#indieweb 2025-09-21

2025-09-21 UTC
failxontour, aelaraji9, srxl, Maker and JustBleedFan joined the channel
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trwnh not that i'm aware of but to summarize: mastodon unlisted is still visible in your home timeline and on your profile, but youtube unlisted is not visible in your subscription feed or your channel videos
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trwnh ie youtube unlisted means you have to access it by direct url
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aaronpk Mastodon unlisted doesn't sound like unlisted to me
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[tantek] +1
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aaronpk like if the post appears in a list, it is inherently not unlisted
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[tantek] lol
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trwnh mastodon unlisted is basically "don't show this post in the public timelines" hence why they rebranded it as "quiet public"
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trwnh imo it makes more sense to me to think of unlisted as public, and public as discoverable (or unlisted as discoverable=false)
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[tantek] None of those make sense to me in terms of what the labels literally mean
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trwnh it is a weird and not entirely consistent set of expectations, yeah
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[tantek] Pretty sure every other service / software treats "unlisted" the same way so Mastodon is being weird here
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[tantek] Likely violating user expectations based on their experiences with other tools/services
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trwnh naming things is hard, to be fair
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[tantek] Even Strava is consistent with this meaning of unlisted
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trwnh the "quiet public" name is a few years old at this point
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trwnh "unlisted" lives on in the codebase and the frag id of the docs page
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[tantek] "Quiet" is not really a good qualifier here IMO
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trwnh on a technical level it's just to:public vs cc:public which mastodon uses to control visibility in discovery features
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trwnh so far that's just public timelines, which includes hashtag timelines
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[tantek] yeah it's a weird overloading of email destinations semantics
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trwnh (meaning that if you use a hashtag in a "quiet public" post, the hashtag is basically useless)
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[tantek] Similarly hashtag and unlisted is an odd combo too
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trwnh and of course outside of mastodon, other consumers can interpret it as "public" without making that distinction
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trwnh i think i proposed like 5 years ago or so for mastodon to use their existing `discoverable` property instead of the weird idiosyncratic to-vs-cc heuristic as a sort of "magic switch"
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[tantek] I think Mastodon made "public" unreliable ever since inconsistent replies being listed under your post
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[tantek] An explicit discoverable property would be better for search and hashtags for sure
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[tantek] to-vs-cc for that sounds like weird use because it's there like cw overloaded summary
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trwnh well if it's your post then the immediate replies should be consistent because they would have been sent to you. it's really the replies under other people's posts that are inconsistent (if they are on a different server, because those replies might not reach you)
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trwnh this is getting a bit too close to #indieweb-dev territory but i am reminded of salmon and salmention as a way to propagate replies up the chain, which would at least allow you to check the "root post" on the origin server for a more complete picture. alternatively if there was a real conversation being maintained on a central hub server then you could check there (kind of like a mailing list)
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trwnh there are definitely a lot of choices that mastodon made nearly a decade ago that they're still paying for today
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trwnh the real question is how to make progressive enhancements and upgrades in an ecosystem where most participants don't actually recognize differences in protocol or protocol versioning. everyone just kind of assumes that everyone else is doing the same thing, but they're totally not
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Loqi hey trwnh, that's a lot of dev jargon! root, salmention, protocol... can you move to #indieweb-dev?
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trwnh and there we go xD
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[snarfed] glad we're a bit less beholden to this kind of naming and behavior baggage/complexity in the indieweb 😁
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[tantek] trwnh++ for making a good effort at keeping it user-centric 😂
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Loqi trwnh has 1 karma in this channel over the last year (5 in all channels)
BigShip5, coldfeet, doesnm2, gordinator, DanQ, rvalue, barnabywalters, barnaby, jbd, CRISPR, _90_008[d], failxontour, raucao, marc_in_space, marc_in_-, [KevinMarks], plantroon, [schmarty], merlins, [social], proofreed, angelo, cotsuka, [schmarty]1, Maker1, BigShip54, sarna and gRegorLove_ joined the channel
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[morganm] Mastodon somehow manages to tick all of the boxes in terms of technical features and focus I would want out of a social media platform, but my lived experience of trying it out was not super great and I removed my account in a sort of push to reduce my online time. I really liked how deleting my account felt like actually deleting something somehow, rather than like checking a row in a database "isDeleted" and effectively having left all your
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[morganm] data over all the same
sarna joined the channel
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[tantek] I still think the UX is causing cognitive decline after heavy use over time, since it has been cloned from short-form social media in general, see previous chat https://chat.indieweb.org/2025-09-14#t1757815660517800
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Loqi [preview] [[tantek]] I had an insight about social media today (in the context of observing some current dynamics across a few topics)
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[morganm] Im really happy with my current low-key and down-graded usage of internet and media. I still have a instagram but I use the web client only and its massively less overpowering
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[morganm] Agree with the comments about inhibitory control. emotional cigarettes and such
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