graph problems at heart. Path—my all time favorite social network—was all ablut tiny communities of besties and/or families; LinkedIn is self-selecting professional relationships (effectively instance-based); Facebook and Instagram are basically just the whole of humanity, a few of which you’ve favorited; Google Plus (as well as I remember it), was very forward about allowing you to create different “circles,” but we all balked at the overhead of it all.

@Terra@chaosfem.tw saw a bumper sticker on Friday that got a giggle out of me: “Behind every good woman is herself.”

So, obviously, just don’t do large instances at all, right? But then we’re back to the discoverability, administrative, and operational problems. (All of which can be pitched as features, if you look at them from the right angle).

Also, caching is a _thing_, if you want to grow a large instance.

But instances are administrative and technical obstacles, and discoverability is not good. There’s a potentially a lot of duplication of effort across instances, some of which reflects community values, some of which are probably shared by all users. (e.g., community content moderation versus global security)

Right now, instances are the closest corollary to communities. Ideally, your instance is populated by people who are similar enough to you in enough ways that your conversations are rewarding, and your federated timeline more relevant than not.

Been doing some light reading on mastodon this weekend. Unconnected, ill-informed thoughts follow.

@danirabbit You’re riding the express train to super cute! 💖

@danirabbit Ugh. The hoops through which we must jump. :/

Which place was this so that it can be avoided?

There are exciting days at work and then there are _exciting_ days at work. This was one of the latter. After running on 12 happy pistons for 12 happy hours, I’m kicking back with a small tub of ice cream and a little greedy dog.

One of my all-time favorite Chibi photos.

@Terra@chaosfem.tw It’s gonna be a whole lot more once you add up all the years all the people who read your post are going to spend letting their minds tease at it. 📈

@Terra@chaosfem.tw Been thinking about this one pretty much nonstop since you shared it. 🙇‍♀️