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Hmm, I would have thought a post starting with @mention would not be visible on the main timeline but only under posts and replies but apparently not.

I guess it’s “full attention of everyone following you” or “direct message.” Would be nice to have “public but I’m not shouting it to all my followers” as the default for @mentions.

So the issue here is we’re not differentiating between directing a post to someone and mentioning someone in a post.

If a post begins with someone’s handle, that post should be treated as a directed post.

If public, it should not appear to all your followers by default (but should be in your replies if people look there).

If not public, mentioning other people in the post should not bring them into the conversation.

The current in is socially awkward.

@aral You're saying it should work exactly the same way it works on Twitter? 🤔

@decathorpe I just made a case for how it should work from first principles. And yes, that’s how it’s implemented on Twitter (or was, last I know). But the latter follows from the former, not vice versa.

@aral As far as I know, there's no such thing as "directed posts" on Mastodon, so you just described a feature request for something you'd want to work - that's not "first principles", but ok 😅

Either way, even if there's no distinction at the protocol level (yet), it should be relatively straightforward for clients to implement something like that and not show "directed toots" in feeds ...

Aral Balkan

@decathorpe Designing from first principles is about discovering the right problem to solve (e.g., how do we encourage civil discourse) and then working out from there to arrive at means of solving it.

What it’s not is looking existing artifacts and emulating them without understanding the needs, success criteria, and process(es) that led to them even if you end up in a similar place at the end (most times, you won’t.) It’s about constantly questioning fundamental assumptions.

@aral Sure, but that's exactly what I'm trying to say ...

The way this works on Twitter (and how you'd apparently want this to work here) is completely non-obvious and has no effect on the UI whatsoever. I used Twitter for *years* before I accidentally discovered this was even a thing. If you'd actually design a feature like this, making "at-handle at the start of the text is secretly magical" is definitely not the way you'd do it ...