Going from "certain features that cause virality are not implemented here" to "hence things cannot go viral here" not two weeks after #JohnMastodon went certifiably viral is… a take.
Going a step further and claiming this somehow means fedi could not have supported social movements even more of a jump.
One way I could respond to that is: this whole network is a social movement, for Dog's sake! It started off as a social movement of people who wanted out of walled gardens.
But…
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…I think there's a more important point here that is missed.
I don't think such "virality-enhancing" features generate more attention in the system, so to speak.
On 
and other algorithmic social networks these virality-enhancing features only *shift* that attention towards certain things, at the cost of other things.
Wondering why you get more interactions around here with fewer followers? My uninformed hot-take is: that's why. Our "attention budget" is artificially redirected.
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So yeah, things are not algorithmically amplified — but nor algorithmically buried either. There is no artificial virality, but there is also no artificial non-virality.
The dynamics are different.
This does not mean things *cannot* go viral — they can, as #JohnMastodon shows if anyone needed any proof.
I strongly believe Fediverse *can* support social movements (it is one), and that interactions here might be more meaningful thanks to lack of certain "virality-enhancing" features.
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@rysiek Things that go viral here when they actually go viral, not when someone pays to promote their product. That means going viral here is "worth more" in terms of human interaction than going viral on commercial platforms. Because it's real.
@robryk @rysiek while there are many factors in what causes virality to happen I would hesitate to call any of those factors "randomness". eg: weather is modelled using randomness as a placeholder for "variables we don't have the ability to know". So, if one takes the same definition for "randomness" here, then somewhat definitionally: a system which doesn't have the ability to artificially alter the results regardless of those variables would see more influence from them.
Randomness is a good model for the world, in the same way in which temperature is a good model for motion of molecules. You can similarly say that temperature is just a placeholder for all the variables we don't know about (motion of individual molecules).
What I'm curious about is: let's say a similar post was posted by a similar person at a similar time. Would you be more certain about predicting whether it'd become viral based on everything you can see at the time it was posted here, or on e.g. Twitter?
