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.
@robryk @rysiek if you want to be more-literal about randomness: algorithms which we can't see might have literal randomness as part of their process. Mastodon has no such algorithm, and therefor is not random. As I can't speak to how various "sort by recommended" feeds work, I can't say with certainty that they use randomness. I know that in at least one case where I've written them myself, they did involve literal psuedorandom numbers to a limited extent.
> Mastodon has no such algorithm, and therefor is not random.
I think there's actually more influence of randomness here, given that whether I see a given post depends on whether I happen to look at it in a stream of date-sorted posts at the time that I pick by a random process that's not influenced much by other things in fedi. If I had a queue of unseen posts sorted by some weight (or a feed that rate-limits posts I see by picking the ones with highest weight when the incoming rate is too high), the weight would be a good predictor for whether I will see the post. Until the post is boosted by (more) of people I follow, that weight is uniform across all the posts in my Home feed.
@robryk @rysiek perhaps if I can rephrase, I am more-generally translating "randomness" into "entropy", which in the context of this discussion I would further translate into "the ability (or inability) to accurately predict the outcome". I believe that Mastodon, being a more-open platform, would (given datasets of similar size), be easier to build an accurate prediction model for. BUT, if one exposed the (bird) concept of an artificial boost, I would expect the opposite.