Responses to some frequent comments:

* I'm certainly not suggesting that algorithmic feeds should be imposed on everyone! Choice is great. I recognize that many, perhaps most current Mastodon users like chronological feeds.

* "Reverse chronological" is an algorithm, albeit a simple one. It's currently the only option. Chronological feeds are not normatively neutral. There is, unfortunately, no neutral way to design social media. https://mastodon.social/@randomwalker/109308664849924122

* "Mastodon doesn't need to become popular." Sure. But like it or not, it's getting more popular, and many of the newcomers have a different culture and expectations. Eugen Rochko: "People who are arriving now have as much right to be here and bring their own culture as the ones who came before them." https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323118267580967

Again, all I'm suggesting is choice, and I thought Mastodon is all about choice.

* What do I mean by chronological feeds don't scale? A few things.

1. There's a lot of social pressure to follow people (especially people you know). Old-timers here are comfortable with following a small set of people, but most newcomers aren't. For those people, pretty soon the feed becomes a firehose.

2. Even in a mostly-chronological feed, some ranking would be really nice. *Not* necessarily by popularity, but if there are 15 posts by the same person I don't want those to be the first 15.

Amusingly, this thread is getting boosted a lot today, a couple of weeks after I first posted it. That's another difference between chronological feeds and Twitter's algorithm (which heavily emphasizes immediacy).

But—and this is the point of the thread—imagine all the interesting things you could do with a tunable algorithm. You could even let the recency preference depend on the type of content! You could customize it to show you news only if recent, but educational content regardless of age.