Post AylzMP5QZPAPoR1Teq by tychotithonus@infosec.exchange
(DIR) More posts by tychotithonus@infosec.exchange
(DIR) Post #AylzCm4kF6tUDR70D2 by scottjenson@social.coop
2025-10-01T17:27:47Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
#Mastodon trust and safety people, I need your helpI'm trying to understand how "Quiet Public" is used. In nearly every UX discussion I have with people the vast majority not only don't understand it, but it actively confuses them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have it, but I would like people to at least know WHY we have this. Given you can already opt out of search results w/ a setting, why you wouldn't just use "Followers only" instead?
(DIR) Post #AylzMO5kGjpKj8ADVw by tychotithonus@infosec.exchange
2025-10-01T17:30:52Z
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@scottjenson Before, searchability was all or nothing. With this option, you can select which posts have which level of searchability. For example, you might generally want to have your posts searchable, but you may reply to something using a couple of keywords that you know are likely to attract a swarm of trolls, so you opt out just for that post.It lets you decide, post by post, in a way that wasn't possible before.
(DIR) Post #AylzMP5QZPAPoR1Teq by tychotithonus@infosec.exchange
2025-10-01T17:35:47Z
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@scottjenson And specifically in the replying use case, it lets everyone who saw the original post organically also see your reply. The "followers only" option would only be visible to your followers, when you want to reply to be seen by all of the followers of the person you're replying to.
(DIR) Post #AylzMPh0JhDzgybUEC by scottjenson@social.coop
2025-10-01T17:38:51Z
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@tychotithonus ok, got it. But if you're into the weeds of a reply and having to calculate *which* followers only would apply, I think we've lost nearly all users at that point. I don't wish to appear insensitive! But this feature feels SO COMPLEX that I worry only a small fraction of mastodon users actually know how to use it properly.
(DIR) Post #AylzMQOxgGO1tJAakC by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-10-01T17:42:29.479556Z
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@scottjenson @tychotithonus IMHO, every repy should be "Quiet Public" by default. I have a modification to my server that does this.Why?Because my reply shouldn't be in public timelines. Public timelines should be the *first post* in a thread. And then you open the thread and read the replies. This also forces people to get more complete context before jumping in and saying something
(DIR) Post #AylzMQzpTBsRjeQ2D2 by scottjenson@social.coop
2025-10-01T17:46:04Z
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@feld @tychotithonus That's a great point, thank you. I've noticed that replies show up in my feed far more than they did on that other place and that likely explains it.What's interesting is that wasn't a user visible choice they had to make, it was just "how it worked". That's the type of thinking I'd like to explore, e.g. if "Quiet Public is most valuable in replies can we auto-magically just work that in so people are covered w/o haven't to think too hard?
(DIR) Post #AylzMRYvMhwxUUq3ua by feld@friedcheese.us
2025-10-01T17:52:42.998060Z
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@scottjenson @tychotithonus Agreed, it would make the fediverse a much better experience if this was default everywhere. Currently the timelines are almost like reading debug logs and it's really stupid.And followers-only is just broken by design. It should only be allowed for the FIRST post in a thread, and every reply to a followers-only post should be direct / DM, or just simply quiet public but only addressed to the original author. Followers-only replies creates broken threads for people because it's impossible to know if your followers are also following the person you're replying to, so they might not even be able to see what you replied to!IMHO Mastodon's holding us back from progress because they have outsized influence on the entire fediverse and refuse to do bare minimum UX research on this
(DIR) Post #AylzMS6xKBAjC2lExM by mkljczk@pl.fediverse.pl
2025-10-01T18:07:40.037683Z
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@feld @tychotithonus @scottjenson remember that timelines on Mastodon work different than on Pleroma and you only see replies to other people you follow in your home timeline, so it's less cluttered (not a fan of the behavior though)
(DIR) Post #Aym2fumtELPbUoLanQ by phnt@fluffytail.org
2025-10-01T18:44:55.445514Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@feld @tychotithonus @scottjenson I don't really agree that it should the default since most of the time, it's not the first post that makes me interact in a way, but the discussion resulting from it, the replies. And it definitely shouldn't be the default for "Home" timelines, only for "The Whole Known Network" and the "Public/Local" timelines. I think that's what you mean, but I wanted to clarify that nevertheless.Also instead of doing it with different scopes, you can achieve the same by using the timeline filter in Pleroma-FE and selecting "Show only my replies". That makes Public and TWKN timelines behave basically in the same way as quiet replies. Downside is that it applies to all timelines.
(DIR) Post #Aym2lGNsMWfhvNCIts by WeirdWriter@caneandable.social
2025-10-01T18:00:01Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I wish it was like this by default, having every reply as quiet public if the post is public. If the post is followers only, I'd like replies to default to followers only. I like the original UI label when it was called Unlisted. Some said Unlisted was far worse UI but I disagree. @scottjenson @feld @tychotithonus
(DIR) Post #Aym4KhZRNKNYKc4L7w by scottjenson@social.coop
2025-10-01T18:51:49Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@phnt @feld @tychotithonus I'd like to think I'm a fairly sophisticated mastodon user and I have no idea what you're saying. I mean, I've sorta got an idea but it's complex and still confusing to me.This is the crux of the issue, "offering choice" comes at a cost. I'm trying to find that sweet spot where more consumer level users are protected, that is my highest concern. I hope we can get there by reasonable defaults.Power users can choose what they'd like/use the settings they need
(DIR) Post #Aym4m0uvYMW89W8uAK by phnt@fluffytail.org
2025-10-01T19:08:27.436890Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@scottjenson @feld @tychotithonus I'm a Pleroma user so some of the terminology likely isn't the same. MRF (Message Rewrite Facility) is Pleroma's way of doing additional processing on outgoing and incoming posts, or more precisely incoming/outgoing ActivityPub activities. The difference doesn't matter here. It allows the instance administrator to rewrite posts completely and in this case there's an MRF module that forces all replies to be "Unlisted"/"Quiet Reply", that's what feld uses I think.Timeline filter is a feature in Pleroma-FE that allows the user to "Mute"/Hide certain posts (like bots or NSFW) from timelines and in this case it also allows restricting in some ways what replies you can see on timelines.Public timeline is the timeline of the instance and nothing else. I think the equivalent is called "Local" in Mastodon. It basically shows only posts from the instance you are on, for you that would be social.coop. You can get to it by clicking on the "Live feeds" button and then clicking on "This server". At least that's how it works on mastodon.social without an account.The Whole Known Network/TWKN is a timeline that shows all known posts on the network from the perspective of _your_ instance in order as they arrived. You can get to it by clicking on the "Live feeds" button and clicking on "All" in the header.This is the crux of the issue, "offering choice" comes at a cost. I'm trying to find that sweet spot where more consumer level users are protected, that is my highest concern. I hope we can get there by reasonable defaults.That will unfortunately always be a problem. So in this case, you can do multiple things which all make more or less sense:1) Make quiet replies the default on the instance level, give administrators the option to change that behavior and offer users a simple toggle in settings that overrides administrators choice2) as 1), but add it as a toggle/setting when composing posts; this is almost the current default minus the instance level setting I think3) Add a toggle/selection to the settings and leave it hidden unless a user specifically asks to show advanced settings; I don't know if Mastodon currently has that concept.4) Any combination of 1), 2) and 3)Power users can choose what they'd like/use the settings they needAs I've said, I don't really mind what the default is, as long as I can change it. That's my stance on most things.Also sorry for the long post. :)
(DIR) Post #Aym5NS0rm5Miu3lv9s by phnt@fluffytail.org
2025-10-01T19:15:13.951872Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@scottjenson @feld @tychotithonus Also since you are part of Mastodon development, maybe you could try to convince someone in the management to implement something like Pleroma's MRF system since it greatly helps with dealing with spam. It can reject posts from accounts based on programmed heuristics, keywords, users with same name, etc.There have been plans to support something like this, but external to Mastodon, where Mastodon would call the service to do the processing. But I don't think any progress was made on that for months.