rosa ▼ obscurae
Constance VariableI don't think follow bots are a good idea, because they make the federated timeline the same on every node. Without them, the federated timeline is still an expression of the interests of the node's users.
Rysiekúr (old account)@lambadalambda that's an interesting point. However, instances that are not running follow bots will not have this issue. So in the end it's up to the instance admin, if they want to make it easier for users to find other potentially interesting users (by running follow bots), or do they prefer to keep the federated timeline a better reflection of local users' interests. :)
@rysiek the problem of user discovery is so bad on mastodon because there's no publicly visible timeline. When I was starting my instance and looking for people to follow, I'd just look at the public timelines of other gnu social servers. Of course, that's not possible with mastodon, so you need the bots.
MMN-o ✅⃠@lambadalambda Then again maybe people prefer to look up friends through friends rather than through public timelines. Public timelines can also be extremely overwhelming for some .)
@mmn Sure, but follow bots have nothing to do with that, or not?
Follow bots, as thinfs are right now, help create more complete locally stored conversations etc.
^- @chimo made some neat visualisation at some point I believe. I've just played with crawling and drawing ugly graphs using Graphviz.
kevinmarks@mmn @gargron @lambadalambda @rysiek you could do xfn more easily than foaf as it's just a few rels in the template
Motoma :motorcycle:@lambadalambda I agree, but blocking them from following you send counter productive. The admin (or some user on the system) had decided that's what they want to see. Users migrating from more popular servers may be in for quite a shock putting an alt on a less popular site.
@motoma yeah, no real reason to block them, except that they tend to be noisy, so they suck for people that have auto follow enabled.
William D. Jones@lambadalambda Definitely a fine balancing game between fragmenting one's attention and keeping individual nodes unique.
@lambadalambda Never though I'd say this, but seems like G+ got this right w/ circles...
@cr1901 I think the diaspora/g+ style circles are interesting, but I don't think they are 'right', just a different approach. I like the simplicity of gnu social.
mykola 🙃🌎🤘@lambadalambda agreed exactly!
Doc Edward Morbius ❌@lambadalambda I'm starting to lean to that thinking as well.
The attractive fiction of the Totally Integrated Internet is that Everyone Has the Same Data. The option with Federation is that /stuff that is worth going off-Instance/ does, /but not the other crap/.
"Worth" is, as always, subjective, but it's indicated by the collective interests of users. An element of "data physics" is the loss of friction and momentum. Organic following dynamics restore some of that.
Jérémie Zimmermann🎶💗🧀🫖5946@lambadalambda
Sure, but they're probably unavoidable.. Best option remains to filter them, client-side (and instance-wide if there is a consensus/other type of rule...)
Sure, but they're probably unavoidable.. Best option remains to filter them, client-side (and instance-wide if there is a consensus/other type of rule...)
@jz This is mainly a reason why shouldn't use them on your instance. I don't actually mind them following me.
Ꮢ๐ϲoᴄo Ⅿoԁｅm Ᏼaｓіliｓk@lambadalambda At the very least, if follow bots exist for specific themed nodes, they should follow based on a keyword whitelist or something. The big problem with them is they aren't selective.
Nobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]@lambadalambda IMO, followbots also express the interests of the instance's users and admins. People would end up subscribing to those people directly, because these are usually people who frequently pop-up in conversationss with people who are already in the instance's TWKN timeline.
Better conversation-retrieval would also help.
Better conversation-retrieval would also help.
@lambadalambda It's not just at node-level that the bots have an effect, but across the whole fediverse. Individual follows select for what /is/ considered worth-following. Not perfectly, but at least probabalistically.
OTOH, it can be disconcerting to see a single boosted post from a thread without context. One of @maiyannah's from shortly before I joined was boosted to my Home, and all I see is her comment. Going to HA I can't grab timestamps.
Hallå KittehThe Ambassador idea is an interesting variation on this theme.
https://a.weirder.earth/users/mykola/updates/309
@[email protected]
https://a.weirder.earth/users/mykola/updates/309
@[email protected]
@clacke it's interesting, but retweeting 'most popular' stuff around the network is exactly the kind of algorithmic mood making that I had hoped we'd left behind on twitter.
@lambadalambda I don't know. Depends on how you do it, and the scale of the instances. For a small and new instance, I think an ambassador bot that presents a "best of" of the instance adds something useful to the mix.
The idea that bots don't pollute the public and federated timelines is a good one.
The idea that bots don't pollute the public and federated timelines is a good one.
@clacke I guess I just don't have much faith in 'best of'.
@lambadalambda That's fair. But if bots stay out of generic timelines and you don't follow the best of-bots, everyone is happy, no?
@clacke sure, you can trash up your instance any way you want :)
@lambadalambda My *timeline*.
@clacke I still fills up the federated timeline with an algorithmic (instead of relationship-based) selection of notices. It's not as bad as a followbot, though.
@lambadalambda Like I said, if we could sandbox them that would be great. Voluntary followers only.
Bob Mottram@lambadalambda @clacke when I see such categories in the silos they're always the kinds of things I want to avoid. That's because of their monolithic structure.
@bob @lambadalambda I think smaller instances with their own narrow selection makes the difference. I'm orders of magnitued more interested in "trending on heldscalla" than "trending on twitter". Because that basically means both @dtluna and @lambadalambda liked something.