See, I was pretty neutral about #Threads federating: let them do their thing. Now, all of a sudden, I'm thinking what if random companies start hijacking hashtags that we use and love? Blocking an entire server is the common workaround proposed by people but what happens if others from the #Fediverse get FOMO and start hijacking those as well? I'm only thinking publicly, we still don't know how robust this hashtag-based algorithm-less system will be. #DogsOfMastodon
@moxxi well currently users have fairly few and blunt tools for shaping their #Mastodon experiences at best, even setting aside vulnerability to bad actors.
You can follow others, which you have to seek out and then process in totality; you can check out local/public instance feeds, which can be a lot of noise to signal; you can follow hashtags, relying on authors to shape what you see by how they use tags; etc.
But all of those are clunky and don't let the user easily refine their feeds.
In fact, they tend to give others a lot of control over what goes into the firehose, to be directed at the user: the followed feed, the instance, or the hashtag author.
In the end, users are faced with all or nothing choices instead of finer controls over how they'd like to shape their feeds.
@volkris oh yes okay I get it. I agree, right now it's very all-or-nothing.
@moxxi it's one of the axes I grind that I might see discussions happening every day about how to make this platform better, and yet I almost never hear them coming with a focus on empowering users.
The tech behind Fediverse is focused on instances, not users. People working on UIs seem to focus on making decisions for users instead of handing users power to make decisions.
It's just the attitude of this place from bottom to top that the users are kind of left out of the conversation, so this is the result.
@volkris what do you mean by user controls?