One of the things that's made it easy to find communities whose discussion I want to see is the linear feed. This is a stark contrast to new social apps I've tried, e.g., Clubhouse, where my feed is dominated by high engagement stuff I don't want.
I understand why companies push that stuff; looking at Twitter's experiments, you get more growth/$ when you switch users who've chosen linear timeline back to ranked timeline.
Fundamentally, this is why most apps don't even offer linear timeline.
At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.
The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.
If I look at my own site, I make $30k/yr off donations and could easily do 10x that with big ads, but I don't currently need the money enough to put ads up.
Likewise, if you do the math on how much it costs to run a Masto server, even if the fediverse gets way bigger and hosting costs go up, you should be able to run a small instance on donations.
Donations aren't profit maximizing compared to have ranked feeds with ads, but it's ok for there to be things that aren't profit maximizing.
Dan Luu
Gabriel Pettier