During 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.
@Gargron Why do you need to use the data to create hierarchies at all?
@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
@anna
The total(?) lack of brands here kind of changes the game, yeah
@Gargron
@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