Algorithms aren't the enemy. Chronological feeds don't scale and the signal-to-noise ratio will plummet if this ever gets popular. The real problems with today's algorithmic feeds are non-transparency, lack of choice, and optimizing for engagement instead of healthy discourse.

Open-source is a perfect opportunity to fix all this. Have there been any efforts to create a Mastodon instance with a (community governed) ranking algorithm? Is that technically feasible? Or is the idea simply anathema?

@randomwalker

It's a free world :). There are interesting forks and implementations with different behaviors, such as Hometown, which emphasizes local posting:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

Personally, I'd love the ability to temporarily turn the volume down for some frequent posters, or to have their stuff collapsed when the post velocity gets very high - that'd be enough for me at least at current scale.

GitHub - hometown-fork/hometown: A supported fork of Mastodon that provides local posting and a wider range of content types.

A supported fork of Mastodon that provides local posting and a wider range of content types. - hometown-fork/hometown

GitHub
@eloquence @randomwalker For that you can mute people temporarily, though.