Pete Prodoehl 🍕

A friend of mine posted about algorithms and how they feed garbage to users of certain social media sites. Here's my response:

I see people who have left Twitter join Mastodon, then they do one or two posts, don’t follow anyone, and then give up. Like, hey, sorry pal… this is work. You gotta put in some effort to find people to follow, and to actually engage. You are not just a consumer anymore, you are a participant. So get going! Do something or nothing will happen.

Jul 24, 2023 at 6:37pmWeb
Show threadPete Prodoehl 🍕Jul 24, 2023
Because you know what? If you don't follow people, reply, engage, and post... the only one who loses out is you. There is not quarterly earning report or stockholders or sales leads on Mastodon that are worried about "hitting their numbers" by shoving ads in your face. We are people here, looking at other people. That's it.
Show threadCalum Andrew MorrellJul 24, 2023
@rasterweb @neil It's short memory syndrome. When they joined Twitter, they had to put in a lot of work to establish their accounts there.
Show threadPete Prodoehl 🍕Jul 24, 2023
@drulum @neil Did they though? Doesn't Twitter suggest accounts to follow? Does that happen on Mastodon?
Show threadCalum Andrew MorrellJul 24, 2023
@rasterweb @neil Even with that, it takes effort. That makes one aspect a little easier, but there's a lot more to building an account than finding people to follow.
Show threadDoug Whitfield [Minneapolis]Jul 24, 2023
@rasterweb why would you not follow people...that's weird
Show threadmystixa 🎶🎧Jul 24, 2023

@rasterweb Algorithms don't automatically mean garbage.. bad algorithms do.

It would be nice if Mast had more of a means to help in the search.. because its not just 'work' and this place turns good. You have to be good at it & a lot of good creative ppl just don't have that time on top of posting to the pile of other social media that IS willing to provide that help. ..often at the cost of the garbage unfortunately.

Show threadAnnaTLeigh.bsky.social🏳️‍⚧️Jul 24, 2023
@rasterweb I have very little faith in Mastodon, every basic feature request is promptly dismissed with "but twitter has it, so it's bad!" (full text search, algorithmic newsfeed, quote tweets..), plus all the defederation drama.
As soon as bluesky gets out of beta, I'm most likely moving there.
Show threadDubs! 🌩️Jul 24, 2023
@rasterweb this this! I’ve been boosting posts and following accounts and tags that interest me, but so far I’ve noticed engagement with my own posts is so far low. I’m still gonna link my Mastodon posts instead of Twitter/X on other socials though. 😁