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)
@Lady You literally just listed a bunch of features that would only be for your satisfaction. And then you go on to say that that's one of your biggest criticisms of other people who participate in the discussion. Tell the world that you are angry without telling the world that you're angry.
@av i'm not angry, i'm describing a fundamental disconnect between various approaches to software. firstly, in terms of values, i value curatorial tools, of which all the things i listed are, over tools which discourage curation, a category which i believe includes most simple text search implementations. you are correct in noting this is a personal preference; i even go so far as to call it a “pretentious” one. however, it is how i feel.
but secondly, and more importantly, i describe differences in approach to DEVELOPING software. it's not possible for you to attack me for hypocrisy here because i have not developed any of these things. if i did do so, i would do it as a part of my instance's fork, in collaboration with my instance's users, as a bare minimum, and ideally also in collaboration with a larger fork like Hometown or GlitchSoc. that is night and day from building something as a software toy under one's own provenance and with no outside input or oversight. you will not convince me that those are the same
@Lady I'm on my cell phone and can't seem to access my initial comments. I do not believe that I called you a hypocrite. I am sorry if my comments read that way. It was not my intention to name call or otherwise disparage you. I thought that some of the examples in your post were applications readily available within every mainstream OS on the market. And that it doesn't make sense to include every application function within a social network. Unless the intention is to build WWOS platform.