While following a lot of people can populate your Home feed significantly, sometimes people (like me) end up boosting a lot and that can unexpectedly hinder your own experience.
So if you like someone's specific posts and don't want to follow their boosts, you can go to their profile under the [...] button, and select the "Hide boosts from account" button.
There is no algorithm on Mastodon. You have ownership and control over every filtering decision instead of some robot.
@simon @antimnguyen @GracelessHippo
For most people I agree that their boosts are interesting. For a few people whom I follow, they boost like a hundred different things in 30 minutes, and for them I've used this feature to turn off seeing their boosts, unfortunately.
There is in my experience a delay before it works, just FYI for those who try it and don't see a difference.
@antimnguyen "unexpectedly" lol.
a/ we all know how frustrating it is to have your feed full of nothing but posts from people you don't follow.
b/ people who boost other people's toots know exactly what they're doing.
@antimnguyen My god, this changes EVERYTHING.
But seriously, I wish there were a way to selectively see what people boost. Sometimes I want to see it and sometimes I just want to see people's original posts and replies.
@antimnguyen Did you mean "There's no *evil black box* algorithm here"?
I know it sounds pedantic but at least within tech spaces I feel we should not use the word "algorithm" like the most people use the word "system", i.e. as something nebulous, bad, and, in the case of the former word, as something that should be avoided or even eradicated.
@gabri
I don't think that algorithms are inherently evil. In an ideal world, I would like to have an algorithmic method that is highly controllable by the end-user. It is simply that many for-profit platforms have used targeted advertising as a monetization method.
I don't think it is inaccurate to mirror Mastodon's statements that they don't use suggestion algorithms. But not having them means that users have to do more work to see the content they want. That is what I wanted to communicate.
@tsumami @antimnguyen The technique suggested has been effective for me. I would argue that the algorithms showed me LESS relevant content, on the other website, than I am seeing here.
I would rather scroll past innocuous but irrelevant posts for hours, over being bombarded with tens of thousands of words devoted to hatred, vitriol, and disinformation.
@tsumami @antimnguyen I will also add, the corporation blamed its algorithms for my account being marked "spam" and suspended, multiple times, when I was trying to report spam, and debunk, and report disinformation, which the algorithm actively stopped me from doing:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/yl4nwe/comment/iuwnm83/
Here is documentation of my last suspension from Twitter, that stretched from January 28, 2022, until November 14, 2022.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/yf9ofm/comment/iu3qnza/
Twitter Support only lifted the suspension because I sent the following evidence to reporter Alex Heath at The Verge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/updkbo/comment/i8khufb/
Twitter Support's only response, to me, was that my account had incorrectly "automatically" been flagged as spam.
This is an outright lie as the foreign state bad actors whose COVID-19 disinformation I was attempting to fight and report were falsely reporting my account in large numbers; so it was NOT "automatic" at all!
Millions of COVID deaths happened because of Twitter's complete reliance on bad algorithms.
There can be other weird things: A nice person I follow had their posts show up as notifications unlike everyone else.
Unfollowing and then refollowing seems to have corrected that
@antimnguyen @Aminorjourney I like to think of it as we are the algorithm. My choices, and the choices of those I follow or share an instance with, is the algorithm.
I don’t mind getting more powerful tools to extend my algorithm with, as long as I am in charge.
@antimnguyen that's useful, thanks. I still think "the robot" made smarter decisions than simply hiding all boosts though... And trying to curate my feed has honestly taken quite a bit of time at this point...
I think many algorithms are evil (eg the ones on ad-based websites), but some are a great help to me :)
@antimnguyen in about 6 weeks I'm going to turn off all boosts, because they're pretty annoying really.
I really wish we had QTs to play the discovery role though. I want to be able to hear my follows saying "read this because it's about that" and boosts do not give that context telling me why I should read.
@antimnguyen But what I really want is "Hide boosts from xxx containing the phrase nnn".
Mastodon has filters you can create like this which act globally across all users. It shouldn't be too difficuly, surely, to add a users handle to this to make it even more flexible!
I might very well be interested in tech info from, I dunno, Bill Gates. Not so much my nan.
Right now it is all or nothing.
@antimnguyen Thanks
I wish I had a 'Throttle <person | hashtag | instance>'. I like the folks I follow, but itd be great to spread out the posts from everyone
Matt Rubin
An-Tim Nguyen 
simon gray
Jeremy Jacobs
indri
Tsumami 
lesp88
Doug Massey ✅
WOMUMP
Kat Earthren Liu
AliQuack🐘🦆🫖🍫🇪🇺
WaywardPython
AustinPSheehan
Autumn the Red Sage
PoeticLicenseDK
Trisha Lynn 🇵🇭 🇺🇸 🇨🇦
hawkse
Debbie Spillane
Max Riethmuller (TechLife)
Kelly
Sandra Goodson
Gabriela Noriega 🏳️⚧️ 🇧🇷
The Spoonless Kitchen
Edge
Jase
petrockette
Wolfgang 🎶= Me + Dog ☑️
Gen X-Wing
Planet_CC
Gwen Pauloski
lazysupper 🍂🍁 salguod, man
ALS
padrenurgle
SSFC KDT (MOVED)
Perpetual Mystic 
Kyle Rose
Bram van Dijk
DutchVulcano
Matthijs
John Harris
Rivikah
Marcel Kolder
𝚂𝚝𝚎𝚙𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝙵𝚒𝚛𝚝𝚑
SandyMamoli
Island_Martha
Sean
/// //