Is this sort of thing inevitable? The fact we feel compelled to bring algorithmic content sorting into the fediverse says something about the way we use social media. The author mentions that reverse-chronological timelines make you feel like you need to spend hours scrolling through much of the same thing to make sure you’re not falling behind on the internet. The other side of that is, why is it that we’re all spending so much time dumping the same thing into each other’s timelines? (I’m at least a little aware that I’m probably the nth person you’ve seen posting about this or a similar problem in the last week)
My solution to the timeline getting too fast has always been to unfollow/mute people, but maybe that’s getting impractical.
Happy with full timeline, I’ve followed people for a reason. Not interested in others making decisions for me cough fb. What I would like is a way to rank prioritise people and increase decrease feed volume based on priority that I choose. Also set / mute by topic.
The idea of a trending digest, posted elsewhere is also a good one. Opt in approaches.
This is exactly what I want to see. Every user should have their own algorithm that they can control to adapt their timeline to them, with settings like auto-open CWs by keyword, truncate posts over some user-defined limit, hide/show replies/boosts, show posts that are getting a lot of attention on your local instance.
I hate the framing of algorithms as a bad, Silicon Valley creation. Every fediverse service uses an algorithm, even if reverse chrono is one of the most basic algorithms. The negative part of big tech algorithms is that the user has no control over it and doesn’t necessarily know the goals of the algorithm’s writer. Let the user design their own algorithm and that problem goes away.