Tim Nguyen 
Red Team friends dropped me off some gifts! Woot!!
Lauren Weinstein@methodtim Be sure to plug in the flash drive buried in there. Special surprises await!
Edward Rosen 
@laurenweinstein @methodtim exactly. I'd scan for RFID frequencies before you stick those to anything.
@edrosen @laurenweinstein Gentlepeople of the Mastodons, I did that joke already: https://twitter.com/methodtim/status/1524090321390301184
@methodtim @edrosen Actually, I'm finding the structure of these timelines here not very conducive to scanning for past relevant posts. It seems to take 10x longer than on Twitter.
The absence of "the algorithm" is sorta jarring isn't it.
@methodtim @edrosen Which puts the lie (again) to the largely politically-motivated attempts to vilify "algorithms" in general. Without them UGC even at this relatively small scale can rapidly become a mess that would just take too much time to sort through manually, even with the best of intentions of everyone involved.
@laurenweinstein @edrosen Yes and no. At its core, the algorithm was essentially "1) if you like this thing, we'll show you more from this person, 2) and more from things we think are similar, 3) but also how about this other stuff which is super popular for some reason so you'll stick around" -- and there's a lot to not like about that last bit.
I think my only real critique of what is essentially a purely chronological timeline is that it's... kind of boring.
@methodtim @edrosen I'm not even really thinking about the Twitter algorithm in particular -- since I've tended to stay with a chronological timeline there most of the time (though I expect that the method I use for that will get broken at any moment now). But I can scroll through large numbers of posts there quite quickly in a way I just can't here. It's discouraging me to even try, so I'm obviously missing stuff, again even at this relatively low scale. My "algorithm argument" is more in line with, for example, YT -- which would be utterly unmanageable for me without it, especially for a heavy YT consumer like me who tends not to follow what's trending at the moment.
@methodtim @edrosen And I'll add, the YT suggestion engine and I get along really well. It virtually never offers me anything toxic, and most of the stuff it surfaces for me is excellent. It knows me pretty well and that's just fine.
@laurenweinstein @methodtim agreed, it's like Twitter and YouTube have an ability to carry a conversation by showing more. Mastodon answers the question you ask, but nothing more and totally stops talking. I'm using the mobile app and got to the end of the posts - and that was it! I started tapping the buttons on the bottom and discovered at least a little more content. I'm sure it'll pick up when I follow more people.