undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjudge20203y ago0 comments

A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.

0 comments

3 comments · 3 top-level

systemicdanna3y ago

The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.

Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.

snapetom3y ago

Then they type "clubbing" or "cars" or "<insert city>" or whatever and see a shit ton of other instances they get to choose from.

This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.

dgudkov3y ago

A person typically have multiple interests. Associating yourself with a single interest is usually a bad idea as sooner or later your would want to talk about something else.

It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse