Eugen RochkoDuring the #Eunomia meeting, I was asked, who are the most influential accounts on Mastodon? I know what Mastodon thinks about popularity contests, so don't get me wrong, I am not going to publish what I find, but I am thinking of methodologies for determining who in this network has influence.
I didn't say "influencer". I didn't talk about Instagram users pushing sponsored products. I didn't talk about users who put "thoughtleader" into their bio as if that would make it true.
Anyway, I can't resist sharing some of my thoughts on this. Ranking by follower counts alone is boring. Admin accounts artificially inflated through the Tom effect.
Running the follow relationships through PageRank makes the results a bit more interesting, but I still feel like that's not it--the results are too influenced by my personal follows, and it's hard to agree that some of my personal friends have influence on the community just because I follow them...
I'd be curious to see how the results would look if you used the number of times a person boosted the person they are following as a weight in PageRank. Maybe that would be it.
Odo Tournesol@Gargron Why do you need to use the data to create hierarchies at all?
witchlectical runeterialist@Gargron i mean .social is going to be a bit stilted by your presence, just as witches.live is stilted by mine. this is why i think mentions are kind of a big deal here, it seems like the most popular people get in conversations or are tagged into things regularly
@Gargron its very different than like, twitter or insta or whatever where number go up, since interaction here is a lot more interpersonal
𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚝@𝚑𝚙𝚌:~#
Lumb@Gargron
What about if you assigned a weight to faves and boosts and hmmm is there a way to track just replies? I suppose just times people have been mentioned could do that.
But I mean, just the number of times people have had their toots boosted, faved, n replied to? Is that something
What about if you assigned a weight to faves and boosts and hmmm is there a way to track just replies? I suppose just times people have been mentioned could do that.
But I mean, just the number of times people have had their toots boosted, faved, n replied to? Is that something
knzk forever 
@Gargron hmmm. if i aint number 1 i'm suing
healyn@Gargron i appreciate your transparency, and i think the best way to rank users is how often people respond "god damnit" or "god damn" or some other variation to their posts
Trap Beat Spider
Maggie McFear@Gargron Next time just show them pictures of the best cats... which will also be hard to decide. :)
Gadfly (-booq-)@Gargron The question's a bad one, IMO.
It tries to collapses "influential" into one measurement, which is, like, totally BS.
@Gargron
Like is your question "people know their opinions and react to them and that drives conversation?" Then you're pretty high up there. Most people have SOME take, if you take an opinion.
But if your asking after, like, an Ender's Game style "their phrases and opinions percolate through the community" -- with all due respect, I don't think you've done much of that. Whoever came up with the term "hornt", tho..? DesPITE me (and you, and, like, everyone) not knowing their name!
@Gargron Alternatively, maybe you want "they cause people to take certain actions" -- heck, there's a 60+% chance /I/ hit that! Unless someone I didn't see was also constantly mouthing on about it like me, I singlehandedly caused both Pleroma main and at least one Mastodon fork to implement BBCode parsing!
@Gargron
Btw, as an instance admin I would love more tools to be able to look at metrics (messages in and out of the instance, most/least active users, etc.) just because I think it would be neat to be able to track that stuff.
Btw, as an instance admin I would love more tools to be able to look at metrics (messages in and out of the instance, most/least active users, etc.) just because I think it would be neat to be able to track that stuff.