I had such a hard time trying to start off on mastodon. Finding the right accounts to follow, getting some basic filtering, no recommendations, …
That was very difficult and uncomfortably unintuitive for me. And I am a software engineer.
I can only imagine what hell that might be for a “normie”.
I love the fediverse and all it’s platforms, including mastodon, Lemmy, pixelfed, matrix, etc. but we still have a long way to go for people to adopt them, especially if you make it hard to get started.
I personally think the issue was never the recommendations or “content milling”. It was that there was no way to change it or turn it off.
I think the best way to make it more appealing is to put in the basics of other centralized platform but show users that it’s a choice, every time.
Registration? Enable OAuth with Google etc., but show users all of the options.
Recommendations? Use open source algorithms. Or models. On first login enable it and ask them if they want it to stay enabled, changed, or disabled.
Privacy? Turn off telemetry but tell them on first login they are free to turn it on in the settings to help with development.
Donations? Just like in boost for Lemmy, this should be the bottom-most option in the settings. Dessalines deserves the support.
I think the issue was never that a platform is capable of all the things lots of people don’t like, the issue were the dark patterns of opt out and making things hard to disable. Choice is powerful when it’s truly free and transparent.
why are (some) extroverts like this?
I sometimes do this too even though I’m very introverted. I do this because I want to feel useful with the experience I gained and it just feels like a waste sitting on some knowledge and not being able to do something with it.
It’s a really cool thing if you can help someone. And some people have such a need for this, either they completely forget they were very explicitly not asked, and some will ignore it, just in the hopes they get to contribute.
Funnily enough I get to see both sides, because I also sometimes get an answer from multiple people, so I’ve learned how to handle it to some degree.
The best thing to do is not to tell them to shut up, but to acknowledge it and then explicitly say “also wanna hear from [experienced] person as well on this though.”
THIS
Try to get this in writing, or document your day-to-day with this. Focus on the retaliation, the instances they tell you how you’re supposed to spend your money and maybe get coworkers to back you up and write that down.
The more clear evidence, the better. Lawyers love when you have a bunch of evidence in writing. Especially if it’s emails or similar directly from them that prove your case.