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.

@SarraceniaWilds

> 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.

@jeff

@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

@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.