Mastodawn

Freya Holmér Jan 23, 2024

I still don't know how to use mastodon, I feel like I'm only here to share my stuff and read replies, and less so any kind of discovery of following and engaging with other people's stuff

it seems like there's only a chronological feed of those you follow (which I usually don't like because it skews to the most active people), and a generic feed for your instance (pretty much useless), but no algorithmic discovery thing?

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SarahV Jan 23, 2024

@acegikmo It's important to remember that the fediverse is federated. I see you're on mastodon.social, one of the largest instances hosting all kinds of people interested in all kinds of things. It's no wonder that the local timeline is a mess for you. Picking the right instance is about joining the community of people you want to connect with. I'd encourage you to find a gamedev-related instance, so that the local timeline meets this need you have. Also, hashtags as others have said. :)

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Freya Holmér Jan 23, 2024

@admin yeah, but, as soon as I have more than one interest, it gets much harder, bc you can't join multiple ones right? and even within a single instance I'd prefer an algorithmic feed

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SarahV Jan 23, 2024

@acegikmo That's totally fair. Fediverse and activitypub are designed around chronological information sharing. Algorithms would need a collection of posts to select from and/or order. One of the main advantages of projects like mastodon is that it's not a capitalist org creating your feed for you, often to your detriment. Chronological makes sense as the first step away from that, but putting algorithmic tools in the hands of users is the next step, and other than filtering I haven't seen it.

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SarahV

@acegikmo I have seen people talking about it though.Having a column in the mastodon interface for people who post a lot and another for people who post less frequently, so the latter have greater chance to be seen. Or the ability to combine a set of users and hashtags to follow in a single column. For people like you with multiple interests (and that's everyone I guess), using some kind of ethical local AI to sort posts from one user into different topic categories. Wish I had time to build em.