As much as people mock it, or know it’s the source of why social media optimizes for outrage and other unhealthy behaviors, the algorithm is what they are missing on Mastodon.
As someone who always used third party Twitter apps, and never directly saw the algorithm in my timeline, mastodon feels like Twitter always did.
Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.
Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.
I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.
Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.
Yep. Actually brave to say this given the fever that word throws people into. But not only is everything literally an algorithm, including “show your subscriptions in chronological order” but we all want a little more than that because it’s easy to imagine how one frequent poster would throw that experience off completely. We need to talk about what we want from algorithms and lay down this narrative that we must stamp them out of existence.
They want an algorithm.
As much as people mock it, or know it’s the source of why social media optimizes for outrage and other unhealthy behaviors, the algorithm is what they are missing on Mastodon.
As someone who always used third party Twitter apps, and never directly saw the algorithm in my timeline, mastodon feels like Twitter always did.
Some people don’t want a suggestion algorithm but do want full reply federation.
Alec from Technology Connections stopped using mastodon because of this, every post he made would get nitpicked on by 20 different people from instances who did not federate the replies with each other so each reply guy thought they were the first.
I have a single user instance and I use a relay, but most replies are still missing if I click on a post unless I go to the original webpage.
Lazy-federating replies when a post is viewed sounds like an obvious solution but AFAIK the mastodon devs are very opposed to this.
Yep. Actually brave to say this given the fever that word throws people into. But not only is everything literally an algorithm, including “show your subscriptions in chronological order” but we all want a little more than that because it’s easy to imagine how one frequent poster would throw that experience off completely. We need to talk about what we want from algorithms and lay down this narrative that we must stamp them out of existence.