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Is it just me or is the fact that the click-through link for someone's profile that you get when notified that someone has followed you on Mastodon leads to some useless page that doesn't show _any_ of their posts, requiring yet another hop off some link on the bottom of the page incredibly frustrating UX?

"Oh look, 50 new followers! 250+ clicks to see if i should follow them back or if they are just going for volume! (2 forward, 2 back, 1 to add) 50x."

Twitter: 1 to profile, 1 to add, 1 back

@kmett Overall I'm amazed how poor Mastodon is. I hope this new popularity leads to improvements.

@ciphergoth So far it is, sadly, almost exactly what I expected.

Fortunately, the chief twit seems to have finally realized _quite_ how unpopular the no-outbound-links policy was and didn't immediately double down on it, like Freenode did during its own alt-right implosion, so I'm not forced to spend all my time here, but yeesh.

@kmett you're not seeing posts on profiles b/c your server doesn't have them:

1. It hasn't seen them yet, as nobody on your server follows that person;
2. Your server deleted those posts to save disk space;

It's like subscribing to a mailing list, then complaining that you don't see all the emails, having to click through the online archive.

Either way, its distributed nature makes Mastodon "not Twitter".

@kmett you mean the phenomenon when a certain remote user's profile doesn't seem to have any toots when seen from schelling, but does when you click through to their instance?

yeah that one is annoying! has to do with the distributed nature of the fediverse and the difficulty of indexing the entire network. its a known problem without obvious solutions! i've seen some proposals but none has wone out just yet

@pee_zombie I think I understand the 'why' of it all, but clicking to a local profile, then going down to the bottom to click on their remote profile, which opens in a new window, closing that window, then going backwards to add is just the sort of bad design-by-committee UX I was fearing coming over here to try this out.

I wonder if I can't skip the local page and new window for the remote one with a scriptmonkey or chrome script of some sort, as that middle page is positively useless.

@kmett yeah its def not ideal, but there's always discourse and development happening, so mb someone will figure out a better way soon enough

also, if this helps, you can click on their avatar instead of scrolling down; not sure what you mean about "going backwards to add" tho

@kmett the "useless middle page" should occur less and less as our instance discovers and indexes more of the fediverse, in theory. will have to see if it actually works out this way

@pee_zombie If I click through from the "useless middle page" to their server to see their profile, I can't add them there, because that page isn't on this server and I'm not logged in on whatever other server they are on, so I have to bail out of there after checking that yep I know them and/or that they are a real person I might care to interact with, and then I can add them back on the "useless middle page" or I can add them by clicking on the + back in the notification page.

@kmett ah i see what you mean. i guess i discount the effort required but i agree that it shouldn't have to be that way

someone made an extension that remedies that last part at least, i'm still evaluating but mb you'd want to try it too?

github.com/Lartsch/FediAct

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Mastodon

a Schelling point for those who seek one