On awkwardness of boosting one’s own toots vs. the scrapbox idea

Mastodon has this funny aspect that public timeline of an account is a completely separate beast from the Home timeline. Apart from all the foreign toots, the home timeline includes also all the responses by self to other conversations.

This led me to an idea to treat the public timeline as an archive of stuff I want to keep “for posterity” - the scrapbox idea. It is turning out to be a limiting feature.

Specifically, it leads to confused use of the toot boost facility. Originally, the boost of a toot is meant to make it visible to one’s followers. In turn, the public timeline turns into a set of toots one wants to “broadcast”. Complementary, “favourite” facility is useful as a signal of :thumbsup: emoji: “I read you!”. It’s more of an acknowledgement, rather than saving into a box of “favourited” toots. Simple “like”.

So far, so good. The problem starts with my idea of “misusing” the publicly visible timeline as a curated sequence of notes to keep. It makes it impossible to “boost” a toot to one’s followers with an intention to instigate a conversation. Additionally, if I want to keep some of my own comments which I make during an interesting conversation, I have to boost it. That is a somewhat socially awkward thing to do. It’s like screaming: “Hey, look what smart thing I just said!”. Now, that is silly…

Lesson learned

Clearly, Mastodon (and in fact any Fediverse tech, such as Friendica) is best used as a discussion tool: “broadcast stuff you want to be read and discussed”. My one month attempt to turn it into a tool for central storage of public notes of mine is turning negative.

While I still want my notes to be discussed, it’s clear it cannot be the primary purpose of my Mastodon account - if I want to use it for communication with people too. Proper use of Mastodon would turn my notes (kept in my account’s public timeline) into a mess.

A better idea is to keep notes outside of Mastodon and semi-automatically import them from outside. That seems to be a better design.

Either way, I like this Mastodon thing for communication. But not for my original idea of notekeeping.