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                     Mastodon Clients Could Do So Much More

   Adam Engst

   Much of the appeal of Twitter in its early days was what the community
   made of it. @mentions, #hashtags, and even a bird as the avatar of
   Twitter'all came from community members and outside developers.
   Third-party clients reached much deeper than Twitter's own Web app and
   basic platform apps. Software makers offered alternative interfaces,
   cleverly constructed bots tweeted information from automated systems,
   researchers extracted insights from trawling the data, and more.

   But as Twitter focused on increasing engagement in the service of
   making money'and as the company flails wildly in the insanity era of
   Elon Musk'many of the unusual uses of Twitter have fallen away. ([1]The
   most recent Twitter implosion entry: users posting just one or two
   tweets being told erroneously, 'You are over the daily limit for
   sending Tweets,' an error previously reserved for posting what seems
   like a thoroughly excessive 2400 tweets per day.)

   The rise of Mastodon, with its open-source, federated nature, has
   gotten me thinking (see '[2]Mastodon: A New Hope for Social
   Networking,' 27 January 2023). If developers can break free from
   thinking of Twitter as the apex of microblogging, we could see tools
   that would radically change and improve our ways of interacting. Here
   are a few ideas that have occurred to me; share yours in the comments
   below and on Mastodon, where we can hope they'll catch the eye of
   developers.

Interact with Mastodon More Like Slack or Discord

   I can't take credit for this one. I saw the basic idea roll through
   from a developer when I was first playing with Mastodon, but now I
   can't seem to construct a search that finds that post. (Search is
   effectively local and unfederated.) My version of the idea is that,
   instead of a firehose timeline where every post appears in
   chronological order, a Mastodon client would present posts in a
   hierarchical, columnar fashion, much like messages appear in Slack or
   Discord channels. (Columnar Mastodon clients already exist, but they
   merely devote a different column to different timelines: your feed,
   notifications, messages, and profile, say.)

   The first column would contain a list of people you follow, sorted
   alphabetically, with an option to pin favorites at the top and another
   option to show only those people who had new posts. The second column
   would naturally show posts from the selected person, and the third
   column would contain replies to the selected post. Below those three
   columns, an optional content pane would show the first linked Web page
   from the selected post; if it had multiple URLs, clicking another one
   would replace the previous page. (Bonus points for anyone who wants to
   create a mockup of this app interface.)

   The big win of this technique would be that you could more easily pick
   and choose who you wanted to read at any given time, just as you can
   focus on particular people or channels in Slack, Discord, and other
   chat environments. Providing a Web view of linked content could also
   speed up reading by eliminating the need for a trip out to your browser
   for every link.

Limit Reading Time

   Social media is an endless scroll. That's one of my main complaints
   about it. There's no way to 'finish' reading unless you follow only a
   handful of people who post sparingly. Even [3]TidBITS Talk is finite,
   despite its roughly 1400 posts per month. I read every post there, and
   if I skip a day or two, I can catch up easily. I can devote significant
   time to TidBITS Talk because it's a key part of the overall TidBITS
   publishing model and thus is part of my work day. But I don't have time
   or attention to spare for random content from social media, even if
   some of it comes from friends or other fascinating people. (Family
   doesn't intersect with social media for me because we've successfully
   centralized all family communications in Slack, which is also finite;
   see '[4]Fed Up with Facebook? Move Your Family to Slack,' 12 February
   2019.)

   I'd like to see a Mastodon client designed with 'finishability' in
   mind. You could set a certain amount of time per day that you wanted to
   read Mastodon, and the app would manage that. It might prioritize what
   you see by preferring posts from certain people or that are connected
   to messages you replied to, favorited, or boosted. Then you would move
   on with your day without feeling like you were missing out because the
   next post might be life-changing (hint: it never is). Screen Time might
   seem like a solution, but I find it frustrating because it's an
   arbitrary cut-off after X minutes, and I know more posts are waiting.

   Instead, my hypothetical Mastodon client could estimate how long it
   would take to read a post, make some assumptions about whether you'd
   also read replies, build in some time for clicking out to external
   pages, and then display a selection of posts. The technology for this
   shouldn't be difficult. Many blogs and publications now display a
   reading time estimate so you can get a sense of whether you would be
   committing to 4 minutes or 25 minutes before you start. It could also
   observe your reading speed and adjust accordingly. The trick is that
   when you say that you want to read 10 minutes of Mastodon, the client
   would have to make it seem like you had actually finished at the end. A
   nice 'You're done!' animation would be welcome.

   In the meantime, you can simulate a finite Mastodon by tuning lists or
   using hashtags. In both cases, filtering by a set of people or a topic
   dramatically reduces what appears. These stop-gap measures for
   'finishing' work for now because fewer people post on Mastodon and tend
   to post less frequently.

Could Local Content-Selection Algorithms Serve Users?

   Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which employ algorithms that choose which
   posts you see based on what they think will cause you to keep reading
   and replying, Mastodon apps generally present posts solely in
   chronological order, with the newest first. It's sad that a simple
   chronological list is a refreshing change from the manipulation of
   social media algorithms, but algorithms don't have to be evil. The
   desire to bring the best and most interesting posts to the fore isn't
   problematic on its own; the concern is that these black box algorithms
   are designed to serve the needs of their corporate masters, not users.

   Without a profit-driven company at the heart of Mastodon, I'd suggest
   that the time is right for Mastodon clients to revisit
   content-selection algorithms, but with two key differences.
     * The algorithm should be designed to serve the user, and only the
       user, in ways specified explicitly or implicitly by the user. (The
       lack of a corporate overlord also means there's finally room to
       revisit the discussions surrounding [5]Asimov's Three Laws of
       Robotics in the context of software agents.)
     * The algorithm's rules should be at least visible to the user, and
       preferably actively editable. It shouldn't be difficult to specify
       people or topics that interest you more than others.

   Tasking a client-based algorithm with what posts to show would also
   increase the utility of a feature that limited reading time because the
   algorithm could select only those posts most likely to be of interest.
   Mastodon as a protocol is unlikely ever to adopt an API-accessible
   algorithmic feed, so we're reliant on app developers experimenting in
   this area.

Add Categorization to the Mix

   Adding categories to posts would let you see discussions that are
   topically related, something that's not possible with social media now.
   Let's face it: Twitter and Mastodon both suffer from an extremely short
   attention span when you look solely at the timeline. Posts jump from
   topic to topic haphazardly.

   Chronological ordering works well on a service like Strava, where every
   post is a friend's workout, but it's just schizophrenic with quickly
   updating microblogs. Your feed might include someone linking to a long
   read about an important but depressing topic, others heatedly
   discussing last night's sportsball game, a comedian trying out new
   material, and extreme weather warnings from a bot. They're all
   interspersed with one another, forcing you to make mental context jumps
   every 20 seconds. That can't be good for our brains.

   The popularity of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter shows the
   extent to which people like to stay on one subject for a while before
   moving to another. I'll admit that whenever I do end up loading the
   Twitter page, I can't avoid looking at the What's Happening box. I'm
   very seldom interested in anything there, but on the rare occasions I
   click through, I appreciate that all the tweets are inherently related.

   We're treading into the world of AI here, but if an algorithm could
   automatically categorize Mastodon posts, it would enable users to focus
   on specific topics in the Mastodon content stream. With a Slack-like
   Mastodon client, categories could appear alongside people, much like
   Slack channels mix with direct messages. You could pin favorite
   categories, but others would come and go as associated content ebbs and
   flows. Because machine learning benefits from training, an app that
   started with loose categories and let you provide feedback could
   rapidly produce worthwhile results.

Looking Forward

   It's still early days, and most Mastodon clients I've seen are nearly
   identical. I get that developers are still polishing their interfaces
   and figuring out how to handle Mastodon's hypergrowth spurt. But I hope
   that, once developers have nailed the basics of this bigger ecosystem,
   they can turn their attention to taking advantage of the openness of
   Mastodon to innovate rather than merely copying Twitter clients.

   What radically new approaches would you like to see in a Mastodon app?

References

   1. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/08/twitter-daily-limit-error-prevents-users-from-posting.html
   2. https://tidbits.com/2023/01/27/mastodon-a-new-hope-for-social-networking/
   3. https://talk.tidbits.com/
   4. https://tidbits.com/2019/02/12/fed-up-with-facebook-move-your-family-to-slack/
   5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

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