If we had an open source algorithm for Mastodon/Pixelfed that learned based on the words in the post and image/video we could have a Following + For You feed that showed you all the posts from people you follow and you could choose to see, say, 1 recommended For You post after every 3 posts from your Following feed. With the option to disable For You posts completely or tweak how often you see these.

Discovering new people to follow on mastodon/pixelfed isn’t great (hashtags are rarely used and make posts look ugly) so I still occasionally use twitter because I often discover new indie animators/gamedevs showing off their project making it really nice to browse the For You feed.

  • new_guy@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    There are effective ways to be discovered on Mastodon: by being boosted by others and by using hashtags.

    If a user wants to be discovered they should be using hashtags. If they’re not prioritizing discovery then they shouldn’t. And the “consumer” (for lack of a better word) can follow those hashtags, so they appear automatically on their home timeline.

    If a user wants to make their followers to know about a person then they should boost their content. That’s how relationship works on real life: Your friend sees something cool and snows it to you.

    • NXLOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      I know how reposts work. I know how hashtags work. They’re not great way for discovery especially for discovering smaller accounts. I constantly get recommended tiny accounts posting their gamedev or indie anime work through the algorithm. We can have chronological and algorithm on one feed so its the best of both worlds

    • whiny9130
      2·
      1 year ago

      word clouds will find when a corpus of hashtags is similar in meaning. If you use only hashtags, that’s like experiencing a grocery store or farmers market via an ambassador who cannot see the serendipitous shops that are nearby, the things frequently seen together. It’s like shopping in an app and never visiting the grocery store itself. Having a precision following list means you can’t experience going to a library and browsing shelves until something catches your eye - serendipitous search is fundimentally different from subscribed/reposted delivery, or even keyword search.

      computers and digital space don’t natively have the metric for which hashtags are closer, so they have to crunch the numbers to help figure out which books are closer to other books. Otherwise it’s like entirely separate universes that you’ll never ever find, like if you never knew a word that would lead you to a community of much more words and concepts and free thought.