How would you say “no obscure algorithm to determine your timeline, hiding posts of people who follow and showing posts of people you don’t” without having to write a full paragraph each time?
No algorithms isn’t a selling point to the average user. My Mastodon feed is kinda sad and boring, if I’m not on top of it I’ll just miss interesting posts that happened in the days I didn’t open the app.
Bluesky custom feeds really help with that, while still providing the chronological no-algorithm view as your main feed. It’s just a more interesting experience for people that aren’t chronically online.
Yep, discovery is still a major pain point for pretty much every Fediverse platform. Probably the biggest issue the Fediverse faces right now, IMO.
Part of it is due to technical limitations due to the way ActivityPub/federation in general works. But another big part of it is (what feels to me like) a stubborn aversion to convenience, a trend I see a lot in FOSS dev communities. When you have devs that would be content reading a news feed off of a .TXT file passed to them on a 5" floppy, and users who want features on their platform, you end up with the situation we’re in, where it’s impossible to convince the mainstream user to migrate. If the mainstream user doesn’t already know who is even on the platform in order to follow them, and has no effort-free way of discovering accounts to follow, they’re not going to stick around. Especially when on just about any Mastodon server you join, your local/global feeds are almost all politics and high-level tech discussion.
I think that the average user would be supportive of FOSS and the Fediverse in general, and probably likes the idea of a non-corpo platform where they have more control over their feeds and their content. But I feel that it’s not worth trading away discovery or “algorithmic” tools for most users.
I think if Mastodon (or a Mastodon-adjascent platform like Misskey or Pleroma) could find a way to develop an algorithmic recommendation engine that respects user privacy (perhaps basing recommendations on a file stored on the user’s account, which they can modify/backup at will), we could see a sizable increase in Fedi users.
There’s a major section of mastodon users who like mastodon because it doesn’t have any recommendation algorithms. Both from the side of “I don’t want to be told what to click on” and the “I don’t want an algorithm surfacing my posts in a way I’m not in complete control of”
This might curse it to forever be the platform with the smaller number of users, but the nice thing about activitypub is that there may be other services/clients that will be willing to take up that mantle for those that want it.
Either you’re following the wrong people or this says more about you than it does about mastodon
Or maybe you just want to see more relevant and interesting posts from the people you follow at the top of your feed rather than digging through hundreds of people crying about politics or talking about their dog walk this morning…?
So stupid. Just use Mastodon. No algorithms. No billionaires. No monetization. No bullshit. And some really great folks, too.
Could we please use words for their actual meaning?
How would you say “no obscure algorithm to determine your timeline, hiding posts of people who follow and showing posts of people you don’t” without having to write a full paragraph each time?
“No algorithms” is a worse answer to this question than “no timelines”, “no posts” and “no people”.
“No trickery” maybe. “No recommendations” is another.
No algorithms isn’t a selling point to the average user. My Mastodon feed is kinda sad and boring, if I’m not on top of it I’ll just miss interesting posts that happened in the days I didn’t open the app.
Bluesky custom feeds really help with that, while still providing the chronological no-algorithm view as your main feed. It’s just a more interesting experience for people that aren’t chronically online.
Follow hashtags, not just people. That makes your timeline much more interesting.
Have any recommendations?
If the developers could fix search, it would go a long way in improving Mastodon.
Yep, discovery is still a major pain point for pretty much every Fediverse platform. Probably the biggest issue the Fediverse faces right now, IMO.
Part of it is due to technical limitations due to the way ActivityPub/federation in general works. But another big part of it is (what feels to me like) a stubborn aversion to convenience, a trend I see a lot in FOSS dev communities. When you have devs that would be content reading a news feed off of a .TXT file passed to them on a 5" floppy, and users who want features on their platform, you end up with the situation we’re in, where it’s impossible to convince the mainstream user to migrate. If the mainstream user doesn’t already know who is even on the platform in order to follow them, and has no effort-free way of discovering accounts to follow, they’re not going to stick around. Especially when on just about any Mastodon server you join, your local/global feeds are almost all politics and high-level tech discussion.
I think that the average user would be supportive of FOSS and the Fediverse in general, and probably likes the idea of a non-corpo platform where they have more control over their feeds and their content. But I feel that it’s not worth trading away discovery or “algorithmic” tools for most users.
I think if Mastodon (or a Mastodon-adjascent platform like Misskey or Pleroma) could find a way to develop an algorithmic recommendation engine that respects user privacy (perhaps basing recommendations on a file stored on the user’s account, which they can modify/backup at will), we could see a sizable increase in Fedi users.
There’s a major section of mastodon users who like mastodon because it doesn’t have any recommendation algorithms. Both from the side of “I don’t want to be told what to click on” and the “I don’t want an algorithm surfacing my posts in a way I’m not in complete control of”
This might curse it to forever be the platform with the smaller number of users, but the nice thing about activitypub is that there may be other services/clients that will be willing to take up that mantle for those that want it.
As a perpetually overloaded autistic person, yes please.
Seriously - something like federated Hotline would be so cool. Distributed - even better, of course.
OK, dreaming.
Either you’re following the wrong people or this says more about you than it does about mastodon
Oh no!! Heaven forbid you miss a social media post!! Whatever will you do?!??
You really leaned into the ‘jerk’ vibe with this one
Yeah, I guess I do that sometimes. Sorry.
Or maybe you just want to see more relevant and interesting posts from the people you follow at the top of your feed rather than digging through hundreds of people crying about politics or talking about their dog walk this morning…?
I never thought I would see the day that people WANTED algorithms. Jesus. Get of my lawn, kids.
There’s always an algorithm.
Sequential order with no weighting for what you care about is just a particularly bad one.
Something very basic and transparent like lemmy’s ‘scaled’, sure