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Alright, we appear to have uncovered something with the help of y'all.
Twitter had a featured apparently called "Quality Filter" - this was probably turned on at some point unbeknownst to me once I crossed X-number of followers but was opt-in otherwise.
This was undoubtedly the thing that hid nasty replies and prevented them from showing up in my notifs. And if this wasn't on for you (or you didn't have access) that may explain why my lived experience Over There has been easier than here.
And my complaints are really just about that - quality and volume of replies.
I have received some ugly stuff here, but nothing that is even actionable by moderation. I don't think it's crossed that line. So people saying "just do this!" largely don't understand the scope of the problem. At least, I think that's where we're at now.
What I'm yearning for is a filter to separate signal from noise. Because now everything is signal - which means it's all noise.
The Notorious Kyo 
@TechConnectify that’s a solvable problem then. In principle that could be implemented in mastodon.
@hyenagirl64 Absolutely it's a solvable problem. Because Twitter did it.
Since this was (apparently) not a widely-known feature, that's probably explaining the friction I keep running into here explaining what I want.
Now my next worry is that people will think "well, obviously, it's a bad idea because Twitter did it." Hopefully not.
@TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 Twitter did microblogging too, hope we don't remove that feature.
@TechConnectify I think what would be good here is to make it opt-in and customizable, with maybe some reasonable defaults, so power users with large reach can tweak things to their preference.
I think letting individual users implement a more sophisticated filtering system than what we currently have is very much in the spirit of the software’s design philosophy. Nobody should be forced to see things they don’t want to.
I don’t immediately assume it’s a bad feature but I sure wonder if it’s an expensive feature.
(Yes! Ofc! Outwitting adversaries requires skilled tooled labor!)
I would be really interested in the implementation of that.
"low quality" is an extremely vague term, sentiment analysis could help, but if (for example) you complain about sockets and a comment agrees with you by bashing on a plug, that's a negative sentiment, but a useful comment to you (I assume).
@TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 it is harder to execute in a distributed, federated system, though. (I am not saying impossible, I am not saying it shouldn't be done!)
For this you either need to have a lot of knowledge about a commenter on your home instance (hard, given the distributed nature) or you would have to trust the remote home server of that person (bad idea, because this would easily be spoofed by an intentional bad actor).
@claudius @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 I don't think it's true that it's harder to execute. Email is just as distributed as the fediverse and email clients have had spam filters that do this sort of thing for years.
@diligentcircle @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 Yes, and also email fails terribly at really solving the problem. Ask anyone who runs their own mailserver. Someone on your subnet misbehaving? Too bad, you're now blocked, too. Also now you get to beg at some odd filter list to please please get your IP off of that list. Some of your e-Mails don't get opened right away? nice, now Gmail sorts them into spam, even though they might not be!
I love email, but it is terribly broken in so many places.
@claudius @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the user-controlled spam filters in email clients like Thunderbird, where you mark messages as spam and it uses machine learning to figure out what kind of messages you think are spam.
The thing you're talking about here is more akin to instance blocking, which is something that already routinely happens on the fediverse and is not at all the same thing.
@hyenagirl64 @TechConnectify
Yeah, maybe they could implement some sort of trust system. Users could be vetted by the system-operators to be trust-worthy. They could even signal this by adorning a system-operator granted tag next to user names. Like a check mark of some kind, maybe blue.
@hyenagirl64 @TechConnectify but it really shouldn't be. Most of us are here to get away from the algorithm driven feeds, implementing "quality" filters would likely mean smaller accounts would start getting silenced, just because they don't have enough followers to be relevant to the algorithm. And if it's not automated, then you'll just get more drama, like entire servers being blocked because of a single admins opinions.
@indirectferret @hyenagirl64 That's a bad read of what this did.
I saw stuff from small accounts *all the time* - it's was absolutely not as if you needed to have so many followers for me to notice your reply.
It was that when someone used abusive language, their reply would not get to my eyes.
Of course the filter will be imperfect and there will be collateral damage, but welcome to life.
@TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 don't get me wrong, I understand the desire to have some kind of filter. While I'm sure it's not to the extent you have to deal with, I get plenty of abusive messages sent my way as well (mostly just because I have a trans flag next to my name)
And I'm not totally opposed to there being some kind of user end filtering, I just worry that opt-out server side filters like twitter uses toe dangerously close to the line of having someone else decide what you can and can't see.
@indirectferret @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64
User-driven content filtering has always been a goal of the Mastodon project, from what I understand, as opposed to corporate driven algorithms. I'm not sure what a feature could do beyond censoring specific words and phrases, but perhaps this should be a feature request?
@Raccoon @indirectferret @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64 probably oversimplifying things: we need a downvote button.
@RedstoneLP2 @Raccoon @indirectferret @hyenagirl64 That would probably be the easiest way to keep the spirit of Mastodon (entirely user-generated feedback) but it does have abuse problems. And the general HOA vibes here make me think abuse would absolutely happen under that paradigm.
But some sort of signals are necessary.
@indirectferret @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64
How would you think of solving this problem? There is the idea of free-speech, and then there is the idea of i-can-only-take-so-much.
@indirectferret @TechConnectify @hyenagirl64
I don't want someone else deciding what I can't see, but I would love to get help from people I respect deciding what I do and don't see.
Twitter had one algorithm, and it was all about maximizing engagement, and it ended up maximizing outrage. There are a million other possible algorithms, and I want people to be able to say "Try Janette's 'Fleeble' algorithm! I did, and I'm loving my feed!".
@TechConnectify You basically need a spam filter for notifications. I think this is a great idea. And should be relatively easy to implement. I mean spam filters already work quite well on emails. You "just" need to train it with a few dozen messages each of what you DO and DON'T want to be notified about. Question is: Who will implement this for you?
@root42 @TechConnectify Replies and notifications, yeah. Theoretically could be done client-side, like Thunderbird does, so if someone wants to fork the official app and add it, they could do so without any changes to Mastodon (the service) itself. Everybody could train their own classifier, or download someone else's if the classifiers are sharable.
Honestly this seems like a huge quality of life improvement
@indirectferret @TechConnectify a client-side filter would be the best of both worlds, I feel. Algorithms by themselves are not bad, it's only when the incentives are against the user that they can cause harm. This is what happened on Twitter, they prioritized engagement.
Besides, if the algorithms are transparent/open source, configurable and opt-in, they could help with many issues.
All of this is just part of the growing pains of the network, I've seen a lot a progress in just 1 year!
To be entirely fair, we already have that going on with T/B/S allegedly abusing their power.
@hyenagirl64
In principle it could be implemented in the client, you wouldn't even have to ask your instance admin to upgrade.
In principle. But someone has to build the damn thing.
Is there enough overlap between developers and those who need it that this thing would be done open source? Possibly, maybe.
Is there enough of a market that this could be a commercial app? Less likely.
Funny enough, this seems to be the kind of sorting problem where LLMs just might be useful.
@notsoloud @TechConnectify I mean, tbh, I could use a software project. Maybe I’ll go make the plug in. No promises :3
It might take more than just modifying the client though. You don’t want a bunch of notifications on your phone of people telling you the same opinion over and over either. I’d have to look at the source code.
@hyenagirl64
Yeah, that's true. Could you route the notifications through some filter/aggregate app on the phone?
@notsoloud probably, but each app would have to implement it independently.
@hyenagirl64
Well but all the highly followed accounts would use your app because of the superior quality filter obviously 
@hyenagirl64 @TechConnectify I’m curious what that solution would look like.
@TechConnectify I appreciate all the reflection and investigation you've been doing on this topic, and hope you'll stick around and make this place better! It's been annoying to see a vocal minority make this place less welcoming for some.
@TechConnectify Clap on replys, clap off!
@TechConnectify one of my joys on Mastodon has been chatting to people who on twitter I'd have been invisible to - probably because of said filters. You had to play the system there and sort of hustle for engagement, in order to get noticed at all.
That won't have been a thing for you, because you're making quality content and people clearly like it, so of course you wouldn't have been filtered out and left unnoticed.
But I get why it evolved that way, and can now see how it saves overwhelm.
@sarajw I want to stress that, at least as far as how my experience went, I would see most replies. It was only people being dicks that were getting filtered out.
Of course there will be some collateral damage when the filter makes a mistake, but I wouldn't go so far as to say people were invisible to me. Almost all people weren't!
@TechConnectify That may be true, but I'm still going to celebrate that I actually get counter-replies here when I didn't over there!
Guess it's just a numbers game, in that my account here has grown alongside people I admired there, and was essentially invisible to (they had thousands of followers and I was a small drop in a huge ocean) - even if I wasn't filtered, I was probably one of a whole deluge of replies.
You obvs can't pay attention to every reply when there are hundreds.
@sarajw Oh, I've noticed that the quality of engagement here is — usually — much better than over there.
I think that's the plus side of the no-filters, all-chronological approach.
The downside of it is that with a larger following, you're exposed to a lot of stuff that's not healthy for anybody.
@TechConnectify yeah, I'm sorry you're having to deal with that :(
People can really have such different experiences here.
@TechConnectify Also on twitter when a post had umptybillion replies, I wouldn't bother adding another one. Such a thread wouldn't need yet another 2c from me.
But here on Mastodon, there is a visibility issue in the replies on posts between instances because of weird federation effects. I suspect you get a lot more doubling of similar answers, or people piping up when they wouldn't otherwise have bothered, if they could automatically see how many replies were already under a post.
That's not to say that there wasn't anything objectionable or spammy outside of that section, but I had a pretty small circle of people I regularly interacted with, so our experiences are not really an apples to apples comparison.
MAGFest 
@TechConnectify I wonder if this could be implemented on the client side? (Or maybe there’s a client that already implements it? Idk)
@TechConnectify I’m sorry you have had such a wretched experience. You don’t deserve that at all. Moderation is so messy here :-(
@TechConnectify I think that simple *prioritization* and sorting of replies and feeds would go a long way towards making it more manageable. Consolidating of favourites/etc would also be a good and necessary step, of course, but following that, being able to sort your feed by "most favourited/boosted" would at least let some of the less "shitposty" items float to the top and help focus your attention.
There are a couple issues on the github. Here's one:
@rbos why does this need to be in the core product when it could just as well be in a client
@jason Sure. Know of any that do it, offhand? Mostly I use the default advanced web UI, but I'm not married to it.
@rbos I mean it’s a feature I’m decidedly against, or at best indifferent to, so no, but I think a world where we have a basic, stable core with vibrant clients is generally going to make people happier than the web UI having to provide for people with varying wants, so just raising the question.
@rbos There is a problem with popularity metrics being implemented as The Solution, though: the long-term effect is that once enough people start using it as such (after all, that is The Solution), it will give everyone else reason to start optimizing *their posts* for popularity to remain visible, and so you get all of the problems that the popularity contest on other platforms introduces.
It's kind of like a cobra effect; initially it will make the situation better for the early adopters, but then in the long term it will make things worse for *everyone*.
@joepie91 Trading a known actual current problem for a hypothetical future problem, though. If you're concerned about that, I don't think the answer is "throw up hands and do nothing", I think it's "find a way to mitigate".
I'm not convinced that that'll actually happen, anyway.
@rbos People have already been finding ways to mitigate this for a long time, that do *not* have this problem, that's the point.
@joepie91 Still, not convinced that there's such a straight line between "sorting a feed" and "everything going to shit". :)
Regardless, mastodon *badly* needs some kind of solution to the cognitive overload problem. I'm open to ideas, but I simply can't keep up with every post by the people that I want to follow, and replies are much too demanding.
Something is going to break, and either Mastodon is permanently a backwater or some solution is found.
@TechConnectify That's interesting and also makes sense. I wonder if it would be possible to construct a filter using Mastodon's filtering system and maybe build that in as a filter that is available by default - both because it would be useful in itself and also as an example of how to build a filter.
That approach might be rudimentary by comparison. And as with all proposed changes on Mastodon, it might be controversial.
@TechConnectify I think if you want to have 30k followers, you have to find someone or some system that will run an algorithm to do the filtering you want.
I for my part very much want to be in a network with no algorithm, and I don't want to follow or be followed by more than one or two hundred people. If somebody inserts an algorithm between me and my ppl, I'm gone.
I agree. I'd be gone too. But for -
"If somebody inserts an algorithm between me and my ppl *involuntarily*, I'm gone."
@Madagascar_Sky @TechConnectify I really don't want any remote ppl who I don't know deciding what I see. I am on a small local instance and the ppl who started it have formed a registered association and a regular donation is in my plans and I know where to go to meet them in person. That's exactly what I want. >
@Madagascar_Sky @TechConnectify I used to have a birdsite account with follower/following nos. around 1000. It was fun and gave me an educational peep into lots of milieus I otherwise wouldn't have experienced, but it ate up my time and attention so I downsized with a new account. And since the Space Karen Putsch it has dawned on me that all the fun and nice stuff may be just a side product of something that is costing us a price we can't afford – Musk, Zuck & others running the world. >
@Madagascar_Sky @TechConnectify These fuckers are literally more powerful than elected governments, they are complicit in crimes against humanity and I want to withdraw as far as possible from anything they are profiting from. I also wonder if the whole concept of social media has been flawed from the start because it was developed by techbros in silicon valley who quite likely have never experienced living in real-world local communities. >
@Madagascar_Sky @TechConnectify So happy that I can start again but based in a real place in Europe where we have a European consciousness of place and community and can reach out carefully from our little node into the wider world. Peace and love to Mr 30k Followers, but I feel we're in different games or different leagues and I don't want his game to be the norm where I am. I'm not looking for a replacement for X or Insta, I want to reinvent what might have been if they had never happened. <>