Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

@jdp23 i think the answer there is a good instance that connects its members both on-network and off-. mastodon has strengths but it can't do everything. it's geared towards public discussion, not getting things done.

and the “getting things done” part needs just as much organization and facilitation as the discussion does. i think we’re going to be stuck until we can get ourselves an instance which can take on both. but most people view mastodon as a hangout place, not a working place. it's really hard to get people to invest their time and energy into the latter part.

@jdp23 i’ve been saying that mastodon needs to actually take the time to identify distinct user roles and perform real community outreach since january of 2017 😩

@jdp23 @Thapsyrensays@mstdn.party @cassolotl mhm. altho i think an important counterpoint to that is that Black Twitter’s (and other marginalized Twitters’) hashtag use was really them taking over an affordance which had not been designed with them in mind, and i can certainly say mastodon’s hashtag implementation wasn’t designed with it in mind either

i definitely think those conversations should stay open, but i also think we have an opportunity for a more active role here. what would a feature which WAS designed with those usecases in mind look like? how do we get there? i think the conversation should be driven by the usecases more than the technologies, and don't want us to get stuck with the current hashtag system as a local maximum when maybe we could be doing much better

practically speaking tho, with mastodon development being what it is, that runs the risk of certain usecases being “planned” but deprioritized, and then used as justification for stripping away those features in existing software. like reddit’s whole “it's okay that we broke mod tooling and accessibility, because we have better features for that roadmapped” thing. the replacement has to come first. so i don't think you're wrong to call it out

@jdp23 @cassolotl the relevant demographic here iirc is independent artists, who rely hugely on hashtags for getting their work out there (it's the only discoverability mechanism mastodon has), but suffer social penalties for doing so (because a lot of fediverse users find long lists of hashtags aesthetically unappealing).

people want mastodon to be an inviting place for indie artists because that was a huge attraction back on twitter (and because, like, more art is good). so they want artists to feel like they have the tools to get their art found (extensive tagging). but they don't want art posts to be very obviously and clearly visually distinctive from typical mastodon culture (which is light on tags), so having-but-hiding the tags felt like a possible alternative.

i think the question is still a bit open as to whether hashtag-based discoverability actually IS the best model for fedi. for example i believe @Curator generally recommends using fewer hashtags and relying more on boosts and grassroots interpersonal connections for getting art out there. but that's where this is coming from.

as i've hopefully said, this is cultural as much as it is technological. so the necessity for this will vary depending on cultural feelings/connotations around tag use. i can only speak for historical white queer mastodon culture there :)

@jdp23 i really like it conceptually and it has a lot of applicability for the kinds of things i do, but your tolerance for things just being unnecessarily complex sometimes has to be really high if you ever want to get anything interesting done

@Satsuma no, previous pokémon games were farming sims but they dropped that feature in the more recent ones

@jdp23 they fixed a lot of this stuff in later versions (i know that XPath 3 has a function for this for example), but browsers never implemented anything beyond the first version (and would love to get rid of that too, but can’t because too much enterprise software depends on it)

honestly i’m just glad (and kind of surprised) there’s any way to do it at all

@garbados https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-computer

@aescling @jdp23 @woozle @cassolotl i’m preeetty sure it also did “the last hashtags if they are all on a line” but i could be confusing it with a different implementation

anyway my point is just that this isn’t out of nowhere; it’s something people have been talking about for at least five years

at the time of all of those conversations though, following hashtags wasn’t a thing, so it was clear from a post being in a hashtag timeline that it was tagged with that thing even if it wasn’t rendered in the post

i do agree with the comments that now that you can follow hashtags that complicates things, and this feels a little half‐baked

@jdp23 @woozle @cassolotl going to drop in to say that “out‐of‐body hashtags” were an old monsterfork (<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115135415/https://monsterpit.net/about>) feature that were requested and generally liked by the community.

they were implemented and federated basically exactly like this (hashtags at the end of the post were not included in the post contents; on remote servers the post would appear in the hashtag timeline but would not be visible in the post.) i didn’t spend enough time on monsterpit to remember how they worked on monsterpit itself—@aescling do you recall?

anyway @cassolotl you explicitly requested this feature in 2018, just fyi https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7250

@Satsuma there is in scarlet violet

<variable name="dcmitype">
<for-each select="rdf:type/@rdf:resource">
<variable name="datatypeelt">
<element name="{.}"/>
</variable>
<if test="namespace-uri(exsl:node-set($datatypeelt)//*[1])='http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/'">
<value-of select="local-name(exsl:node-set($datatypeelt)//*[1])"/>
<text>,</text>
</if>
</for-each>
</variable>
<choose>
<when test="contains($dcmitype, ',')">
<value-of select="substring-before($dcmitype, ',')"/>
</when>
<otherwise>
<text>???</text>
</otherwise>
</choose>

you befriend a dragon and feed it sandwiches

“okay, the way the WRITERS intended” there weren’t any writers

“for my first playthrough i just want to experience the game the way the developers intended” i have news for you about the developers and their intentions

“i don’t want to sequence-break this game which was specifically designed not to have a sequence to break”