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glitch-soc / mastodon

A glitchy but lovable microblogging server
https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Modify or Remove "Enable Desktop Notifications" Message #1466

Open rhipsalis-paradoxa opened 4 years ago

rhipsalis-paradoxa commented 4 years ago

image

Currently the Mastodon frontend will occasionally display an "Enable Desktop Notifications" message in the notifications section. There are a couple reasons why this message may be considered an anti-feature:

Pushes a potentially addictive setting

Closing Mastodon allows the user to take a conscious break from online discourse, so enabling desktop notifications "when Mastodon isn't open" makes it subtly harder for users to disconnect. While desktop notifications may be useful to some people, the banner in its current state actively pushes enabling them. This may seem like an insignifcant problem, but it goes against Mastodon's ethos of breaking free from the addictive/unhealthy patterns of centralized social media platforms.

Overly commercial language

The "Never miss a thing" line is reminiscent of an advertisement, or something you'd see on a centralized site. Sites like Twitter, Discord, Slack, et al. employ similar, if not identical, language when advertising features like desktop notifications. Mastodon is free software, so it doesn't need to reproduce such canned, commercial language if it's not trying to sell its users anything. After all, sites like Twitter are the problem that Mastodon seeks to fix -- so why borrow from it?

-- It may also be relevant that this banner has other, more technical issues.

ClearlyClaire commented 4 years ago

I understand your concerns, and I'm not super happy with the current solution either.

It was introduced because the way Mastodon asked for the Web Push permissions until now was broken and unintuitive (it tried to request permission some random amount of time after loading), and we need to ask permission on a user event.

There was also some confusion about where the setting is stored, I will try resolving that and reworking the design accordingly. I think we might not need this banner at all if we ask for permission when enabling individual settings.

EDIT: on that last part, I'm confusing web push and browser notifications, the former is indeed session-bound, but the latter is shared, which is an issue

rspeer commented 2 years ago

There should at least be a "No" button to go with the "Enable desktop notifications" button, to make it stop asking.

I made it stop asking the way I would for various commercial websites: clicking the button and then clicking "Always Block" on the resulting browser popup. But Mastodon should be better than a commercial website, and not use pushy language to ask a user to consent to interruptions.