I think a big problem behind the reluctance of alternatives to the strictly chronical timeline on Mastodon is that people fear that too much power is taken out of their hands if they are introduced. But the fact is: it is already the case that we put a lot of trust in administrators to put the correct software in place. A strictly chronological timeline makes one thing less to worry about but basically, it only reduces the symptom of the problem. Instead, I think the real problem needs to be faced: take away the fear of users that their instances are not working as they are supposed to and give them the power to check themselves whether the instances they are on are actually doing what they subscribed to.
As the most important, I think of the following two:
- Defederation Tool: shows from which other instances your own instance defederated (I think that already exists).
- Timeline tool: is the timeline curated based on the algorithm the instance proposed.
If these are in place, you could check that you see the right posts by the right instances, which is already a nice thing to know to begin with and would at least me quite content for introducing custom timelines and thereby giving more power to the admins. And with the mentality of this being an important issue, there would always be someone trying to see if an instance is run as promised and most admins wouldn’t bother trying to do bad things.
Additionally, the algorithms would need to be determinstic and data collected by the instance about the user downloadable.
PS: Of course admins are doing a great job here, also given that most of them are volunteers. I’m not saying they are bad people, I’m just saying there need to be tools to control what they are doing if more powerful tools will be introduced to them in the future like custom timelines.
I would one up that suggestion : what could be awesome would be to allow users to choose which sorting algorithm they use, and possibly tweak it. This would allow people to share the sorting logic they like, and there would be no trust issue, since you can verify the logic is respected by changing it.
Not sure how realistic this proposal is, though, because this could lead to performance issues if users submit too complicated sorting logic, which could be exploited to DoS an instance. On the other hand, it could be solved with a timeout mechanism : “if your query takes more than 100 ms to load, we kill it”. And also, you can’t just let users run arbitrary SQL, obviously, so this would require to implement some sort of meta-language safely transpiled, this would be the real challenge.
Bluesky already implemented that. I think its a cool concept although most users will just stick to the default one
Which would make it important that the default would be something with no tweaks, like a chronological list. But I would be all for a scripting setup or some other configurable sorting engine to play with on a per-account basis. Maybe you could even subscribe to other’s sorting configuration.
No necessarily. Just let it federate.
You mean subscribing to algorithms of other instances? Really interesting idea but I doubt that it would be a good idea security-wise.
It would have to be a defined standard. I imagine it not so much as a script that runs, but rather a description of fields and weights. I guess there might be some computation involved, but I think a standard could be devised that there would minimize the security risk.
Interesting idea. Who would be setting the standards? Some neutral committee? W3C?
Don’t know. As long as it is open source, I’m not sure it would matter. Eventually one would win out with the community.
Oh really? Awesome. I’m still not going to use a generalist social network, but they’re doing it right. :)
Yeah, indeed. My taste for tinkering may be showing, I should acknowledge it’s not something widespread. 😅
I’m the same but the general user doesn’t want to worry about this kind of stuff. They want to sign up to an instance, probably based on a recommendation by a friend, and have a good time. And if they don’t, they change to another one. The algorithm would just blur into the whole experience of an instance.