🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@dankmaximus

Dependency conflicts:

* Lewd-humor 0.1-alpha
* depression-5.7-rc4
* awkwardness-2.3
* Python2.4

In which the U.S. media has taken propaganda lessons from the DPRK, who is the master of the "we enjoy nice weather because of the good graces of our glorious leader" bullshit

https://twitter.com/SallyMayweather/status/1354549375805042689 #SalTheAgorist

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bot list: https://joejoe.github.io/mastodon

@freemo First of all, congratulations to running an interesting space. There's some serious dedication behind this and It shows.

* re timelines: yes, this added flexibility of filtering or just managing whole instances is something I already discovered. Feature request: it seems to be somewhat difficult to just randomly browse a timeline of an instance. It would help if one could use the search bar to display the full timeline of an instance. Right now I discovered that to browse an instance timeline one has to find a toot from that instance and use the "..." context menu. Alternatively, one can put an instance into favourite domains, then open its timeline, and then remove it when it turns out to be mostly uninteresting
* re the idea with the instances catalogue: yes, that sounds useful. Over the last couple of days, I was doing that using https://instances.social/. A more integrated UX would help, although I am not sure how many users it would attract.

> What sort of interactions are you talking about and what sort of managing would you envision needing to do?

Just personal psycho-hygiene 🙂 . It's too easy to get down a rabbit hole and lose oneself in endless back-and-forths. I've been there so much in the past that I suspect, I am somewhat beyond that. I rather go for a walk with a friend and we can at least argue properly and aloud. So when I see that everything important was already said in a conversation here and we are getting into an agree-to-disagree territory, it's more useful to just back off, then to continue pushing into a brick wall. Easier done in flesh, one needs to be more conscious when doing it here. It's alright as is, but it can turn into a humongous waste of time for everybody if not kept in check.

> What sort of images are we talking about here.

Everything. Memes, cats, dogs, anime, whatever it's called today. It's the same stuff then it used to be 25 years ago, it's just that I moved on, only to re-discover it now. Back then it was propagated via chain e-mails with endless Cc lists, today it's apparently Twitter/Facebook (neither of which I ever used - so it's probably telling what sort of odd person I am 😃 ).

* re: hashtags

Yeah, I know what's the point, but I always found tags anywhere overwhelming. Either one develops a taxonomy and system to it beforehands, or it's rather useless - either you find only a subset of what you need, or too much. I gave up on it like 15 years ago and instead use full text search. That's why I am doing this mini-blogging even for music and stuff. My comments around stuff are often just SEO phrases making sure my full text search in a year or two from now will discover what I am just recording. I am a simple guy, you see 😉 .

# 3 weeks of Mastodon@QOTO

So it's 3 weeks since I joined Mastodon@QOTO. My motivation was a low threshold scrapbook place were I can throw whatever I want to remember and/or share with friends.

After these couple of weeks, I can say this:
* works - kind of. Feels a bit weird, probably because I never did this kind of stuff in public before
* obviously what I am doing is not very standard (more than 200 chars), but within the design envelope of Mastodon and QOTO (kudos for all the customisations, I like it!)
* probably what I am doing would be better called mini-blogging (more than Twitter, less than a blog). When called this way, I took a look at services which do that (e.g., Tumblr) and the usage pattern fits
* timelines are somewhat distracting, but I'll try to use this in a somewhat introvert mode anyway
* interactions are not a bad part of the experience, but need to be managed - can be easily distracting
* lots of strange stuff fly around, but can be filtered out when needed
* the images people post are a throwback into 90's when we were sending this via e-mail (I still have a couple of GBs in my mailbox archive just funny pics and powerpoint slidedecks full of one-off jokes). Since I left this subculture, I never thought it still clogs the Intertubes elsewhere. Still fun, but I could do without.
* tooling: Tusky proved useful, `toot` is good too, web interface a bit overwhelming and distracting
* still need to work out how to deal with hashtags - probably will ignore

#note

@pete