Fundamental UI flaw: current timeline options are confusing to beginners and seem impractical

[ell1e]

Pitch

The current timeline options seem very confusing to beginners, and is it only me or do they ignore the entire idea of followers entirely (or alternatively, fail fully without any)? That seems a bit outlandish and impractical.

Here are the timeline modes that I think would be most expected:

1. Posts & boosts of all people I follow but ordered by some weighted mix of time and how often they were favorited, with maybe the occasional most favorited post from the known federated ones thrown in (from someone I may not follow). This is alike to Twitter's "Home", ordered view, and could be something like "Followed and popular activity". This I think is a mix of Mastodon's current "Home" and "Federated" views. So far, there seems to be no view mode to do this.

2. Posts & boosts of all people I follow unordered, no matter if they're local to my instance or not. This is alike to Twitter's unordered, non-algorithmic view, and could maybe be called "Followed activity unranked/by time". This is, if I understand it right, Mastodon's current "Home" view.

Option 1 is IMHO the more natural default, since it would still have content to show when I don't follow anyone yet. Additionally, the timeline view should then prompt me to follow people in a very prominent way by suggesting some.

The current "Local"/"Federated" buttons reflect, as far as I can tell, none of these two modes and they're confusing, so I think they should be removed or be turned into a minor option somewhere (like on the "Home" view).

Motivation

The current buttons seem confusing because:

1. Neither of "Local" or "Federated" is obviously referring to the activity timeline a new user wants to get to, and the (current) "Home" doesn't work well when I don't follow anyone yet,

2. They push a view mode choice on people that don't know yet how to choose when they're fresh on the platform when they basically just want to get to "the timeline" but with a well-working default even when not following anyone yet (which current "Home" doesn't seem to offer),

3. Neither of "Local" or "Federated" a view option people would naturally want to see on a platform where following is a thing so I don't get the prominent placement,

4. The point of mastodon seems to be to unite across federations, so that "Local" is a suggested option at all is confusing to me,

I don't know, I just don't get it. Why not 1. Remove "Local"/"Federated" buttons, 2. Make a side menu button when looking at "Home" with above suggested view options and maybe the old "Local"/"Federated" views as optional unobtrusive choices, 3. Make the suggested Followed and popular activity (with followed stuff ranked by favorites & unfollowed more global favorites thrown in, especially for when not following anyone yet, so some weighted variant of "Federated" and old "Home" united in one single view) the default for "Home".

This would fix both the confusing buttons and make the "Home" view "just work"(TM) out of the box as people expect. I think it would greatly enhance the initial experience.

[ell1e]

I think this twitter thread explains nicely why "Home" is underpowered (since it doesn't have wide enough reach without some mixed mode like my above suggestion of "Followed and popular activity", see above) and why the "Local" & "Federated" variants are too untargeted and conceptually confusing: https://twitter.com/shengokai/status/1592099805492174849

Similarly to the linked poster, I think this is one of the fundamental, major flaws of Mastodon.

[MattWilcox]

I've written about this longform, but TLDR:

Human centering language rather than technical centering language is generally more approachable for everyone.

I would suggest the following:

Instance -> Community Local Timeline -> Your Community Federated Timline -> Other Communities Explore -> Topics

Instances are re-branded as Communities. Which is what they actually are as far as the people using them care. The fact they're an Instance or a Server is a technical detail, not a functional one. You choose a community to join, which is implemented as an Instance. Ditch the technical terms for user presenting interfaces.

"Timeline" is somewhat understandable but still somewhat technical - "local" is certainly technical in most of the cases where it is used in the project. "Local Timeline" makes sense but again centers the technical language. "Your Community" is more general and also more of what matters.

"Federated" is just a no-go for non-technical people. Most won't care to read an explanation. The "Federated Timeline" is more broadly understandable as "Other Communities"

When switching to the "Local timeline" in the Mastodon app, the dismissible explanation currently reads: These are the most recent public posts from people whose accounts are hosted by mstdn.social. maybe try instead These are posts from people in your community; mstdn.social. To see posts from other communities, look at the Other Communities Timeline.

When you click on the Federated Timeline you're faced with this explanation: These are the most recent public posts from people on this and other servers of the decentralized network that this server knows about. That is certainly too technical for many new users; maybe rename the Federated Timeline to "Other Communities" and re-word the explanation as: These are posts from other communities that are friendly with your community.

Explore is nebulous. What am I exploring? Users? Instances? Topics? Suggest renaming to Topics which is what that interface actually presents; topics as defined by hashtag. If that's the feature MAstodon wants to centre. At the moment it loads "posts" which are "gaining traction" which is getting close to an algorithm being centred.

As for usernames; there's confusion because the shorthand of using only the first part (@mattwilcox) is not a Mastodon username, it's an instance username. But that's what people are used to thinking of a username in most other systems (because they're unique in centralised systems, but not in federated systems).

I would suggest that the language around "usernames" is changed to "Mastodon Addresses" and effort should be made to equate it to an Email address - which is actually how it works, and is more readily apparent that there might be many @myname users, that each exist in different communities.

[MattWilcox]

Current:

Proposed:

Original toot

[ell1e]

While that fixes the naming, to me it doesn't seem to fix the (comparative) lack of usefulness of these options, or maybe it's just me.

[MattWilcox]

I absolutely do not want 1. A feature of Mastodon is a simple timeline with no algo, and I would have no desire for 1. It leads to Bad Things. A big selling point to MAstodon - for me - is how it works now.

2. I don't follow what you mean? Isn't that exactly what the current default home timeline is?

[trwnh]

Instances are re-branded as Communities. Which is what they actually are as far as the people using them care.

The problem with "communities" is that they've already been tried and caused a lot of confusion. It implies that a server even has a community, which may be true for some servers but generally misleads people into thinking they have to make multiple accounts to participate in multiple "communities", because the word "community" makes people think of Reddit or Discord.

If there's an analogy to be used, I've seen "neighbourhoods" which is less inaccurate but not really ideal either.

[ell1e]

I absolutely do not want 1.

Use 2 then! But I think most new users will want some variant of 1 as a starting point. (That doesn't mean tuning it as aggressively as Twitter, see below.)

A feature of Mastodon is a simple timeline with no algo

Even a simple listing is an algorithm of sorts. And not factoring any wider federated favoriting at all, not even as an option, just makes it really hard to find new things. Yeah, chasing favorite scores etc. has its dark sides, but this can be softened via various scoring (e.g. non-linear weighting of favorites scores to favor excessive standouts less, focus more heavily on followers if they post enough, etc.) Just having no good global discovery at all isn't a good alternative. The current federated view is so random, many people will find it not that useful, also see the tweet chain I linked above.

2. [...] Isn't that exactly what the current default home timeline is?

Yes. So you could keep using that anyway.

[ell1e]

Here, I made a UI mockup myself:

(a bit janky but it should illustrate the basic idea)

View option "Followed & Popular Content" would be a mix of "Explore"'s list of popular posts and current "Home", with some sort of built-in weighting factor on how this is mixed/ordered. If you follow nobody it would still something, namely the popular posts, so it's a way better starting point than before.

View option "Followed Content" would be current "Home", so the no-thanks-I-want-it-unfiltered option for pure followed stuff.

View option "All Local Users" would be the previous "Local" sidebar category.

View option "All Federated Users" would be previous "Federated" sidebar category.

Things addressed with this: 1. the confusing for beginners "Home"/"Local"/"Federated" buttons listed in the sidebar categories are all fused into a single "Home". 2. The timeline has now a default where it's not empty when I click "Home" as a new user, but as soon as I follow someone it has an immediate effect mixing that in, which I think is a good easy to understand compromise for newcomers. 3. The timeline will now keep interjecting some popular stuff as an occasional seasoning to make discovery of things easier in its default view, while allowing to turn that off - a slight algorithmic nudge if you will that widens the view but is optional. 4. And the federated and local views aren't gone either, just moved to a spot where they're slightly harder to find, but on most larger popular instances they're not that useful anyway since they're just such an onslaught of unsorted stuff that it's hard to use them - so I think having them slightly less visible this way to confuse beginners less makes more sense.

Edit: just to add this, obviously this is an opinionated suggestion. It slightly undoes, at least as a default, the default views' sharp focus on instance-local-crowds and only-those-I-follow-crowds in favor of having at least some popularity based federated influence mixed in. While it can all still be opted out of, I know some appreciate mastodon's more focused and strictly compartmentalized defaults. I personally think some of the magic of a wider view and discovering new things is lost that way, hence this suggestion (and this suggestion makes onboarding easier, too).

[ell1e]

I think this post sums up my thoughts on this pretty well, and why I hope the timeline options are changed in some way alike to how I suggested: https://mastodon.social/@deivudesu/109734757190753099

People who reflexively recoil in horror at the suggestion of any "algorithmic curation" must either have 10h to spend reading their timeline… or not mind missing out on the 70% that get posted when they aren't around… 😐

It's just a time thing. Completely unsorted just isn't the most ideal way to find good content for everyone, as much as any algorithm has its flaws. Options would be nice.

[nemobis]

Completely unsorted just isn't the most ideal way to find good content

So you're not talking about the presentation of the different timelines, but merely of what gets into the home timeline? That's https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/3782

[ell1e]

@nemobis yes this is in part a duplicate of #3782 (which i hadn't seen before, thanks!) but in part also isn't because I'm also suggesting revamping the UI around it. I made both a very concrete suggestion for useful algorithms and then very concrete suggestions for the UI buttons to be adjusted and different to how they are now. Because "Federated" and "Local" are words that are very confusing how they are used right now, especially since the UI doesn't even tell you what that refers to. Federated what? It doesn't even say Timeline. ("Home" implies that for most people, these other two words don't.)

[ell1e]

This bug is still the reason why I mostly read on Twitter, and post on Mastodon. I just can't find enough interesting things to talk about on Mastodon itself.

And before you say I have to follow more interesting people then, I'm following more than 300 people so clearly enough to get quite some activity. But with it being absolutely unranked and no weight given at all to what others might have found above average interesting, I'm just pretty much guaranteed to miss all the gems that I really would want to be reading. The "Explore" posts listing is both way too generic (can't be limited to who I follow) and too limited (should be an infinite or way longer listing, not the few items that it is right now), and therefore even if I bother to jump around the UI so much and not have this nicely unified worked into my timeline, as it should be, that doesn't solve the problem.

Mastodon just doesn't seem very good for finding interesting things.

[MattWilcox]

Follow people you are interested in. Not just people. Follow tags you are interested in. Go and look, don't just expect to be spoon fed.

[ell1e]

Nobody is always interesting, people aren't robots. That's what optional agorithmic rankings can be helpful for, to prioritize a little what sticks and make it easier for everyone who wants that. Algorithms aren't inherently the devil if used for positive things.