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

@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.