I've just sent out 200 personal messages to people listed as my followers but who were not seeing my posts. True for a vast majority at least.
Everyone's been a good sport and really friendly. Having an an exchange with almost every follower is perhaps the silver lining in this mess.
A re-follow may have done the trick and perhaps already this post will be seen by a tad more people than the 15-20 people who have been able to see my posts the last few days.
🤞
If so, I'll keep going...
My confidence is not boosted by the activity on this post though. 👆 😅
Have now sent out a total of 500 personal messages (yes, manually). It's been very nice meeting you all. 😊
I will hopefully have time to do the next 500 tomorrow evening, and then I can return to my regularly scheduled programming on Friday. Haha.
The things we do when computers break... I'm now reminiscing about hard disk crashes in the 80s. I mean those things at least didn't break down covertly.
As I'm getting ready to send out the next 500 messages today I'm reflecting on the emotional cost of this migration breakdown. It's a hassle for me, obviously, but then there is the fact that I'm understanding how many people had their follow of me as "Pending".
If people went to my profile they would be wondering why I never approved their follow. That's actually one of my big fears... to be perceived as rude or stuck-up for things outside my control.
But much worse than that, I'm afraid of people waiting to accept my approval of their follow and imagining that I am dismissing them on purpose, because of who they are.
We talk a lot about the technical architecture of social networks, but we should also be talking about the emotional architecture that lies on top of that.
The Fediverse has great and important discussions about the interactions between people, and tools to support or mitigate interactions. But there is also a dimension of how we interpret the state of the system and make assumptions about other people's intent.
Emotional distress happens in the absence of interaction as well.
Taking a break to give you some stats.
I am indeed sending these messages manually. The web interface of my Akkoma instance makes this easier, as I can go up a list and send messages without leaving the list. I also have Rocket Typist on my computer, so the message itself has an abbreviation that prints out the whole message.
I just did a speed test and my fastest rate is 82 messages per 10 minutes. But that was when I was going really fast. My realistic estimation is 6 messages per minute. Because I also keep checking if I sent a public message by mistake (has happened 4 times).
This means in total to go through and send to each person on the current follower list of 1,000 people will take in total a little more than 2.5 hours.
Also, my followers are the best! I've had so many lovely messages back. Thank you. ❤️
So yeah. Worth it.
250 to go.
Aaaand that's a wrap.
1,000 listed followers have been notified. And based on the feedback I'd wager 95% of you were actually locked in a pending state even though everyone appeared as followers in my profile.
Thank you everyone for being so nice about this! I honestly didn't expect so much kindness - I was a bit nervous about sending all these out. My sincere apologies if you have gotten more than one message.
And yes I will do writeups of (1) What really happened here (don't have it all figured out yet), and (2) Why I prefer Akkoma over Mastodon.
Now I need a breather and a dog walk 😊
Quick #usability note.
As I expected a significant number of people actually do still believe (even after my message) that I'm not approving their follow request. Even when I explain that I do not have the option to approve requests activated. You can just deactivate the follow request and follow me.
The wording on that button needs to change… but it's also not that simple. The wording on that button, because this is the Fediverse, is different on different instances, on different software and on different apps. And in different languages.
Try writing a tutorial for that(!)