Comment by runako
5 days ago
I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?" I'm in EST, for example, which means that unless my Asian follows are up in the middle of the night, I will generally not see their posts on Mastodon.
Also some people post a lot more frequently than others, but in practice that means I want to surface every post of the infrequent posters to make sure I catch them. As another comment noted, the Quiet Posters feed in Bluesky solves for exactly this.
IMHO the pluggable algo design of Bluesky is the way to go. I already follow feeds that are based on manually-verified membership of the poster, content of individual posts, and on frequency of posts. I'm really excited to see what other algorithms people come up with.
You can make lists in Mastodon, and put the noisy people there and exclude them from your main feed.
You can put all your Asian follows in a separate list as well if you want to quickly catch up with them.
No algorithm has its down sides, but I doubt they'll put in an algorithm that I'll like more than "no algorithm".
I'll add that I think algorithms should be the responsibility of the client, and not the server. The web client is merely one client. There's not much preventing any of the numerous other clients from implementing an algorithm.
Bluesky also has a followers feed like Mastodon. I use that one sometimes, but it's easy to toggle over to one of the algorithmic feeds as well. Sort of best of both.
Worth noting that some algorithms can be done client-side, but it may not be feasible or desirable to do so. For example in the open protocol of email, some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
Either way, I think the proliferation of sites is good for the digital ecosystem.
> some huge majority of all mail is supposedly spam. Filtering client-side would be a tremendous waste of resources. I suspect the same could become true of any open protocol like Mastodon or AT.
I once had access to the Twitter Firehose.
It was, as you say, a mindbogglingly tremendous waste of resources.
The solution was always: provide several algos on top of chronological order, and let people choose.
Client side Algo cannot be implemented because the API does not give you enough controls (I know, I have written Mastodon clients)
If you can get the messages, you can run a client-side algorithm - just download everything in the last 24 hours or whatever, and algorithmically choose what to display in what order.
2 replies →
Too much work for not enough reward.
> I tend to follow a lot of people, and like to see a mix of their posts. But on Mastodon, what I got instead was "who is posting right now?"
This was a big issue for me. Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online. Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
I remember seeing someone post a prototype of a view of the feed that instead treated it like a messaging app or RSS feed where you'd see a list of posters sorted by most recent post date first. That way, you could just click on a profile to see all their posts in chronological order instead of a mixed feed of everyone's posts. I thought might be a better way to go.
> Some people I followed would constantly post, so your feed, over time, simply becomes whatever those extremely online users post. It becomes less of a "balanced media diet" if it favors people who are always online.
I saw this as a feature of sorts.
If anyone starts spamming my feed: instant unfollow.
Now my feed is curated towards a slow but interesting ephemerality, and not a firehose of psychological manipulation designed to keep me hooked.
> Of course, you can just stop following those people, but you really don't know how prolific someone is when you first follow them.
Hard disagree.
Rather than following people willy-nilly, I've found I've become a lot more discerning who I allow on my feed. If I see an interesting comment / shared post / post on a hashtag I follow (e.g. #creativecoding), I'll always check their account and review their post history before choosing whether to follow them.
> Now my feed is curated towards a slow but interesting ephemerality, and not a firehose of psychological manipulation designed to keep me hooked.
This. It's also not email - it's not vital that I catch every toot from everyone I follow. It's an entertaining list of posts that I can dip into when I have five minutes spare.
I love the no-algo thing. I love that I'm not being manipulated for maximum attention. This makes it actually practical for me to use because I don't get hooked into it for hours.
It's like the internet used to be :)
>If anyone starts spamming my feed: instant unfollow.
How is that a feature? It would be entirely unnecessary with a feed mixer.
2 replies →
> I tried Mastodon before Threads & Bluesky, and I can say that the lack of algo was the part I liked the least.
It's probably the one big technical feature I like the best.
Not to say you're wrong, just that we use it differently.
I've never tried Threads (out for my disdain for Meta/FB/Zuck), but I can sort of understand why some people prefer Bluesky.
To me, Bluesy if a better alternative if you want to see (or become) "viral" things. If you secretly dream of having one of your hotcakes/zingers/memes/rants become viral and get millions of views/boosts/retweets/whatever, Mastodon isn't for you. Perhaps Bluesy is. And if you enjoy those occasional viral posts, you'll see them there and not on Mastodon (at last not without doing a lot more work curating the list of people and hashtags you follow).
I mute Mastodon posts linking to Bluesy, because I very explicitly do not want "viral content", at least not until it's been vetted and reposted by someone I've chosen to follow.
Why don't you start Mastodon from the place on the timeline you previously got off? I do that, and I scroll up to see newer posts instead of scrolling down to see older posts.
That wouldn't solve most of the issues I indicated.
The solution to this for me is lists, though there are other options.
Lists group profiles, and I tend to have 2--4 of these, mostly organised by priority / interest, and explicitly NOT organised topically. Roughly, there's A, B, C, and maybe D. This is a system I'd come up with at Google+ and Diaspora*, and find it fits Mastodon pretty well.
I try to keep A limited to 20---40 people / accounts of greatest interest. That evolves over time, in part as people join or leave Mastodon, or as my own interests / frustrations shift.
B are still generally interesting but not as interesting. C and D are filled as I find profiles really aren't bringing me joy in A or B.
Mastodon lets you pin threads (in the traditional/power-user view), so I'll usually have 1--3 of my lists pinned to the display, unpinning as I find them distracting.
Other options are to use filters, to focus on your own instance's local users (if that's sufficiently topical), or to use various group systems (Guppe is the principle tool I use, there are others: <https://a.gup.pe/>).
Note that for topical filtering you're far better off using either keyword filters or group/community systems such as Guppe. As was learnt many times over at Google+ (and its Circles feature), people don't know how you've classified them, and may have little interest in accommodating your ontologies. (People yelling at others for not conforming to how the yeller had organised the others got to be a rather amusing if cringe trope on G+, that site's equivalent of "you're holding it wrong".)
Other tools include limiting reshares by people or within lists, and of course, muting and blocking profiles. I'm of the block early and often school.