my most pretentious take is “you should learn how to cultivate your own digital space instead of relying to tools to avoid having to”
“funnel my entire home timeline into a massive bin that i can have a computer run a full text search on” is, to be clear, entirely the latter
the absolute bare minimal action of favouriting or bookmarking a post that you might want to see again is the bar which is too high for these folks
literally any active effort or curation is too much of an ask, it has to be entirely automatic
and idk i work in libraries, i write XSLT and weird yaml metadata files and raw RDF as a hobby; the kind of person who views digital space as, ideally, an uncurated mass of raw data to sift through is not somebody i will ever understand
the tools i want are not search tools but organizational tools
if you want to fix something broken in mastodon, make lists work better lol
let people sort, organize, and annotate (for personal usage) bookmarks, and let bookmarks be exported/migrated between accounts
add better notetaking capabilities beyond just shooting yourself a DM. make it easy to write notes no matter what you are doing or where you are in the timeline. make it easy to attach what you were looking at to the note
add a reminder functionality to remind yourself to look at something again later
add a hiding functionality to clearly mark and collapse things which you have already read
sometimes i do want to find posts which i didn't bother interacting with the first time. the posts are never more than two weeks old and i usually can narrow down who shared it to a handful of people. i can just scroll through their timelines until i find the post. i don’t need a computer for that.
build me tools for things i CAN’T do
(the real reason people keep trying to implement moar text search on fedi is because it is mind-numbingly easy to tell a computer to search for a thing, whereas building actually beneficial tools for users requires design and planning and thinking about human interactions and is generally quite hard)
(not one of these people has shown any interest in actually contributing to the community beyond toys and discussions and experiments that they entirely control and which are done entirely for their own satisfaction and pleasure. i have, as a rule, very little patience and tolerance for people whose approach to computers begins from a premise of fun solitary genius and not difficult solidarity work. insofar as computers are information technology their job is to bridge and facilitate communication across space and time. meaningful communication depends on social context and community. software therefore should also flow from social contexts and communities, not simply be thrust upon them one day by a stranger who thinks they know what is right)
(i realize that people who are new to mastodon are in a place where they are not yet a part of the community but still want to contribute and that enthusiasm is why we keep getting things like this. what i wish these people understood is that the best way to integrate oneself within a community is by doing the kind of work that the community does. new mastodon admins for example acclimate extremely fast. people who contribute to the forks quickly find themselves in productive conversations with experienced people who can help educate them on how things are done here and why. people who build software toys on their own and then blast them out there “for discussion” are doing none of this. they are not meeting people where they are. they are not performing the labour of the masses. they are doing what is easy and fun and fulfilling for them and then expecting everybody else to embrace or at least tolerate their genius. this is not how software should be built)
(if you are not interested in doing the work of the community then your relationship is necessarily one of exploitation, as you are gaining value from the community without giving back in a manner which the community can recognize. you do not have belongingness within the community and you should not be developing solutions for the community except perhaps at the community’s express request. it does not matter whether your community is an anarchist book club or a trade union or a political state, we all agree that nonmembers should not be the ones coming up with solutions for how the community should operate. it holds for social media networks as well)
