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Using Mastodon often feels lopsided: positive reactions are subtle and small, yet negative comments are notifications right in your face!
A small tweak (e.g. don't show randos' comments as prominently) could make things feel calmer, more like a group of friends.
This screenshot shows how the Mastodon web app tries to fix this. I bet most casual users don't even know it's there.
If you do use these options, could you reply with what works best? Any suggestions? (private mentions welcome)
@scottjenson my options look like this for more than a year. Though fortunately I don't get a lot of negative comments 馃槵 so this is more like balancing signal-to-noise ratio.
On implementation side, I have this thought/idea that if notifications show too many mentions, or some form of heuristics, a banner will appear to surface this "hidden" options and suggest filtering them 馃檲
@scottjenson I saw a request for control over replies similar to the existing control over boosts: "only followers can reply" or even "only people *I* follow can reply".
I'm not popular or marginalized enough to need any of these, but they seem like useful options. Even if they're not enforceable across software stacks, they're still likely useful in not inflicting rando replies on your own followers.
@jyasskin very reasonable suggestion. "reply controls" is a common request that is definitely on our radar.
What we've heard quite a bit (more from marginalized communities) is that newcomers get quite a bit of "reply guy spam" and it's hard to simply ignore that, particularly if you're just getting started.
I'm thinking of a calmer notificaitons area that only shows things from mutuals. This could be overkill but it creates a 'safe zone' for people to get started in.
Also, one reason I asked is that I'd like to know if ANYONE is using these features! I get the feeling most aren't (which would be good to know)
@scottjenson This is one of those where it feels like a lot of up front customization work instead of just-in-time tweaking of stuff. If someone鈥檚 being annoying I probably just wanna de-emphasize them at that moment and folks like them instead of searching for the setting.
Super useful I just worry that folks won鈥檛 discover this.
@jon Oh, I completely agree with you. These options are very powerful but I'd argue that the people that need it the most are casual users (who famously don't go digging in settings)
My goal with this post was to understand if people use these and if they are helpful. If so, we could likely find a better way to surface this.
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