Discovery here IS bad, and — I hate to say it — the solution to that is an (entirely optional) algorithm that surfaces potential follows and compelling content right out of the gate.
Algorithms aren’t inherently evil. Hell, “show posts in reverse chronological order” is in itself an algorithm.
What matters are 1) choice and 2) the intention with which the algorithm was designed.
#Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@mimsical/110865836818850808
I was able to bootstrap myself here relatively easily because I was both part of the deluge of Twitter users in November of 2022 as well as highly-motivated to make it work because I hated what Twitter was becoming and inherently grokked the benefit of federation.
That’s not going to be the common case.
If Mastodon is to expand far beyond low-hanging fruit like me it absolutely needs to meet users halfway.
@jeff would it not be enough to ask new people "type in a few hashtags you're interested in or select from this well-curated list of popular hashtags" and then auto-follow these hashtags for them?
Boom, their timeline gets filled out immediately with stuff they're interested in, no need to have any kind of "recommendation algorithm" involved.
Sidenote: this is less of a problem on smaller instances with lively and relevant local timelines, I feel.
> I dont get to see post from people I follow from other timezones
I get such posts boosted into my timeline all the time.
> there is no real way for me to find people posts or news local to me
That's a fair point.
> Making multiple algorithms available, making them open to analysis, and making them opt in/out sounds just fine to me.
I am worried about the power dynamics of this. Such tools tend towards "winner takes all" situations, I feel.
@SarraceniaWilds agreed on the large instances, I even wrote about it:
https://rys.io/en/168.html
The gatekeeping problem is wider, it's about who gets to decide the direction of the largest instance project on fedi, and why are certain features implemented and others are not.
But as I noted in a separate thread, recommendation algos can be implemented as bots, without having to wait for instance software to implement them.
@SarraceniaWilds sure.
But with recco algos you rely on chance that particular set of circumstances converge such that the given post gets picked up and promoted to you by the algo. And I am not even getting into the questions of who designed the algo, what are the edge cases, and so on.
You always necessarily rely on "chance", simply because there is too much stuff published on fedi, and physically not enough time to read it all.
@SarraceniaWilds : "there is no real way for me to find people posts or news local to me"
@rysiek : "That's a fair point."
The solution is: hashtags of geographical names.
@jeff
@xdej @SarraceniaWilds @rysiek I live in Pasadena, California.
If I want to find local posts for my area, do I search for #Pasadena?
If so, I’ll likely get news for Pasadena, Texas.
Do I search for #PasadenaCA? That might work, but some people might tag their posts with #PasadenaCalifornia and I’ll never see them.
And that’s just a local example. Will people searching for #Georgia get posts about the US state, or the country?
Hashtags are a hack.
@xdej @SarraceniaWilds @rysiek And that’s not even considering the fact that people are awful about remembering to add hashtags to their posts. And who can blame them? Adding all the hashtags needed to make stuff discoverable results in a lot of ugly, spammy-looking posts.
It’s not just finding things relating to geography, either. They are at best a stopgap for more robust metadata and full-text search functionalities.
@TedT A fellow local! 😃
On an unrelated note: I was a regular visitor to TheOneRing during an extended Tolkien kick I went in around the time the LOTR films came out (re-read the books, got into the lore, etc). Great work with that site — it was incredibly well-done for what it was.
@bauser first of all, there is a bunch of other software on fedi than just Mastodon.
Secondly, I don't think saying things like "[fedi] designers are so afraid of the world" is actually helpful as far as finding solutions to this is concerned.
It ignores — and I would even say: ridicules — the very real experience of people who got doxxed or otherwise harassed thanks to the design of other social networks, and decided to take precautions against that here.
@bauser I'm sure you'd agree that summarizing your position in this using terms like "ignorant of how certain tools can power harassment" would be a pretty low blow. Maybe let's exercise some civility and at least try to pretend we respect the (very real, often coming from personal experiences) concerns of others involved in this conversation.
@bauser I'm not convinced that calling people's lived experiences "stupid fear" is the winning strategy here, but you do you my friend. 🤷♀️
@rysiek @bauser @xdej @SarraceniaWilds Yeah, I’m not going to co-sign that framing.
I do think, though, that there’s a tendency on here to reflexively dismiss a lot of pretty basic functionality needs outright rather than constructively engage with attempts to make them work more safely.
Discovery doesn’t inherently preclude adding privacy controls, opt-in/opt-out, etc, but a lot of these people aren’t even interested in having that discussion.
@rysiek @bauser @xdej @SarraceniaWilds Also, it’s worth noting that a lot of features that are de rigueur on Mastodon now have also been used for harassment campaigns.
A hashtag, for example, served as the rallying point (and even very identity) of the ‘GamerGate’ harassment mob.
@bauser @xdej @SarraceniaWilds @rysiek It’s a general problem with hashtags, really. Though geography presents some unique challenges.
There are other examples. One I came across with a couple months ago was using hashtags to keep up with news out of Apple’s developer’s conference.
We had people using some combination #WWDC, #WWDC23, and #WWDC2023. To get everyone talking together you had to pollute your post with ALL of those tags. It was a mess.
Jeff C. 🇺🇦🇬🇱
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Veebs
Xdej
Blackthorn
Ted Tschopp
Michael Bauser