What's the point? Is it just to be like twitter? Why did twitter have that anyway. And if I hide mine I still show up in other people's public follower pages? That's dumb

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[–] cabbage@piefed.social 49 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's useful.

Let's say you see someone who posts stuff you're interested in. In a brief moment of absolute brilliance, you think to yourself "aha! Maybe this person follows other people whose content I would be interested in!"

So you check, and sure enough, there's a bunch of interesting people listed. So you follow them as well. Your social graph grows, you have a better time there, the people you follow get better reach and gets to enjoy pleasant interactions with you. Everybody's happy.

These social media platforms are designed to be public. If you want to do stuff in secret, do it somewhere else.

[–] 3dogsinatrenchcoat -1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

yeah but 1. You can just look at what posts they boost. 2. Why are your follows still visible if you hide them in privacy settings 3. Why is there no way to publically show who you're following without also showing who's following you

[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 11 points 2 days ago

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

Feature requests, issues, and bugs would probably be better responded to there. We really can't do anything about that. It's open source. There's also always the option of forking.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

For point one: Not everyone is into boosting or retweeting. Some actually find it a bit obnoxious.

Some people I might enjoy finding to follow, friends, community members, etc, might not be ones to post anything boost worthy.

For the other points, I assume these are just artifacts of Mastodon’s federated nature? Not sure exactly.

These sorts of platforms are not designed like a Facebook profile.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because the idea is to be one giant town hall/message board and to grow a social network based on who you follow.

If you don't want people to see what porn stars you follow? Make a second account to get horny on.

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago

I find it completely discouraging for any sort of content.

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 13 points 2 days ago

they wanted at least some feature parity with twitter in order to draw users expecting that environment.

[–] Auster@lemm.ee 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The Reddit-inspired instances like the Mbin and Lemmy-based ones may be of interest for you. The Lemmy ones, from what I can tell, always hide the follower list, and the Mbin ones allow the user to choose between showing and not showing. Also, both seem to be able to connect to Twitter-like instances, though UI for that part in the Mbin ones is pretty barebones and the Lemmy ones mix them up.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

You cannot interact with microblog folks on Lemmy, unless they actively post something in a Lemmy community by tagging it. So if you want to combine microblogging with threaded discussions Mbin is the only platform that does both. Mbin lists followers publicly.

I think there are Mastodon forks (or configurations) that hide followers from the public though. But it will only ever be half hidden.

[–] Auster@lemm.ee 6 points 2 days ago

I see. That's sad. But thanks for clarifying it!

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago

I always find it funny when I read a lemmy thread that's being posted in by microbloggers who just start all replies with @ followed by usernames of people they're replying to.

[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 5 points 2 days ago

I find it generally weird that follows, likes, etc. are public. But I can't say I understand those type of platforms anyway.

[–] 3dogsinatrenchcoat 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm just from tumblr we don't do that over there

[–] akesi_seli@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Since I worked on a Mastodon client, I know that there is a hide_collections parameter in the account settings which allows you to not disclose publicly your followers and following.

It's in the PATCH v1/accounts/update_credentials API request body, see documentation here.