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@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH if I understand the problem, imagine every time you made a post you got thousands of replies, some of which you'd like to interact with, but a significant number of them are from accounts you've never interacted with on random other servers that are borderline abuse.
No amount of moderation on your server instance can address this problem, because your server is doing nothing wrong.
@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH what is being asked for (I think) is to first recognise the problem. This thread shows that this is far from happening.
Second you need some tools and policies to filter the poor behaviour. Less than a ban, but more than "don't look at messages that are addressed to you, that might upset you"
At least I think that's what is being asked for.
@cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH exactly. One thing that I've just realized is that, when we compare this platform to email, subject lines are effectively content warnings. I don't go to my inbox and see every email that's been sent to me, I see a list of content warnings.
Here, though, it's as if I open my inbox and am reading every single email.
Social media is a different beast from email. A feed full of content warnings is tedious and boring. But there has to be filtering.
holly @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I want this platform to work for folks like you, so I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I assume that the volume of block requests you would have to submit is unworkably high, not that your instance is ignoring your block requests? For instance, we're quick to block accounts that are aggressively annoying our users, but we're only like 5 users with the most followed having under 5k followers, so we only get about 1 request/wk.
@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH On the bird site, this sort of stuff was just... not a thing I ever had to do.
I blocked maybe half a dozen people and muted perhaps a dozen.
The sort of behavior that's bothering me here simply didn't cross my feed on twitter /because they had automated systems to detect it/ and it was hidden.
I'm really asking for a jerkwad detector - not for a means of recourse when I encounter jerkwads. Because, frankly, not much of what they do merits real moderation.
@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH There is absolutely no means of filtering signal to noise here. And the common response to complaints of noise is to play whack-a-mole and stomp it out, or else move instances because they'll have more thorough instance blocking.
But that's not the problem - it's not individuals. It's behavioral norms in aggregate. Some really shitty behavior is tolerated here in no small part because there's no means for the crowd to signal it's bad behavior.
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun Not trying to deny your lived experience or anything but "some really shitty behavior is tolerated here" more aptly describes my experience with Twitter than anything on my Mastodon instance.
@JustinH @TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun Are you familiar with Twitter's quality filter? I always had it turned on and it kept a lot of the low quality chaff out of my mentions. I have no idea how it worked or how to replicate it but it's my understanding that for big accounts it was even more powerful.
@AGTMADCAT @JustinH I think this is the thing that made all the difference. Plus, I only started using Twitter in 2018 so lots of positive changes were already made, and I only ever used the first-party client
(unrelated, I still can't get my head around why so many people tagged the thread reader app all the damn time - I had no issue reading threads, so I can only assume their weird clients parsed them weirdly)
@TechConnectify @JustinH I tried turning off the quality filter once for about a week and it made the site an absolute nightmare.
I got on Twitter in 2008 so I followed pretty much its whole arc - this feels very 2008-2010 Twitter in a lot of ways - mostly weird friendly nerds, no significant moderation or trust and safety tooling, etc. The first part of that I put down to being on an excellent instance, because a lot of my interaction is from other people on infosec.exchange who are generally very well behaved grown ups, but for big accounts with a lot of inter-instance interaction like yours that probably wouldn't be the case.
I'm not sure if maybe @jerry has any opinions on the moderation issue for large accounts, but he's our instance boss and very good about these sorts of things.
@TechConnectify @AGTMADCAT @JustinH literally the least important thing on this thread, but while I never triggered the threadapp myself, I used its output triggered by someone else to save long threads to read later on my read later app (@wallabag).
Long threads are basically blog post and I like to read them as such.
@holly @JustinH @cbehopkins @dysfun @TechConnectify the thing is Mastodon is like an unregulated pipe. You get everything anyone says, period. Twitter had methods that would pre-filter that for you to make it manageable.
With a smaller following that might be like opening the tap and taking a drink. With a large following I’m imaging it’s more like the UHF scene sitting in front of the firehose.
@sleeplessone @holly @JustinH @cbehopkins @dysfun That is exactly what it's like. And I'm discovering relatively few people here know about the Quality Filter Twitter had. It was apparently opt-in but for larger accounts they just turn it on.
That may explain the disconnect between my lived experience with Twitter and others here.
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I already deleted my account so I can’t check, but I also vaguely recall the filter being tied to “chronological timeline” and seeing posts like “if you just want the old tweets in chronological order flip this setting off” so anyone who just wanted tweets in order they happened may have turned it off even if it was turned on at some point for everyone.
I’m almost certain I personally turned it off for that exact reason, but I’m also a rando with sub 100 followers, and the only time it got crazy was when a giant account like LeagueOfLegends retweeted some funny shitpost I made.
@sleeplessone @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH yeah, I think I closed my Twitter account around 2017, and I was frequently hitting the chronological order button (it used to switch back on its own a lot) so I either left before those tools came into being, or I could have been inadvertently turning them off.
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH it sounds like you're looking for "the algorithm" which the rest of us kept trying to escape. Which makes sense if you have an unmanageable volume and we just want to read everything our friends post in chronological order.
@stark @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH Well I think that's just it -- the algorithm we got pushed outrage nazis at us all day and left us to play whack-a-mole with the block button and send ignored reports, meanwhile missing your friends' posts, but since I've left, and certainly it seems for large accounts, they maybe had some sentiment analysis tools that hid all of that. So a much nicer version of the algorithm.
@holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH
Either we're talking about different algorithms or different things - I'm talking strictly about what I could and could not see directed *at me*
As far as I was concerned, Twitter's algorithm didn't exist as I only ever used the following tab. Sure, it influenced what the folks I followed were retweeting and that can't be denied, but it didn't have much immediate presence to me.
Then again, I didn't ever reply much to things.
@holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH And that could be yet another difference between our experiences.
I didn't use Twitter to prod and only ever replied to friends and mutuals. Sure, I got pretty spicy in the depths of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests, but mostly it was a place to post my thoughts and engage with my audience and friends.
The fact that we may have used Twitter in very different ways surely makes this conversation difficult to navigate.
@TechConnectify @holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH out of interest, how many followers did you peak at on twitter ?
@quixoticgeek Something north of 90K I think. It's sitting at 83.5k now, but it's been shrinking since, y'know, I don't post there and people are abandoning ship.
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I've been wanting "pluggable algos" to reorder / filter / modify timelines for years.
fedi is pretty anti "algo," but that's re: centralized ones that megacorps like Facebook turn on with no opt-out in order to extract more ad impressions.
if instead one could select from various user-defined algos, inspect their code if desired, and apply them to a timeline ... this place might be considerably more usable (albeit still kinda for tinkerers)
@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH on the signal-to-noise front, there are filters you can apply in settings, but they are very specific by their nature, so I assume that's what you mean by whack-a-mole? If more work was put into those filters would it be what you're looking for?
@nocalla @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I'm guessing it's mostly rude reply guys, which are pretty difficult to filter out because there's not necessarily going to be a keyword in there.
@holly @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH yeah, it would be nice if people would announce that they were about to be rude with some kind of universal keyword. 
The lack of a signal-to-noise filter on Mastodon is something I've felt just as a regular person trying to find my way around. I don't have any sort of "audience," and I've only ever had one person (that I knew already) mention me in a post.
I have had a difficult time exploring Mastodon and finding interesting accounts to follow, because there's *so much* noise. Can only imagine how bad it is when the noise comes to you.
@ListenUpPhones when I first started out I found a lot of people to follow by looking at the accounts of people I knew and liked to see who they were following. The other trick is to search for hashtags for your hobbies and interests and participate in discussions there, and follow folks you like. I never read the federated feed (too much) I just follow freely from the first two methods and started pruning once my follow feed got too big.
@holly Interacting with the hashtag feeds is something I should probably do more often. Usually when I check my favorite hashtags, there isn't much activity, or the activity is in a language I don't know.
Seems quite a few of the hashtags I enjoy are more about product promotion than personal engagement, if that makes sense.
@ListenUpPhones Oh wow, I never see product promotions, but then all of us have a slightly different view of the fediverse skewed based on the instance we’re on. The returns you get from a search (and the replies you see to a post) are from the accounts you and the people on your instance follow (perhaps extended somewhat, although I’m less sure of how that works). It gives the place a different flavor depending on where you’re standing.
@TechConnectify I'm sad you're having this problem and also that the conversation to surface it is also being problematic. But I do appreciate your efforts to explain it in the hopes that better abled people can figure it out.