If I now start posting and boosting in these communities, since there is no interest-based content recommendation algorithm on Mastodon, people who follow me will see these in their timelines, no matter if they are interested in those particular topics or not.
2/6
I know that many are using Twitter and Mastodon from a purely academic and professional perspective to stay up-to-date on relevant works and those could be annoyed (or see Mastodon as not well suited for their use-case) when people they follow also post and boost stuff from, to them, unrelated topics.
3/6
There are two solutions I see here: 1) create a second, community-specific Mastodon account. 2) Have some form of recommendation algorithm.
I think 1) is annoying and too much trouble for the end-user.
4/6
Option 2) is often waived off by Mastodon users, saying that they enjoy the algorithm absence in comparison to Twitter. While I generally agree with this statement, I think this is the perspective on a recommendation algorithm that is based on likes and retweets and the popularity of the author and retweeter (is that even a word?).
5/6
This leads to famous (in terms of followers etc.) people being recommended with a higher likelihood. E.g. on Twitter, I don't even follow Elon Musk, but I see every single post of his on my timeline. What I'm getting at is: While Mastodon should stick with not recommending posts based on the popularity of the author, it might still be a good idea to recommend, or rather score, posts based on how relevant it is to the user.
6/6
Steven Braun
Marc Lanctot
Michael Misamore