One thing I am always surprised at when people discuss Twitter/Mastodon clients is that there are apparently still so many people who attempt to consume every post in their timeline. I pretty much gave up any pretense of treating my timeline like an inbox years ago.
(Not an argument for algorithmic timelines at all BTW. I just don’t care that much about rock solid timeline position restoration because I don’t even pretend to follow everything that happens on here.)
@buzz I learned to --love-- tolerate the algorithmic timeline at some point. My hope for mastodon is that I’ll be able to tweak the variables to some degree and end up with something that works a bit better. I don’t need much more optimization than the 2000s era Bayesian spam filters tbh.
@jimray Perhaps a more thoughtful algorithm might habitually say “Hey, here’s someone you haven’t seen in awhile! Guess what—they still exist!”
@buzz Weirdly, Facebook has this feature. Last time I checked it out, it wasn’t actually that compelling to me.