[snarfed]UX/social norm question: following someone is often interpreted as an explicit positive signal. if you follow someone, they'll get a notification, and they'll generally think that means you care about them in some way. likewise, if you've been on a silo for a long time, and you see that someone you know is following you, you may interpret that to mean that they "still" care about you
[snarfed]we technically have native indieweb following via u-follow-of, https://indieweb.org/follow , but it still seems pretty rare. people are more often to subscribe in their reader, which doesn't give the followee the same kind of per-follower feedback
[snarfed]my own (recent) usage is funny, I currently post u-follow-of's for fediverse people I follow, to trigger Bridgy Fed, but I don't post them for native indieweb follows since I add those directly in my reader 🤷
[schmarty]bridgyfed++ i started before the UI update and now feel like i need to continue with this method for some reason. had the UI option been there at the beginning i would have gone right for it.
[snarfed]this ^ occurred to me because I want to prefer native indieweb following when I can, but if I then unfollow those people in silos, I wouldn't want them to see that and interpret it negatively
[tantek][snarfed] rather than "you care about them in some way" what I saw on Twitter was, "you want to see what they have to say [even if you expect to disagree with it]" and very little about "care"
[tantek]I think it's worth questioning the value of explicit follow interactions, like what actual social value is it bringing traded-off with the social hazards it is bringing (absence of following [back], unfollowing, etc.)
[tantek]fully private follow (traditional feed reader, follow someones feed, no one is notified, no one knows you are following, like no one knows your browser history)
[tantek]person-to-person follow (some silos, I think, can't find one offhand), where the person you are following is notified, and you know they know you are following them, so only two people know that this "relationship" exists
[snarfed][davidmead] I was thinking about the social interaction effects/norms of one person following another person, on a specific platform. not really thinking about counts or cross platform or any technical plumbing
[snarfed][tantek] agreed on the general interpretation of following, Twitter etc. I was thinking about people I already have a personal relationship with. if I follow them on web, and _not_ in a given silo, and they see that I'm active in that silo, I'd hate for them to think, hmm, he must not care about me as much any more
[tantek]if silos are like feeds, it doesn't really provide useful information (to others) to broadcast which particular feeds of a person you are (un)following
[snarfed]sure! that kind of above-platform (or platform/feed-independent) following infra is woefully incomplete right now, but I'd love to see it fleshed out and adopted
[tantek]also why I believe in the "follow a person" model, and then mute *types* of content you don't want to see (or hashtags) — where muting is obviously private (only you know about what you have muted), rather than the juggle/manage all the feeds/silos of a person you are trying to follow
[tantek]I realize this is probably futile because it goes completely against the dopamine reinforced interaction of a new silo popping up (Threads) and stimulating everyone with a whole new set of follows / allow-follows / follow-backs etc.
[tantek]btw not spending much time on Threads (native app UI) nor even spending emotional energy hating on it probably because I've been through this cycle enough times to see it for what it is and kind of meh my way around the problem
[snarfed]^ one small good first step on the de-duping is probably to encourage u-syndication links. eg [manton] you were my inspiration here, I'm ready to file a feature request to add u-synd links to https://www.manton.org/ ! 😎
[tantek]and as such, I am seeing ZERO brands or crypumpto or forex or saturated-color-twitchy-video-games accounts on my Threads home streams aggregation
[tantek]apparently 199 accounts. that's fewer than I would have expected. perhaps some of the accounts I blocked were fly-by-night scams and eventually disappeared. I did report all crypumpto and forex accounts as scams
[tantek]oof yes de-duping, that's starting to feel like a #indieweb-dev how-to chat unless you were wanting to discuss presentation / UX aspects? surprises to avoid when de-duping?
[davidmead]Since quitting the silo’s sometime ago, my view of “followers” is probably out-of-date. Also, my working assumption is that zero people subscribe/read my blog as I have no metrics on it 🙂
[snarfed]but interestingly UX wise that's still awkward compared to silos. you don't "post a follow" on silos, you just follow. so maybe something like "follow via my site" is better 🤷
[tantek]for example, on IG, if you tap the bottom right 👤 icon, then tap "Following" in the top right corner, then tap on the "Sort by Default ↓↑" line, and choose "Date followed: Latest" or "Date followed: Earliest", you will see a stream (reverse or actual chronological) of all your "follow posts" which are private to you, but still, they're there)
[tantek]point being, there *is* some notion of follow posts in the data stored by silos, so we might as well accept that such a thing exists, even if it is very hidden in the UI, and not public
[snarfed]oh definitely. we're agreeing. they exist, it's good that they exist, including for indieweb. UX wise for the average casual user though, they probably never think of "follow posts" at all, they just follow
[snarfed]maybe useful for us when thinking about how to represent actions in social readers, micropub clients, etc. "follow X" instead of "create a follow post"
[davidmead]I may be misremembering but I thought early Twitter had a “person X just followed you” in your timeline. Maybe that was one of the early clients
[tantek]maybe there's a subset of posts which are only "implied" or "under the covers" posts that are not actually visible as proper "posts" with author/date/location etc. to users
[tantek]I think it's worth more deep thinking & feeling about the UX & design considerations before implementing anything "follow" related that either notifies or publishes anything visible to others
[tantek]As [snarfed] said, plumbing is not the issue, and anything follow-related is something we should very much avoid merely replicating what any silo has done so far, because their incentives are strongly misaligned with ours when it comes to creating/growing a "social network" and curating what you consume
[tantek]Like we need UI flow sketches between multiple people and maybe only then UI screen sketches that illustrate visual mechanisms for accomplishing those flows. Plumbing is way down the priority list
[tantek]Not just avoid replicating the silos, but frankly avoid replicating anything decentralized that is a effectively a clone of silo UX. That means Mastodon (and yes ActivityPub) follow UX, or Bluesky for that matter
[tantek]for example, plenty of users want reposts/retweets and [manton] made the very wise decision of NOT providing that feature in http://micro.blog, despite "those that want it". That's the sort of deliberate design example to follow
[tantek]The designer is responsible for considering and designing for systemic effects which individual users (and desires) cannot be expects to know about, much less consider themselves for their own wants
[snarfed]^ it's interesting that [tantek]'s "silent following" brainstorming in https://indieweb.org/follow#See_Also is the opposite direction from where the fediverse has gone, requiring people to "accept" follows (at least by default) before the follow takes effect
[snarfed] UX/social norm question: following someone is often interpreted as an explicit positive signal. if you follow someone, they'll get a notification, and they'll generally think that means you care about them in some way. likewise, if you've been on a silo for a long time, and you see that someone you know is following you, you may interpret that to mean that they "still" care about you
[schmarty] snarfed: i do the same. i didn't have follow posts before i started with Bridgy Fed.
[davidmead] [snarfed] do you need to show where they are following from? Your posts on yr site, via RSS? The syndicated post on Mastadon etc.?
[tantek] for example, on IG, if you tap the bottom right 👤 icon, then tap "Following" in the top right corner, then tap on the "Sort by Default ↓↑" line, and choose "Date followed: Latest" or "Date followed: Earliest", you will see a stream (reverse or actual chronological) of all your "follow posts" which are private to you, but still, they're there)