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.
@rysiek @jeff Not really, because you're expecting newbies to know which hashtags will find good content on their specific instance/federation, which isn't a newbie-friendly approach (especially on young or otherwise under-federated instances).
I'm noticing a trend in these discussions, in that the response to any criticism of #Mastodon is effectively "New users just need to be social media experts."
Jeff C. 🇺🇦🇬🇱
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
Michael Bauser