Notifications are a pain point:
giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.
They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.
They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.
And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.
Yeah I really feel for Alec and his Mastodon problems (I would mention his handle but that would be yet another ping). Twitter never appealed to me but Mastodon seems even harder to use, even just going through OP’s linked thread was hard for me having to open up each reply. Then any time a related thread comes up elsewhere in the Fediverse, all those mentions end up in the original person’s account.
Months ago I posted a TechConnections video on Lemmy and added his Masto handle in there. He was receiving all the Lemmings replies too, possibly unbeknownst to the people commenting on my post. There was some criticism towards Alec mixed in with the praise.
I think it was part of the point of Twitter to follow famous people’s musings… If you have an amount of notifs that would make your phone vibrate off the table all damn day, that’s not a good experience.
There are definitely technical improvements that can be made to make Mastodon a more enjoyable experience for major or minor celebrities and their following. I hope people using Mastodon come around on their views on algorithmic filtering. They are on the “naive algorithm or bust” train. Giving users more control over their feeds and notifications algorithmically seems like such an obvious win to me.
I think it would be good as an “opt-in” feature to placate anti-algorithm folks.
I am privacy conscious to an extent, but I’d be ok with data collection and “algorithms” if they are clearly defined and have a clear purpose. Masto being open source would for the most part satisfy my requirements for transparency…