What's with mastodon and the other microblogging software having public "following" pages
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
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.
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
Feature requests, issues, and bugs would probably be better responded to there. We really can't do anything about that. It's open source. There's also always the option of forking.