Eniko Fox in Elk: "Man people are having a bit of trouble wi..."

Just noticed, at least on mobile web for mastodon 4.4, pinned posts beyond the first are hidden behind a tiny left/right widget at the top right. This makes having multiple pinned posts pointless since let's face it, nobody is gonna see that tiny widget let alone feel compelled to click on it. So this effectively makes mastodon less unique and more like every other social media platform where you only get 1 pinned post

Sure, you're technically allowed more, but nobody will ever see them

Again, I get why they did this. But it's hard not to feel like all the character, all the uniqueness, all the customizability and control is being sucked out of mastodon just like it gets sucked out of anything trying to go mainstream

I guess if fedi wins the social media battle maybe making it as bland and watered down as everything else might actually be worth it. But that doesn't seem likely so is it just making things bland to appeal to people who aren't and never will use mastodon?

Man people are having a bit of trouble with the "I get why they did this" huh? Yes lots of pinned posts on a profile was a problem. Yes this solves that problem. It also makes having more than one pinned post effectively pointless. Both can be true. And if it makes having multiple pinned posts useless then, maybe, it wasn't the best solution

July 15, 2025 at 8:11:51 PM

@eniko a tiny widget? that's awful

imo *key does it right, there's a seperate tab for pinned posts and usually is selected by default when viewing a profile

There's a lot of the *key UX that I think is awful, but this is absolutely the best way to handle it. Though it could be made more clear, because I was today years old when I found out that default view is pinned posts and that's why I have to click "notes" to see someone's notes when it was already displaying their notes.
@eniko

@SymTrkl @eniko fwiw i don't actually know what the default it.... half the time it shows me notes and half the time it shows me pinned

Replying to someone

@ielenia @eniko that nicely explains why there are so many pinned posts on misskey

That sounds like a nice solution.

Another I could imagine is having the newest N pinned posts followed by a big bar that says "show older pinned posts" before the regular feed.

yeah :/ like... we came to terms with the clear fact that Mastodon gGmbH is seeking mass appeal and that this will imply becoming, over time, highly similar to the corporations it claims to be an alternative to

that's why we self-host, and why it's not a masto fork we use

but it still sucks watching it play out

it's a catastrophically bad UX choice. The better solution would have been to have three toggles for pinned/own/boosted post, to enable/disable each at will. would have solved this AND other problems

BTW what's infuriating is that those toggles are actually present in the internal API. But the UX only exposes specific combinations.