Two years on Mastodon today.
(I rather like it here, but I still quite miss the intellectual stimulation, witty humour and breaking news of Twitter in its top years.)
@verbeeld three more days for me and (unsurprisingly) very similar feelings...
@vicgrinberg @verbeeld I find that here it depends very much on selecting whom and what to follow, crafting own lists.
Yes, the default lacks algorithms stimulating engagement, but that's a feature.
That said, it's quite a bit of work to optimize the feed. I wish there were some open source bots helping to do that.
I found a feature discussion and plenty of links about it. There are ways to implement it on client side, or/and by making a bot crafting lists and filters, or on server side. There are even attempts to do it.
But the real obstacle is not technical - it's not that hard to sort by engagement.
The difficulty is to understand what **should** be done: clearly very few people want another attention-maximizing platform, but federated.
@volodymyr @verbeeld @SnowshadowII in an ideal world, I'd like an algorithm that I can fully control - smthg where I can easily tell it "pull up all entries from my feed that got X engagement within the last Y days" or "show new content posted by folks on list X within the last 5 days that have not posted much within the last ~month otherwise". I definitely can't read all my feed and lists help but not as much as I'd want them to. But I also suspect that would be a lot of load onto the servers.
@vicgrinberg @verbeeld @SnowshadowII
I too want something like that, but I also want other ways. E.g. I want some kind of non-personalized top list, to learn what the community is up to.
I want to exercise agency in selecting my feed, but I want to leverage to be efficient.
If there was a choice between different algorithms, people could discuss and develop.
Technically it's not obvious this is too heavy. It can also be clientside. The github issue mentions phanpy - a working prototype?
@volodymyr @vicgrinberg @verbeeld @SnowshadowII Of note: Bluesky currently has features to make it easy to follow user-generated feeds, which offers this sort of freedom. I've certainly seen academics who have tried Mastodon say that Bluesky provides them with a more useful tool for conversation and networking with their academic community. That being said, I'm not aware of true demonstrated federation of Bluesky (aside from just identity servers), so proceed with some caution there.
As you say, I think similar things could be done in Mastodon, but there is such a strong phobia around "algorithms" that such efforts to make relevant posts easier to find/filter tend to provoke fierce backlash. So it's more of a cultural problem than a technical one.
@internic @vicgrinberg @verbeeld @SnowshadowII
Yeap, same experience with BlueSky: more lively, has user agorithms, but actually does not federate (even if it is meant to). So - suspicious.
People do not want to delegate their decision making (to algorithms).
And I get: it's hard and often dangerous to trust, but it is not possible to live in full manual control.
I think social networks should be the space to explore these questions.
True federated, open source, social networks.
@volodymyr @vicgrinberg @verbeeld @SnowshadowII I think I have a similar viewpoint. I frequently see the discussion on Mastodon couched as whether algorithms are good or bad, but I think that's a false dichotomy. This being software, of course any feed is algorithmic, and it's rather a continuum in terms of the complexity and transparency of the algorithms allowed and how their use is or is not controlled. This hasn't really been explored sufficiently yet to know what the outcome of different policies might be.
Unfortunately, the discussion around federation and bridging with other services and around search makes me suspect that culturally Mastodon is too phobic about this and related topics to usefully explore the solutions. I hope, of course, that I'm wrong.
