Lady, EVOLVED 
fediverse admins disgruntled with mastodon 4.0, please send me your critiques 
haha jk we all have his instance blocked
finally following up on this…
Here is the list of problems that our instance has identified with the Mastodon 4.0 upgrade, and how much work I think it will take to address these issues. I think we will probably want to fix all the things which aren’t labelled “Hard” before we merge in the latest changes here.
https://gitlab.com/kibicat/mastodon/-/snippets/2476610
Comments welcome!
cc: @darius who I know has been looking into this stuff for Hometown.
@Lady imo the mobile experience was better before
@Lady you’ve heard most of mine but to try to put them in one place:
- dislike home page defaulting to /explore instead of /about/more — I have never once wanted to see another instances federated timeline and I have only very rarely been interested in browsing their tags. On the other hand “whos the admin” or “how large is this instance” or “do they have a policy against [thing I’m considering reporting one of their users for]“ are questions I have more or less constantly. Also ideologically I think communities should be able to self define which about facilitates and explore does not
- also, strongly dislike the new /about/more design (these two are the biggest like, “please fix this ASAP” requests for me lol)
- no remote follow/reply 😭😭😭😭
- the sidebar is super irritating on mobile when you’re trying to just read a thread (or another long-form thing like /about/more) bc it takes up like half the fucking screen
- “get the app” link in footer — wtf???
- get rid of “publish”, post is fine or we can do some cute theming thing like mew
@Satsuma can you be more specific about what you dislike with the new /about/more?
@Lady
- mobile accessibility issues: you’ve got the general issue of the sidebar taking up space which is then exacerbated on about more by the fact that everything has been put into boxes thus wasting further screen space eg, compare the amount of useable space in our current page vs .coffees (chosen at random bc it was an instance I’d viewed recently thats on 4+)
- the “server rules” section appears to be highly limited in a way that seems to flatten communication to a set of contextless checkboxes (I’d need to investigate more to be sure of this but I haven’t seen a single one so far with rules more than a couple sentences, no allowances for internal structure/subheadings etc)
- what cat said about not allowing html, if true, would fucking suck. see previous rants about importance of community culture & self definition
the overall effect seems to be to make instances more visually similar & discourage any kind of longform / nuanced communication through a variety of unwelcome changes
@Satsuma the server rules thing already exists (it's on ours too); they're checkboxes because you're supposed to pick one when you report a post; i also hate this but some apps expect it now as part of the reporting workflow
@Satsuma like i didn't define server rules when we first started this server and i think you literally couldn't report posts in some apps lol
- existing bookmarks (e.g. /web/getting-started and /timelines/public) broke without redirect
- about page opening in a column isn't great for instances with long ones like ours
- ate the hero image, had to readd it as "Server thumbnail"
- javascript is now required
- mobile web ui uses horizontal space for all the tabs for some reason
- ui_header appears as early as 1175px width (or ~170% zoom on a 1920x1080 screen) which is still wide enough for 3 columns on the advanced ui
- join date has no reason to be there on the profile screen (vanilla only)
- inconsistent spacing of post options (vanilla only)
- clicking on a pfp now opens it in the lightbox which is fine but it would be nice if "view full profile" was moved to the top of the bio
- no way to see image descriptions in mobile ui (though this i think is not a new issue)
- "i don't like it" in 3.5 report ui is the first option and doesn't actually send a report (already removed by glitchsoc)
- no way to change favicon in a way that sticks except at build time apparently? unsure if the rake task can be used
also seeing people say that clicking timestamps/opening in new tab doesn't actually take you to the full context on the other instance, CNR on glitchsoc and can't be bothered to swap to vanilla ui
@starfall thank you for this list, it's very helpful!
@Lady let no one say we are not thorough 
@Lady I miss "Toot!", that is all.
@Lady I'm sure others have already said it, but I'm really annoyed by a toot's timestamp changing from it's actual public URL. You now have to click on the "…" menu to get the original link. I don't see the point of the timestamp having a different URL that opens within your web UI when clicking on the toot itself has the same effect. :\
mastodon 4
@Lady we hate how the title tag shows the instance name last
i actually prefer the title tag never changing and just being the instance name without any modifiers, especially since it's not actually a different page, it's always just the timeline view
in the screenshot i can tell that "Sleepi" is sleeping.town (pre mastodon 4 sleeping fork), but i visually have no clue what instances "u2784:" (mastodon 4) and "Notifica" (mastodon 4 + glitch) are supposed to be without clicking on them, or even that "u2784:" is an instance timeline rather than a post opened separately
-- cherry opossum ❤️
@Lady grabs a bunch of tomatoes Oh wait, you're not the one responsible, never mind 
lol
@Lady the biggest one I'm hearing from my users so far, that I think I agree with, is the web UI got s p r e a d o u t.
We're discussing our first server CSS to shrink margin and padding in a bunch of places
@Lady thank you this will be VERY helpful for me next week
@Lady Hi! I fixed a few of the issues you mention on that page in Hometown. Specifically the About page is now static:
https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/pull/1264
Also here is a tiny commit that fixes the <title> page issues: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/pull/1264/commits/682334b56acedc07ce1b72f313aa886da648d423
@Lady@glitch.cat.family @darius@friend.camp The issue with the old remote interaction is that it wouldn't work with other Fediverse software, at least I don't think so.
@Lady Is there a place for Mastodon users who have criticisms of, or feedback about, the 4.0 interface and user experience to give that feedback?
Big thanks to all admins! I know your tasks are huge and Mastodon/the Fediverse wouldn't exist without you.
@kagan you can comment on the github source code repository (i believe it has a discussion forum) but historically those efforts usually do not get much response
however, many admins control the codebases for their instances and can make desired changes themselves. the difficulty is coordinating that work so it isn't an undue burden and doesn't introduce maintenance costs down the line
my advice for users would be to express feedback in a polite and understanding manner to your admins, with the understanding that they are probably also frustrated. you can also tell them to me! (i'm trying to compile them for a blogpost). my post was addressed to admins because i expect them to be most knowledgeable about the software and how it has changed but i'll take comments from anyone
(i am not affiliated with mainline mastodon development and am just trying to coordinate patches, as above)
you know if eugen was worth his salt he would’ve asked this question