Here’s an important question about Mastodon from a media person. Any tips to unsilo it?!
@NicoleCRust “tweet deleted”
@neuralengine Too bad! It was a response to my suggestion to Tom Insel (former NIMH director) that he should consider Mastodon over LinkedIn. A media person responded that it is difficult for her to imagine how she would navigate the platform for her pieces, “too siloed”. That’s a real problem, I think.
https://twitter.com/thomasinselmd/status/1594435826179403777
@NicoleCRust yes I think that’s right. I think we can just about manage. But the way the news media use Twitter is so much more distributed - I don’t think mastodon will work for them in its current form.
@neuralengine @NicoleCRust I don’t agree. If you have a large following, posts will end up on timelines all over the fediverse. The main drawback of mastodon for large orgs is that they can’t pay for their posts to be promoted.
@neuralengine @jerlich I think the current search also only works for hashtags, right? So we need software that searches content.
@NicoleCRust @neuralengine @jerlich My understanding is that there are strong anti-harrassment arguments, and fundamental technical limitations, against full text search.
@da5nsy @NicoleCRust @jerlich however it would be very easy (in comparison to the things Google etc do) to use spider bots to build a model of the fediverse, and then create a portal which shows it to you via a customised algorithm, with full search. I predict that in a year or so that is what we we will all be using. Such apps will be launched by startup companies, which will eventually need to recover costs, so they will start injecting ads into the feed…
@neuralengine @da5nsy @jerlich Sigh. @neurobongo had some great ideas for nonprofit management. Maybe that type of thing could happen w/ search?
@NicoleCRust @neuralengine @jerlich @neurobongo I think if there was a way to do it without opening up a vulnerability that could be used to target and harass specific groups, and if it could be done in a way that wasn't open to being exploited for profit, then sure
@NicoleCRust @jerlich yes that is what I would like. I don’t like hashtags. I’m too old for hashtagging, it makes me feel self-conscious… 😆
@jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @neuralengine everytime a post gets boosted it appears again in a timeline. So I think the timeZone isssue is smaller than you think. But I do have similar concerns about advertising and bots ruining this place as soon as there is enough critical mass.
@jerlich @NicoleCRust @neuralengine yes, i believe it's only a matter of short time that our brains get updated with the new fediverse of Mastodon. Learning is what brains are created for....
@jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @neuralengine
I'm also not worried about the ability to participate in sustained conversation. Once you reply in a thread, the default for further replies is to add your tag, so you will end up with a notification.
Even better, my instance, qoto.org allows 2^16 characters per toot! So, in theory people can express themselves a little more clearly. (but the downside is rambling....)
@jerlich @NicoleCRust at the instant they are disseminated, yes. But eg you won’t see many posts from Australia bc they are coming when you are asleep. Also just making a very large input feed does not scale - you need some kind of attentional mechanism. The smart way to do this would be via some kind of predictive algorithm.