I honestly think that mastodon will die on the no algorithms hill.
Plain reverse-chron just doesn’t scale beyond the “hanging with friends and neighbours” experience that mastodon was designed for.
Which is a great experience/platform, but not the social media many are after, I suspect, for better or worse. And also, I suspect, an experience that’s not so hard to get elsewhere.
Thing is that lemmy/Reddit show how helpful simple sorting and aggregated recommendation systems can be without any opacity to users. I’m still baffled that mastodon and people there haven’t embraced that ethos more.
You just made me go back and check because I honestly didn’t even know the explore page was a thing! Clearly we have very different styles of Mastodonning :D
I’m of the mindset that if I can’t fully catch up on my feed within 10 minutes twice a day I’m either following too many people, or the people I’m following are posting too much. I just don’t understand the desire for infinite content. After a certain point I’m not actually reading anything in depth I’m just distracting myself.
Well some don’t want to read endless content either but want to cast a wider net and read what’s interesting to them out of everything that’s caught. Simple reverse chron doesn’t help with that unless you’re happy reading everything from everyone you follow which many are not.
Completely agreed, and it’s one of the things keeping me off Mastodon honestly. I don’t have a close group of friends on it, and for the purposes of following a bunch of strangers/outlets and whatnot I want a better sorting algorithm to actually show me interesting posts when I check in the morning.
Incidentally, I just saw someone singing the praises of mastodon because it forces people to form “authentic connections” as if they don’t their feeds will be empty. Thing they get wrong is that people will follow random strangers that seem interesting in order to fill their feeds. There’s no authentic connection to it at all. And then you get stuck with an unmanageable feed of random stuff from people you don’t know. But this is the myth or affectation of mastodon … that it’s all authentic and real friendships when it’s just social media.
@Coelacanth@maegul I agree with the need for this and I think there has to be a way of doing it given mastodon’s non profit motives, something we can configure, something that works with recommendations and can turn off if we want unlike other platforms that see algorithms as the centre of their business model. Whether mastodon eventually does or it has to be done by an offshoot/successor I don’t know
I honestly think that mastodon will die on the no algorithms hill.
Plain reverse-chron just doesn’t scale beyond the “hanging with friends and neighbours” experience that mastodon was designed for.
Which is a great experience/platform, but not the social media many are after, I suspect, for better or worse. And also, I suspect, an experience that’s not so hard to get elsewhere.
Thing is that lemmy/Reddit show how helpful simple sorting and aggregated recommendation systems can be without any opacity to users. I’m still baffled that mastodon and people there haven’t embraced that ethos more.
I agree that the no algorithm hill gets annoying once you’re following enough people.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t setup something like Bluesky has where you can choose which algorithm you want, including those not made directly by the Bluesky team: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23739174/bluesky-custom-feeds-algorithms-twitter-alternative
One of those algorithms could just be a chronological feed that some people seem dead set on sticking with. Everyone can be happy.
Same. I only use Mastodon for the explore page, which is basically an algorithm for the most popular posts
You just made me go back and check because I honestly didn’t even know the explore page was a thing! Clearly we have very different styles of Mastodonning :D
I’m of the mindset that if I can’t fully catch up on my feed within 10 minutes twice a day I’m either following too many people, or the people I’m following are posting too much. I just don’t understand the desire for infinite content. After a certain point I’m not actually reading anything in depth I’m just distracting myself.
Well some don’t want to read endless content either but want to cast a wider net and read what’s interesting to them out of everything that’s caught. Simple reverse chron doesn’t help with that unless you’re happy reading everything from everyone you follow which many are not.
Completely agreed, and it’s one of the things keeping me off Mastodon honestly. I don’t have a close group of friends on it, and for the purposes of following a bunch of strangers/outlets and whatnot I want a better sorting algorithm to actually show me interesting posts when I check in the morning.
Incidentally, I just saw someone singing the praises of mastodon because it forces people to form “authentic connections” as if they don’t their feeds will be empty. Thing they get wrong is that people will follow random strangers that seem interesting in order to fill their feeds. There’s no authentic connection to it at all. And then you get stuck with an unmanageable feed of random stuff from people you don’t know. But this is the myth or affectation of mastodon … that it’s all authentic and real friendships when it’s just social media.
@Coelacanth @maegul I agree with the need for this and I think there has to be a way of doing it given mastodon’s non profit motives, something we can configure, something that works with recommendations and can turn off if we want unlike other platforms that see algorithms as the centre of their business model. Whether mastodon eventually does or it has to be done by an offshoot/successor I don’t know