Comment by allenu
5 days ago
> 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.
When you have an algorithm, it tends to favor some posts over others which in some cases is good but in other cases is oh so bad. The higher problem is the visibility of the algorithm misbehaving is reduced, so you're likely not even aware of how bad the problem is.
Rather than have an algorithm and trying to hide any problems, Mastodon puts the problems front and centre. You are forced to deal with them. It makes you spend a little bit of time controlling your feed's hygiene and in return you end up with a feed that only contains useful content.
It's like the eating healthy alternative to doomscrolling.
It also has another interesting side effect. Not having an algorithm that concentrates on popularity means that the low effort content problem tends to evaporate away. Attention seekers aren't rewarded for spamming or rage baiting, since they lose followers every time they try.
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