this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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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.
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.
This is exactly why I just could not get into mastodon, and probably Twitter-likes in general
There's no way, atleast at the time, to sort by top of the day. No way to see what was trending across the larger fediverse, no real way to find new and interesting things every hour on the hour
Lemmy is thankfully significantly better with this, and it's honestly become my go-to social app now
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.
I would not have guessed that reply guys replying to really popular accounts would ever check if their reply is a duplicate.
I didn’t catch that this is why Alec stopped posting there. I assumed he was just being sensitive to being a public figure in general.
When you make a channel that is filled with “well actually” and “turns out.” You should expect your audience is into doing the same.
And when you don’t have an algorithm filtering these for you… well, then you get the reality of other people’s interactions. Twitter just optionally hides this reality from big accounts. (I’m talking about what they use to label “low quality replies” or something similar.)
The federation issues of replies/boosts/hearts/etc are still a big bummer, though.
He was really popular on twitter, and if he says mastodon's worse despite having a smaller audience there, I trust his judgement. Literally his pinned toot.
"First replies shown are the ones the author replied to and/or liked" seems like an obvious, simple, and transparent algorithm. Like youtube comments. Give lazy reply guys an opportunity to see without scrolling down that they aren't as original as they think they are. The fact that this isn't implemented in even a basic form is absolutely insane and shows a very fundamental ideological disconnect between people who want "open twitter with decent moderation" and whatever the fuck it is that the mastodon OGs/devs are trying to achieve.