Mastodon gets better search, onboarding, and cross-server interactions
Mastodon gets better search, onboarding, and cross-server interactions
The update comes with some very welcome improvements.
Unfortunately I've heard that a lot of people especially from academia are moving to bluesky. I've already started talking to some people I know about Mastodon. I hope the word spreads around.
What's so special about bluesky that people are migrating there?
The big thing is that it is invite only. Also, I find it easier to use than mastodon.
Another point, I need more shitpost in my feed. I fucked up with my mastodon feed and have too much political crap on there. I ended up saving a good amount of invites and invite only to small group people I like and want to keep touch with (no rando). So, I ended up with a small cohort of people over there that I can share thoughts and photos with.
What I hear a lot is
- they are following other people there
- they don’t know how to use Mastodon and prefer Bluesky
- people on Mastodon keep telling them that they aren’t using it correctly
- reply guys on Mastodon who think they know everything better than the scientists
Guess that proves education can't teach you common sense.
Over time everything gets eaten up by open systems. If you are worried about lemmy or mastodon, don't be. Other open systems are the real concern. I'm rooting for nostr.
The instance I'm on got updated to 4.2 yesterday, but the new search still isn't working for me.
Usually, I'd have thought this was because it needed to take time to index all the posts, but people on other servers are saying that the search is working for them. 🤔
Search only works if your instance runs a search engine installation. Typically this is done by the admin installing ElasticSearch:
Ah, I see. I'll have to ask my admin whether it's going to be added or not.
And Lemmy... stays the same
Looks like a decent workflow update, still going to be confusing for brand new folks I bet
just in time for X to require paying to post
Any improvements to the moderator tools?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mastodon, the federated microblogging platform, has been updated to version 4.2, which comes with massive improvements to search and the web interface, particularly for logged-out and first-time users.
One of Mastodon’s many charming qualities is that, unlike Twitter X, Bluesky, Instagram, and most other social media platforms, the user base is split across thousands of instances, each of which can decide to federate with or block any of the others.
If you’re logged in to Twitter X, for example, you can click on a link to a tweet post, and you’ll be able to retweet it, reply, star it, whatever.
In order to engage, you had to copy the URL, go back to your instance, paste it into the search box, and then do whatever you were going to do (assuming you remember).
If you haven’t tried Mastodon yet — or you tried it and bounced off — you may be interested to know that 4.2 also improves the sign-up process in the web interface.
One last note: the search and web interface improvements only show up on servers that have installed version 4.2.
The original article contains 645 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So, can Mastodon 4.2 full-text search now see Lemmy posts and replies, even without hashtags? You can follow Lemmy communities and accounts from a Mdon account, that way the info is in the Mdon instance databases, but as the new search is "opt-in" only, do Lemmy communities or users have to set some flag to agree that our posts and replies are searchable ? This might help discoverability of Lemmy.
Mastodon search functionality was probably the worst of any site I've ever used.
That makes sense considering that before this update, posts weren't searchable so you could only find user profiles, hashtags, and your own (& favorited?) posts. It was basically just a hashtag and user search before.
Mastodon search functionality was probably the worst of any site I've ever used.
Mastodon is ass. Instead of having social media corporations deciding what you can say, it's some random neckbeard who threw together a server. And your account does not transfer if the admin decides he doesn't like you. Hissy fits over defederation are already tearing apart a lot of good instances. Half of mastodon is just circlejerking about how much better it is than twitter anyways.
Swap mastodon for lemmy and Twitter for reddit and it's the same comment.
Then stand up your own server and govern it as you please.
I don't want to run servers to participate in social media.
This is exactly how Lemmy works, yet you’re here…
My tip would be to try finding German instances. Generally, Germans do this fediverse stuff right, they use it for everyday chill stuff in contrast to Americans who just want to discuss politics and gender all day long.
Any social media that involves followers is fucked or can get fucked.