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 50 points 1 week ago (3 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@slrpnk.net -2 points 1 week 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

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week 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.

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