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Hm I just had this thought:

It seems to me that people who use Mastodon complain a lot about the bad people on the fediverse, like the racists, nazis, whatever. And I dont fucking see these bad people....

So I wonder maybe is because I use Friendica which displays posts and I have complete control over what I see. For example I can easily select to see ONLY the posts from my friends. Period. But Mastodon people may not have these sort of options, PLUS on Mastodon you see comments instead of posts. Like a fuck ton of comments.

So what if because Mastodon people get to read a lot of comments instead of posts, they see a lot more of the crap!?

I wonder...

And for the love of words, I have no clue how people put up with a newsfeed made up of comments that are always out of context. Makes a lot more sense to see posts and then comments on those posts, but never comments in the wild.

Maybe Mastodon people should try Friendica. It is really awesome and the control you have over what you see and who can interact with you, is amazing.

Mark reshared this.

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Tio
Ah ok thats good! So people can change that. Does it mean the default is to see the replies?
in reply to Tio

in reply to Isaac Kuo

Ok but I only see the posts from the people I have added as friends. If there are any bad people commenting on those posts then I do not have to read their comments unless I scroll through my friends' posts and and comments. So I can never see posts from these bad people unless I am friends with them and follow them. I think that's complete control over the content, regardless if my friends follow and interact with "bad people".
in reply to Tio

@Tio You don't see any comments at all, then? It has been a while since I tried Friendica, but I thought it would show at least some comments without needing to click through or expand.

Ugh.

The lack of visibility of comments kills interaction, and makes it such a slog for me to browse a stream. It takes so much time and effort to click and expand all of the comments, and even more so if a click through is required. This is why I keep going back to Diaspora.

@Tio
in reply to Isaac Kuo

No it will show either all comments or a few and the rest you need to expand. Up to you. I choose to show a few then expand the rest. Which is perfect else I end up scrolling through a post with 400 comments endlessly.
in reply to Tio

Thanks, that's what I had experienced back when I tried Friendica.

Like it or not, you will see any comments from (Mastodon) posters who are followed by at least one user on your pod. The way Mastodon/ActivityPub works, each comment is "owned" by the commenter. The person who made the post it's replying to does not have an option to delete the comment.

in reply to Isaac Kuo

Yes I can see the comments but not as posts, that's what I was saying. I can see the posts made by my friends, and yeah if I wanna read the comments I can do that too but they are not polluting since they are a few (collapsed). So I cannot see these "bad people" honestly...

And if I do in the comments I can easily block them and I will never see their comments again.

The control is fabulous.

in reply to Tio

I'm saying that the reason you don't see the "bad people" is that you run your own pod with few users, so no one else on your pod is following them. You only see a comment if at least one person on your pod follows the person making the comment.

A Mastodon user doesn't even see those comments at all unless they click through to view a post/reply thread. Even then, the way Mastodon works is that you only see part of the thread ... it's really stupid. But anyway, you either don't see any comments at all, or you click through and you see comments that the original poster has no moderation control over.

My point is - the problem is the protocol, and the choices of other people on your pod. Trying out Friendica wouldn't help.

in reply to Isaac Kuo

My instance has over a thousand users and I follow hundreds from many instances...some threads have hundreds of comments.
in reply to Tio

Ah, thanks for the correction.

Anyway, I don't see the relevance of whether or not you follow hundreds of people from different instances, or the numbers of comments in threads.

I don't think you understand how things work on Mastodon, though. By default, you only see posts/comments by people you directly follow, and you simply do not see ANY comments by anyone you don't directly follow. You have to click through to see any comments made by anyone else, and even then it's only comments made by people who are followed by at least one person on your pod.

Like I said, trying Friendica wouldn't help.

in reply to Isaac Kuo

Ok. Am not that familiar with Mastodon but every-time I tried it I got to see a wall of terrible comments instead of only seeing posts and not replies/comments. Even trying Friendica with Febilab that is built around Mastodon I could not use it because of the same reason: a wall of weird out of context comments, from people I did not know nor did I follow. I think it was pulling any comment from all of my friends' posts.
in reply to Tio

BTW, a thousand users is not very much compared to popular Mastodon pods. For example, I'm on mastodonDOTsocial, which has 1.5 million users. Most of these users are not active though, only 280,000 users active last month.

But a thousand active users should be enough to have at least a few following "bad people". Are all of those users active?

in reply to Tio

Huh. According to this, less than a thousand users, and only 48 active:

fedidb.org/network/instance/so…

That's ... not very much, honestly.

in reply to Isaac Kuo

That's incorrect, but ok. It is beyond the point, I see a ton of posts even in the federated timeline. And I almost never see these "bad actors" that people complain about.
in reply to Tio

You're only going to see posts from people who are followed by at least one user in your pod. That's just the way it works, regardless of platform. It's not about the platform, it's about the choices made by the other people on your pod.
in reply to Isaac Kuo

Then I have to thank the people in my circles from not being terrible humans :)