I really hope y'all understand I'm trying to improve the experience here and in so doing make this a healthier and more attractive place to be.
I didn't want to be a squeaky wheel but you know what they say...
@TechConnectify have you filed any of this in the GitHub repo? Talked to Gargron about it?
@Pxtl @TechConnectify Still waiting on that call back from Mastodon Systems Incorporated customer service dept.
@JustinH @Pxtl okay, and I'm sorry for bringing the example I'm going to bring up, and feel free to feel less of me as a person.
When I would tag YouTube creators on Twitter and tell them I was having a problem, you know what would happen a lot? The human person tweeting at me would tell me "I appreciate your feedback! Please go fill out this form and make that feedback again."
And you know what this felt like? Passing off the problem to someone else.
@JustinH @Pxtl if you are going to insist that I need to file a GitHub repo or whatever the heck I'm supposed to do in order to get my problems believed or listened to, it's pretty maddening.
There are people listening to me, I am talking to you now, there are many, many other people who are seeing many, many other people express these problems.
I would hope that would be enough to get some balls rolling. Otherwise, this is maddeningly bureaucratic.
@JustinH @Pxtl let me put it another way. I don't use GitHub. I don't even really know much about what it is! I ran into it at one point in the past working on some 3D printing thing and from there it has been in my brain as a weird fiddly thing for nerds.
So. You are asking me to go into a space that I'm not familiar with and, with no agency at all, submit some form so that hopefully somebody somewhere else will understand what I'm saying and take action.
Do you understand the friction here?
@JustinH @Pxtl if that's not bureaucratic, or that's not some way of saying "I refuse to empathize with people who will not take action to help themselves" I don't know what it is.
This is me telling you now, and I tried to tell it with a story of how the YouTube creators tactic of saying "thanks for the feedback! It's meaningless though until you do this" is utterly maddening.
@JustinH @Pxtl and just to be clear, cuz I fear I may be misunderstood here, I am not suggesting that you personally or anyone involved in this thread needs to make these things happen on my behalf. I don't even know if you are in a position to do that.
I am just highlighting my personal irritation with "unless feedback goes through certain channels it's not valid feedback"
And I can't get into details, but I have specific reasons to not trust the process here.
@TechConnectify @Pxtl No I know, I'm not offended, just trying to help you wrap your brain around the open source world.
(Most) everyone contributing to Mastodon at all levels is a volunteer. Getting frustrated at "Mastodon" for a feature you feel is missing is like getting upset at a soup kitchen ladler for not carrying a gluten free option. It's a reasonable complaint, but not an efficient path to actually fixing the problem.
@JustinH @Pxtl Good, I was worried I was stepping in something.
I will just put it this way, though - in my life experience, fixating solely on a to-do list without looking at the broader picture is a mistake. If nothing else, I would hope somebody on the dev team is monitoring the goings-on and tweaking which things should be prioritized.
That thing in particular is the thing that I don't think happens enough if at all.
@JustinH @Pxtl again, I don't want to get into the details of a private conversation especially because it happened a while ago and I might have misinterpreted what I was hearing, but it didn't go very well from my perspective. An actual human speaking to someone in a position of power that things were not going well, was not met very sympathetically.
@TechConnectify @JustinH while Mastodon is volunteer-run, it's got a good stable of donors. Its Patreon take isnt bad for example, but I don't know how much hosting costs eat out of that.
But it's very visible that they don't seem great at prioritizing. Like, "group all the like/toot notifications for a single toot together into one entry" has been getting bickering instead of actions since *2017*:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1483#issuecomment-1822235189
@Pxtl @JustinH oh boy. I didn't know it went back that far.
This is also probably part of the friction where I describe features that Twitter implemented after Mastodon had already started. If they stopped using Twitter at that point, they don't know what I'm talking about.
I'm pretty much running into this left and right when I talk about the quality filter. Lots of people assume this was something for blue checks or that it hid way more stuff than it did.